October 2009

Submitted by slofland on Thu, 06/16/2011 - 11:33

September/October 2009

Dear Partners in the Service of the Master,

I heard Kenneth E. Hagin say that each month when The Pentecostal Evangel came, he looked first to see if it had an article by W. I. Evans. Brother Hagin said W. I. Evans was one of the most spiritual men he'd ever read after. (W. I. Evans ministered 25 years at Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Missouri until his death in 1954.) A partner recently blessed me with copies of the Evans' articles. The following is from an article entitled "Prayer Must Have Priority!"

…the prophet speaks this discriminating word from God: "Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel; Add your burnt offerings unto your peace sacrifices, and eat the flesh thereof. For I spake not unto your fathers nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the Land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices,"
Jeremiah 7:21,22.

That must have sounded startling. Was not sacrifice essential to relation with God? But Jeremiah speaks for God of something more essential. "But this thing commanded I them, saying, Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people: and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you that it may be well unto you." That is the essential thing. It underlies everything we do. It is more essential and basic than offerings and sacrifices…Upon that foundation…He will be able to build everything that He wants revealed and manifested in the world through a people whose hearts are thus devoted to Him.

On the very day He delivered Israel, the Lord mentioned nothing concerning laws of offerings and sacrifices. That came months later at Sinai. God's first commandment was to hear His Voice and obey Him.

Jeremiah 7:24 KJV
24 But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward.

The Amplified Version of these verses is so clear:

Jeremiah 23,24 Amplified
23 But this thing I did command them: Listen to and obey My voice, and I will be your God and you will be My people; and walk in the whole way that I command you, that it may be well with you.
24 But they would not listen to and obey Me or bend their ear [to Me], but followed the counsels and the stubborn promptings of their own evil hearts and minds, and they turned their backs and went in reverse instead of forward.

Reverie and Revelation

One weekend in August, her mother and I drove with my granddaughter, Hannah, to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma where she will study and play basketball at Rhema Bible Training Center.

Over three days we met excited students coming to the Tulsa area to study at two God-established schools, RBTC and ORU. As I observed the hustle and bustle, I became aware that the Lord was stirring my spirit. A spiritual reverie began that unfolded throughout our trip. It began by my wondering if these happy students were aware of what had gone before and what was prophesied for the future.

First, I thought of how the Tulsa area became a Pentecostal focal point. I cannot go into it here. But you can read about it in my book, The Road to Prayer Mountain, which gives the history of the early part of the 21st Century and the Latter Rain outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Topeka, Azusa, and in the Tulsa area as well.

Next, I thought of two young men who heard God's Voice and obeyed, Kenneth E. Hagin and Oral Roberts, and how it affected the lives of these students.

Kenneth Hagin's call and life's purpose came to mind. You can read it in his book I Believe In Visions. (I made sure Hannah read this book.) Jesus told Kenneth Hagin's mother about it before he was born. And the Lord revealed it to him when He took him to Heaven from a tent in Rockwall, Texas in 1950. Kenneth Hagin, and of course, his work, they were told was to be an important part of preparing the body of Christ for the Second Coming of the Lord.

I was editor of publications in 1974 when in late July at Campmeeting, Brother Hagin announced, in an utterance of the Spirit, that he would begin a school in September where people would be trained to walk and to minister in God's Word and His Spirit. Everyone including his son, Kenneth W. Hagin, scrambled to fulfill God's will. And 58 students graduated from the recently publicly prophesied, but long privately prayed about, Bible Training Center.

Seventeen and sick enough to die, Oral Roberts heard the Voice of God. He'd collapsed as he drove in to make a layup in a district basketball game. Afterwards he lay bedfast for months, coughing and hemorrhaging with tuberculosis, until the night his brother, Elmer, loaded him into a borrowed car to take him to a tent meeting where miracles and healings were happening. Oral Roberts had been born again, only the night before. Here's how Oral Roberts related it recently:

"I was lying in the back seat of the car and my brother was driving with my parents by his side. He was talking about the miracles he had seen. I was listening and then everything faded. Everything got real quiet. In this silence, God spoke to me, 'Son, I am going to heal you tonight. You are going to take My healing power to your generation, and someday, you're to build me a university based on My authority and the Holy Spirit.'" Later God spoke to Brother Roberts about the students and their purposes in His plan.

Did the new students entering these schools realize into what plans and purposes of God they were stepping? I wondered.

Our Right Wrong Turn

Driving home on the beautiful day that seemed more Autumn than August, Brenda said, "I think we need to stop for fuel." When she drove back onto the highway, I noticed she'd turned onto Highway 71 rather than I-44. We were looking for a place to turn around when we noticed a sign: George Washington Carver National Monument. Brenda, Hannah, and I knew we were supposed to go there.

George Washington Carver is one of my heroes. It had been many years since I'd visited this beautiful place in the Ozarks. It was on the farm here that he was born to a slave girl at the end of the Civil War. Bushwhackers kidnapped the baby, his mother, and a sister. Moses Carver, the farm owner, hired someone to pursue the criminals. The only one they found was the baby, sick with whooping cough.

The Carver's brought up George and his brother as sons. Since George was sickly, he did only light chores and spent lots of time in the woods where he learned to talk to God. Better yet, he mastered the art of hearing God. Every discovery this great scientist later made came from hearing God.

