The Weapons of Our Warfare, Part 10

Praying in the Spirit can be a controversial subject in the church. Many people think they are praying in the Spirit because they think they are being directed in their prayers by the Holy Spirit. We will not enter into a debate as to whether those prayers are, in fact, directed by the Holy Spirit. Undoubtedly some are, and equally as undoubtedly, some are not. (This sounds a little like it might get ugly already doesn't it?) Trust me when I tell you, I have pretty much heard all the arguments on both sides of this issue. I used to be a Methodist and then a Baptist. I attended a Nazarene church for a period of time. I embraced Pentecostalism, much to the chagrin of my maternal grandmother who was in eastern Kansas when Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Foursquare Church came through there on her way to California. I graduated from a Pentecostal Bible College and an Evangelical (non-Pentecostal) seminary. If, after you have read this post, you think you have an argument I did not do justice here, please call, send an email, or post a comment. That way we might all learn something.


Praying in the Spirit is part of the armor of God. It must be. It says so right there in the Bible. (Ephesians 6:18) Ok, so I had not thought about it quite that way before today. It is obvious really when we think about it. Before we discuss that, though, perhaps we should define exactly what praying in the Spirit really means.


One thing I do know from the discussions I have had about the present day working of the Holy Spirit is that anyone who is willing to discuss the issue with me has as strongly held beliefs as I do on the subject. They also, as I do, hold those beliefs based on their understanding of scripture. It is really not productive to exegete the scripture to show why anyone with such strongly held beliefs is wrong. They have already done that and decided they are right. I am including myself in that. The better way to approach that kind of issue is to just present the teaching and, if it makes sense, let them go back and look at the scripture with a different understanding of the big picture.

Without doubt, as we Pentecostals know from scripture and personal experience, praying in the Spirit means praying in tongues. The vast majority of us know (still talking about Pentecostals) there are two different gifts of speaking in tongues. Most of us know that because someone older, and wiser than us told us so. Rarely did those older, wiser people tell us how they knew that and show us the different gifts from scripture. The dirty little secret there is they probably did not know both of the gifts are shown in the Bible. They simply believed it because the older, wiser people who told them believed it. The term for that is unsconscious competent. They are right, but they do not know why they are right.

Most people, including most Pentecostal ministers, only know about speaking in tongues as the charismatic gift mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:10. We should make the distinction right now that in this gift, God is speaking to His people through one of our own. Again, research this and get back to us so we can discuss it if you disagree.

The other gift of speaking in tongues in the Bible is sort of tucked away and almost hidden apparently. It must be because almost no one seems to know about it or teach it correctly. Most of that problem is our English translations. We will explain that shortly. It is the gift given to believers at some point after they are born again. According to Pentecostal theology, this happens at the time the believer is baptized in the Holy Spirit. That is not what we are discussing right now.

Acts chapter 10 records the beginning of Peter's ministry to the gentiles. In verse 45, the men with Peter acknowledge that a gift was given to the gentiles and 46 tells us they recognized the gift as speaking in tongues. If you have ever heard a teaching on these verses, you have probably heard the gift is the Holy Spirit, or perhaps even that it is salvation. Reading verse 45 in English we see, "the gift of the Holy Spirit". It is almost always taught that the Holy Spirit is the gift. That is what the English text looks like it says. It does not say that in the original Greek. What it says there is, "the Holy Spirit's gift". Does that make a difference? Can you see it? Either phraseology is correct in the English, possessive case. We just do not get the correct meaning as easily with the translation we usually see in English Bibles. For your reference the Greek is in the genitive case which equates to the English possessive case. When we know that, there is no question the gift is given by the Holy Spirit rather than the Holy Spirit being the gift. The gift He gave is the gift of speaking in tongues that Peter and his companions heard.

Now that we understand that, we can see that praying in the spirit is an invaluable piece of our spiritual armor. With this gift we are speaking to God things we would not otherwise know to speak. The Holy Spirit directs our prayers in a different language so that they are perfect prayers. Our minds are set aside as our spirit prays. (1 Corinthians 14:14) Note that this is the same whichever gift of speaking in tongues we are talking about. If you are inclined, as I am, to have your mind get in the way at times, you will appreciate all the more being able to pray in the spirit.

There is no way for us to really understand in the natural what happens when we pray in the spirit. Imagine being in the heat of a battle with danger all around. As you pray in the spirit, you know which way to move and what to do. The Holy Spirit is guiding you away from danger to safety. He tells you when to be still and when to attack, things you could not possibly know for sure regardless of your experience in battle.

Put on the armor of God, and do not forget to pray in the spirit on all occasions. It will protect you even if any of the other armor fails. Our success in battle will be guaranteed.

A Time Before Time Began

In 1985 we were busily and more or less happily pastoring the Foursquare Church in Davis, California. We say "more or less" because a day job was still a necessity with four young children to feed and clothe and a small congregation of mostly college students. We had started that church from scratch in the latter half of 1980. And ok, so the title of this post is a little misleading, but it seems like another lifetime ago, and it was before the time this blog has recorded heretofore.

