Father, Friend, and Judge
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North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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introduction. Prayer has been the most important part of my spiritually life since 1980. It was at this time that I fully surrendered to God's will for my life. From my earliest memory, I have had an awareness of God. My family was religious, but we really didn't know God. In the earliest part of my childhood, we were a part of a very lifeless religious denomination. We came out of that group that my family had been associated with for at least 50 years or more. We then came into the charismatic, spirit filled expression of the church. This was during the Jesus movement days. Hundreds of thousands and even millions were coming out of the stifled and stiff denominational churches. They were being swept up in the things of the spirit and discovering that a whole new realm of God existed. The gifts of the spirit were being revealed, and Jesus was unveiling himself in great dimensions across cultures. This movement that occurred in the 19 sixties, 19 seventies and even into the 19 eighties changed the face of the church. We still see its impact across the boundaries of different groups, what people believe has shifted worship within groups that once stood against the movement. I'm describing now embrace our music. Even the way service times were ordered was impacted by this move of God but touched the church and culture. I was 12 years old when my family encountered this expression of the life of the spirit. We as a family would never be the same and neither would I. Individually, life was altered forever. My father, Welton Henderson, became very hungry for God. E was in his mid fifties and developed this hunger to know God. He would sit up all night for two nights and read the Bible through. He would then sleep on the third night. He held this schedule for some weeks and months, all the while holding down his full time job as a surveyor. My mother, Mary Henderson, became very concerned about his behavior in the denomination. We were a part of You were considered lost and going to **** if you left the church and did not attend. My dad had stopped going to the services and was talking of leaving the church altogether. This man, my dad would go to **** based on the belief of our church. My dad then told my mom something that would rock our world. You now on staff for all the time of reading the Bible, I'm going to find myself a Pentecostal church. This was heresy. What we didn't know was that my sister, who is 18 years older than me and her husband, had already been swept into this charismatic renewal that I have described. When they heard the conclusion my dad had reached, they suggested we should come and see what this was all about. The result was we made the move from the denominational expression of the church to this expression of the spirit filled one. To say this was life changing is an understatement. You were transformed. We all were baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. The gifts of the spirit begin to operate in and through us. More than anything, however, we fell in love with Jesus. Almost all the family, young and old, lived with an excitement of this new life and world we had discovered through the power of the spirit. The reason I am relating this is because it is a crucial piece to my story concerning prayer. Remember This was transpiring when I was 12 years old. As I fast forward to my early twenties, I'm now married to my high school sweetheart, Mary. We had our first of six Children born to us. Even though I had an awareness of God from my earliest years and had experienced many different encounters with Lord, I was now uninterested in anything to do with ministry. I'm saying this because I knew and all who knew me understood I was destined to be in the ministry and preach the word of God. I had, in fact, preached my first message at 13 years old. Still, even though I wasn't backsliding in the classical sense, I decided to do my own thing. Mary and I had charted our course and determined she would be a teacher and I would be a coach. We were preparing to go to school to move in this direction. It was at this point that God interrupted these plans and our life