Hello, everybody! This is Will Ford, 818: The Sign and this is God Today. I want to talk to you about my friend. I want to talk to you about my Lord. I want to talk to you about Holy Spirit. I had a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit years ago that profoundly changed my life.
If you noticed, I didn’t put the determinant “the” Holy Spirit, it is fine if you do that. What I have come to find out is that many of us, especially religious folks like me, I still struggle with that in my life. The whole thing of growing up in a family, growing up in a church family, growing up in the church. Especially a fundamentalist kind of background early on, where it is God the Father, God The Son, and God the Holy Bible. Yes, we need the Bible, yes we need the Word of God. You will not understand the written word of God without the Holy Spirit.
So, it is God the Father, God the Son, God Holy Spirit. The reason why I say that, why I took that determinant off is I had to learn from a period of time that the Holy Spirit is a person, He is the third person of the Trinity. And so, as a beginner, I learned more about who He is and what He reveals Christ in our lives. It became very personal to me. Personally, how I interact with them. So, I took the determinant off for a period of time. Maybe you would like to too for a period of time. Something powerful about when you understand that the Holy Spirit is not THE Holy Spirit, He is Holy Spirit, He is a person, He is God and He loves you.
The feelings, emotions that are connected to God, the experience and you encounter them through Holy Spirit. The power to do ministry, the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Those show up when we do ministry. It is one thing to be anointed, but it is another thing when Holy Spirit shows up to release the power of God in the midst of people.
That is what I have seen people in my life. I remember being in a meeting years ago. My sister had invited me to a revival gathering. That was about 20-30 years ago. I was at a seminary that was more like a cemetery. I told her none of this stuff existed for today, you just needed to be careful about things, kind of like that. People are in the new age, doing this kind of stuff, you see these kinds of manifestations. But, I will go with you to this meeting and show you how wrong and off these people are.
So, I go there with her. I have my Bible and listen. No one laid hands on me at this gathering, but all of a sudden in the middle of this time where worship was going on, the Word of God was about to go forth. I felt electricity hit me from the top of my head and it went all the way to the soles of my feet. I couldn’t keep my arms on the armrests any longer. I just felt the weighty presence of the Lord on me. I felt the kevodoh hit me in a powerful, powerful way. I felt the glory of God. The Holy Spirit just settled on me. I felt that presence for days. For days on end. It led me to a 3-month study in the Word of God. I came across this understanding of how Holy Spirit also manifests itself as the glory of God, the weighty presence of God. The word for glory is kevodoh, which means literally “weighty presence” and that is what I felt. That is what I felt at that time. I had a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit in that time period.
Another time, I was at a gathering shortly after that. I was depressed, I was thinking, “God, how am I going to get out of this particular situation?” I had another company, who had done an audit on me because I had a fiduciary responsibility to them. They were accusing me of taking money that was due to them and squandering it. I had a fiduciary responsibility, in other words, I could have gone to jail for this. I could not prove that I did not do this because the folks that were over me did not do very good record keeping. In other words, I was in my 20s, I was depressed, I thought I was going to jail, I was actually suicidal. I was like, “God, what do I do?”
All I knew what to do was to show up to church. So, I showed up at church and about 2,000 people were there. All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit comes over the person leading the ministry that night. The evangelist who was there looks out on the crowd and he jumps across the platform. He tells the ushers, “Come with me,” he starts making a bee-line, out in the middle of the crowd, but looking straight at me. Now, I am not sitting on the edge of the pews or on the edge of the rows. I am sitting right in the middle. He is not breaking eye contact with me, he is coming down the aisle and he starts clearing people out of my aisle, getting to me.
Finally, he gets right next to me and the lady next to me, unfortunately, throws her hands up and she says, “Oh God, thank you!” He said, “No ma’am, not you, I’m sorry.” Moves her aside and says, “You, come here, take it.” He lays his hands on me and starts praying for me. The weighted presence of the Holy Spirit came over me. This person, me, who had been so resistant to anything like that happening, any manifestations of the Holy Spirit, actually fell down. Felt like I fell on a blanket, felt like I fell on a pillow. Friends of mine said I just collapsed. I began sobbing and weeping for 45 minutes. Here is what I heard God saying, “William, I love you so much. I will part the Red Sea to make a way for you, and I will part a crowd of people to let you know how much I love you.”
He began to tell me how I needed to pray in the middle of this situation. This didn’t end overnight. It took about 3 months, but I prayed the way the Holy Spirit taught me to pray. I prayed these declarations and I prayed for the people involved. Guess what happened? The Federal Government came in and did their own audit on the company that was falsely accusing me. Shut them down, and my so-called debt was canceled. Why? Because I learned how to fellowship with the Holy Spirit, I learned how to move in the power of the Holy Spirit and I learned what it was to receive the revelation of the Holy Spirit. It is not that I fell in love with the information that comes from the Lord, I fell in love with the Holy Spirit Himself.
That is what He is after, He is after your heart. Can I pray for you in this regard? Father, I pray right now, my brother, my sister, wherever they are in their spiritual walk, God, I am asking you, Holy Spirit, that you will encounter their hearts right now. The weighty presence, the love of God will fall upon them right now. In the Name of Jesus, would you reveal your heart, that you would reveal, Lord, right now the strategies that they need to pray through whatever circumstance or situation they are coming through or coming to? In the name of Jesus, would you let them know how much you love them? You would part a crowd of people, even right now. This morning this parted all your emails for you to get this little message. This parted everything else on your cell phone, right now so you could get this message. Holy Spirit, He loves you, Holy Spirit wants to encounter you. Holy Spirit wants to reveal Jesus Christ to you in a new and profound way so you can know the Father’s heart in a way you had never known before. In Jesus’ name. Amen, amen, and amen. This is Will Ford and this is God Today.