That little church was Foursquare in every sense of the word. We had been licensed to preach the Foursquare Gospel in Davis and were diligent about that business. We believed and taught that Jesus is the healer of our bodies, the savior of our souls, the baptizer with the Holy Spirit and our soon coming King. We still believe He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8) We think we even believed all that in our spirits, but somewhere in there a switch had not been thrown or something.

We saw people being born again and beginning their new life journeys. We baptized new believers in water several times a year. There had been a smattering of physical healings, but nothing on a regular basis. Then as He sometimes does, God began to work sovereignly, behind the scenes, to rock our world in a very positive way.

We had made arrangements to attend the annual Foursquare convention in Los Angeles. It would be good to get away and to see some people we had not seen in some time. We could also stay with relatives so the cost would not be prohibitive and it would be good to see them as well. We do not recall if we knew who the keynote speaker for the convention was before we registered, nor does it really matter. It was John Wimber--at that time a man at the pinnacle of a career which included leading the Vineyard churches, teaching at Fuller Seminary, writing, and actively involving himself in what he called "power evangelism". Power evangelism, as we understand it, is the demonstration of the Kingdom of God, on earth, in signs and wonders, for the purpose of bringing people to Jesus.

John Wimber delivered an excellent teaching on physical healing and it's availability to The Church today. Well that was 24 years ago, but if Hebrews 13:8 is still good, the time would not seem to be relevant. At the end of his message, he called for anyone who wanted to participate in a healing time to come to the platform. I was in the first balcony in Angelus Temple, toward the front. The exit is in the back. I believe I was the second or third person to reach the platform. I was excited to be part of that ministry. John then called for anyone who needed a physical healing to come to the platform. He then told us to wait until the Holy Spirit showed us who to minister to in prayer. The end result of that is that I prayed for and watched as a woman, with tears in her eyes, stood erect for the first time in a long time. She was healed from a spinal condition that had kept her slightly bent forward.

Just a few weeks after we returned from the convention, we received an unsolicited invitation in the mail to have dinner at a restaurant fifty miles or so from Davis. The invitation came from a group calling themselves, "Friends of Deliverance". They were providing a complimentary dinner to introduce pastors and other interested people to the need for deliverance within The Church. Some note on the invitation linked the group with a Foursquare pastor we knew in the town where the meeting was being held. We made a telephone call to be sure this was not some kind of weird group and were assured by the pastor these were good people who simply wanted to expose more people to the deliverance ministry. Besides, they were buying dinner so we felt we had nothing to lose by joining them. We found what they had to say very interesting, encouraging, and even inspiring. Our sole, previous experience with a demon had not ended well. By the time we left that meeting we had a better handle on the deliverance ministry. I remarked to Judi on the trip home that I was pretty sure the Lord would not have been teaching us about healing and deliverance if He did not plan to have us doing something in that area.

Within the next several months we actually led our first successful deliverance session. We saw virtually everyone in the church who had physical problems receive their healings. Time and space, and the Holy Spirit, will not allow us to go into any further detail about all those things.


Sometime, I am going to have to rehearse for you, my call to the ministry. Until then, let me just tell you it came via a word from the Holy Spirit to my spirit from Luke 4:18-19. Verse 19 says, "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." Without a detailed teaching on this verse, let us say for now we are talking about a time when God is pouring out His favor on His people. This is not necessarily a literal 365 day year. I am writing this post, on this day, to tell anyone who will listen, you can have the Lord's favor on your life right now. All you have to do to appropriate it for yourself is to do as Jesus said. "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." (Matthew 7:7) It is time. If you need help with that feel free to give us a call or send us an email. You can even post a comment and perhaps help others too. God bless.

The Journey Continues

We made very short work of finding a new church. We visited one church with some friends, but we were not sure we felt quite right about it. Our children also did not like the children's ministries as well as they had others, so we continued our search.

We attended services in a community gymnasium which was the temporary quarters for another church while they were building a new building. It was what would probably be called a conservative, evangelical church. We were impressed when the pastor showed up at our door the following Monday evening to thank us for attending services the previous day. We expressed some of our concerns about the church doctrine, especially the fact that, while not unfriendly to the present day workings of the Holy Spirit, they did not seem to give Him is proper place either. The pastor assured us that we would have no doctrinal problems at his church because the church did not really have any official doctrine (sic). He also said he had grown up attending an Assemblies of God church. If memory serves me, he had also studied at Southern California College, now Vanguard University, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. What we were later to learn is that a fair percentage of the congregation, and most of the leadership including the pastor had no experience with the present day working of the Holy Spirit. Many were even hostile toward the concept.