That Sunday as we walked those same woods, they seemed to form a cathedral of God's Presence. Walking where he learned to hear from God, I heard from Him. The value of hearing God came with new revelation. The importance of the listening side of prayer was impressed upon my spirit.

These excerpts, from The Man Who Talks With the Flowers by Glenn Clark, illustrate how this brilliant scientist heard from the One he addressed as Mr. Creator.

Dr. Carver saw quickly after he came down to Tuskegee that single crop cotton was wearing out the rich Alabama soils, and impoverishing the debt-burdened share cropper. [He wrote farm bulletins and made speeches urging crop rotation, and the growing of peanuts and sweet potatoes to replenish the soil.] When the farmers followed his advice…they were producing more peanuts and sweet potatoes than the market could absorb.…He tackled [the problem] in the chemical laboratory and licked it there. He discovered 300 new uses for the peanut and 150…for the sweet potato…he had rebuilt the agriculture of the South. [Thomas] Edison offered an immense salary for him to come and help him, but he declined. (p 11.)

"Here is what I call 'God's Little Workshop',” said Dr. Carver… [His laboratory.] "No books are ever brought in here, [except the Bible].…Here I talk to the little peanut and it reveals its secrets to me. I lean upon the 29th verse of the first chapter of Genesis.…What other materials do we need than that promise?" (p17.)

"There is literally nothing that I ever wanted to do…that I asked the blessed Creator to help me to do, that I have not been able to accomplish.…It's all very simple, if one knows how to talk with the Creator. It is simply seeking the Lord and finding Him…He said in the Proverbs, 'Those that seek me early shall find me.' So I just follow His advice and find Him.…All my life I have risen regularly at four o'clock and have gone into the woods and talked with God. There He gives me my orders for the day…I listen to what God has to say to me. After my morning's talk with God I go into my laboratory and begin to carry out His wishes for the day." (pp 21, 22.)

"Years ago, I went into my laboratory and said, 'Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?'
"The great Creator answered, 'You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size.'
"Then I asked, 'Dear Mr. Creator, tell me what man was made for.' Again the great Creator replied, 'Little man, you still are asking too much. Cut down the extent of your request and improve the intent.'
"So then I asked, 'Please, Mr. Creator, will you tell me why the peanut was made?'
"’That's better, but even then it's infinite. What do you want to know about the peanut?’"
…"And then the Great Creator taught me how to take the peanut apart and put it together again. And out of this process have come forth all these products." For over an hour Dr. Carver drew forth from his homemade box of samples a continuing procession of face powder, printer's ink, butter, shampoo, creosote, dyes, etc….(p 34.)

Imagine my feelings when I reread the book after I got home and remembered that five years before he died, he prophesied what God is saying to us now.

"Last night as I rode to the auditorium I was holding a little white flower in my hand all the way, and in the silence while we rode, I was talking to it and it was talking to me. It told me some wonderful things. And the flowers have never failed to tell me the truth. It told me that there is going to be a great spiritual awakening in the world…from plain, simple people who know—not merely believe—but actually know that God answers prayer.

"It is going to be a great revival of Christianity, not…of religion…. It is going to rise from the laymen, from men who are going about their work and putting God into what they do, from men who believe in prayer, and who want to make God real to mankind." (p 37.)

Since I got back, when I'm home, I've started my day in the woods with two hours of prayer, especially the listening side. Maybe you don't have woods. W. I. Evans started his day early in the morning in a special corner in his house. Maybe you work nights. Brother Philip Halverson prayed the night watch. What is important is that before you begin, whatever hour of the day your work begins, make time to hear the Lord. To help me I have the following written in my Bible. It's a note on Matthew 4:4 from the Numerical Bible:

"Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." What a sustenance of the true life within us to be thus, day by day, receiving the messages of His will, guided by that wondrous Voice, learning continually more the tenderness of His love for us: "He wakeneth morning by morning; He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learner" (Is. 50:4). This is the utterance prophetically of the Lord Himself: how blessed to be able to make it our own, and thus to have the fulfillment of those words: "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way in which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye" (Ps. 32:8)…He who walking with God, waits upon God what shall ensnare him? What enemy shall prevail against him?

I'm just back from praying with AwakeningAmerica.us in New York City on 9/11. Afterwards I ministered at Dan and Ann Stratton's Faith Exchange Church. I taught on what is in this letter. It seemed to take on new weight considering how important it was for New Yorkers to have heard God on that terrible day. Some in the congregation told how they'd heard Him to the saving of their lives.

Offered herein are special items to help you hear God including The Man Who Talks With the Flowers and a DVD of the life of George Washington Carver which we watched at the Memorial. I am also offering my CD Visions and Voices and Grace Roos' book Spiritual Warfare, which teach how to discern the Voice of God and not be deceived.

Our Autumn Assembly is just about to convene. We will take our place in united prayer for the great spiritual awakening ahead. Please come join us in Branson. Your free registration by mail or online will help us prepare for you.

If you cannot come, please join us in prayer wherever you are. And perhaps you would like to join in the korban offerings we will offer to Him at the meeting. I'm believing the budget will be met before we begin.

Though the sessions begin Thursday morning, we are meeting to pray on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Our request on Wednesday evening is that He grant us a spirit of prayer for the meetings. Just come to the hall. I'll meet you there.

Love in Him,

Billye Brim

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