Our children fell in love with the children's pastors, Michael and Debra Laflin, so we settled in and tried to discern what we should do. We were involved in many of the church ministries over the next several years including teaching Sunday School, facilitating Women's Ministries and being on the leading edge of a new counseling ministry the church started while we were there. When the time came for the church to add a staff minister, it would have seemed I was a good fit. According to two, credible witnesses, the pastor would not allow my name to be considered. There had been allegations that I had made three women in the congregation uncomfortable. There was no identification of the women or were any specific actions on my part stated, but unbeknownst to me, those allegations would haunt me to the present day. I suppose I did not help myself by telling him I thought the Lord might be telling me that I would one day lead that church. Obviously that has not happened to this point and it still seems like a very long shot that it will. However, when the pastor offered to pay for me to have an appointment with a Christian psychologist to see if he could discover why I thought I was hearing from God, I realized there was no longer any point in further communication with him about ministry in that church.

About a year before we left that church, I became the victim of a downsizing in the Financial Planning Department of the Christian Broadcasting Network after only eight months of employment. I would remain largely unemployed for the next four years due mostly to the local ecomony. I did various jobs that turned out to be more temporary than I had hoped. The Lord put it on my heart to write some teaching letters which I entitled "The Rising Sun" from Malachi 4:2, which says, "But to you who fear My name, The Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings..." Those letters became my ministry and teaching outlet. I was careful to make sure the pastor and his staff members received copies of the letters so there would be no allegations of my teaching errant doctrine or attempting to undermine anything the pastor was teaching. I never did receive any feedback from the staff regarding the letters.

An old friend of mine had assumed the position of District Supervisor of the Foursquare Churches in our area. It seemed good to meet with him and see if he could give any insight as to why God had called us to Santa Maria. As we were talking in his office, he asked how large Santa Maria was. I indicated I supposed with the surrounding county area there were probably close to 100,000 people. He said to me that was a large enough population to justify another Foursquare Church. That as a totally unexpected statement. I told him the current Foursquare pastor would never allow another church in his backyard. He assured me that it would be his decision. I left his office pondering the idea and telling him that we would discuss and pray over the idea and get back to him.

We did pray and discuss and ponder the idea of planting another church, our first experience having not been totally unfortunate. We also discussed the idea with the founding pastor of the Santa Maria Foursquare Church, long since retired. He agreed the current pastor would not allow that to happen, but I had the assurance of the district supervisor that it could indeed be done. I called the supervisor and told him we had decided we would like to plant the Sunrise Foursquare Church. He quickly reigned me in telling me that he would need letters of recommendation before that would be a possibility. I complied and had three pastors write him letters. In the meantime, I began contacting people and contracting a building to meet in. He received the letters, but said he needed more current recommendations. We had only been to two churches over the last seven years. One of those pastors wanted me to see a psychologist and the other would not be happy about another Foursquare Church in Santa Maria, I strongly felt it would be no use to ask them for recommendations, but did ask one of them anyway. He declined and the possibility of planting another Foursquare church withered and died.

Since we had already begun the process of planting a church, we forged ahead and did begin meeting as Sunrise Ministries. To say it was a struggle would be a slight understatement. We did see thirteen people make first time decisions for the Lord in the nearly two years of the church's existence and baptized fourteen people in water. The church began to grow and after the first year we had over forty people in regular attendance on any given Sunday morning. Then inexplicibly, three families moved out of the area over the course of about a month. Those families represented nearly a quarter of the congregation. The death knell came not a long time thereafter when one man in the church took it upon himself to let everyone know how poorly I was doing as a pastor and how bad my doctrine was. In my defense, this man thought that because the first page in his King James Bible proclaimed it as "The Authorized Version" it was the only English version of the Bible God had authorized. The fledgling church could not endure that sort of divisiveness and we decided to close the doors the day no one came to church except our family.

In the Beginning

Everything has to start somewhere. (I will be catching you up on the intervening years in coming posts.)

Although this blog starts today, the story starts almost 22 years ago. We were relatively, happily pastoring a Foursquare church we had started in Davis, CA when we felt prompted of the Lord it was time to leave there and go back to "a place you have been before". I remember complaining to the Lord that it just didn't seem as though we had really accomplished anything. He said, "I did not send you here for the sake of Davis. I sent you here for the sake of David." I understood that to mean He had been preparing me for whatever was to come next, but I remember being frustrated, thinking I had just spent another seven years getting an education, wondering when I would be finished with that. Little did I know or understand at that point that our education into the things of God never ends.

There were only four places that could have been referred to by that brief word from the Lord to my spirit so, after packing our belongings and the kids we headed first to Santa Maria. At that point it had never occured to us that we might be leaving the ministry or the Foursquare Church. We visited the pastor at the Santa Maria Foursquare Church and were told there were no ministry opportunities available for us. Although we were not told in so many words, the emphasis, as it turned out, was on the words for us. As it turned out the other three places also did not seem to be the right places and largely by default we ended up resuming the life we had left in the San Fernando Valley in 1980. It was August 1987.