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Pastor's testimony
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Posted by: Chimbamu
Posted by: JG on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 03:35 PM
It is with great delight I want to let you know that we are on the front page of Arise Magazine. I have put the head lines here. Revival in the Pacific Northwest
Saturday, November 30, 2002
C O V E R S T O R Y
Revival in the Pacific NorthwestPosted Saturday, November 30, 2002 Jerry Gaffney
[Q:] What do you think God is looking for in His people today? [A:] God is looking for people that will embrace a bit higher of a calling so we can take back what the enemy has stolen. He is looking for some of us that will get our eyes on cities made by God and not the hands of men. I have been allowed the privilege to be one of the chaplains of the Senate here in Washington. In 1999, I was going to open the session in prayer for the second time and told the Lieutenant Governor that I wanted to give an altar call. He wasn't a Christian, so he didn't understand what I was talking about. He said that I had five minutes to invoke the presence of God, but that I wasn't to get offended if no one paid any attention to me. Usually people were talking on their cell phones during this time. I said that if I were a man of God, everyone would have their heads bowed and know that God came into the room. I prayed a prayer that morning and read a poem written by a little girl who was saved in one of our services. She asked, 'Where are the families we see on t.v. where no one gets drunk and everybody is happy? Where are the families we see on t.v. where people can play and have fun and not hate one another—where you don't lay in bed at night, afraid afraid of who is going to come in?' I said, 'Guys, we've got to do a better job of leading the kids.' When I finished, I told them that if God touched their heart and they wanted to talk about it or receive prayer, they could meet me off to the side—and the senators came running over with tears in their eyes. God is calling out those who are hungry, those who have an ear to hear the call to totally give themselves to the Lord. He is looking for people who don't want to play games. God wants everybody to be saved. He wants to empty jails. He wants to save all the prostitutes. He wants to build His kingdom
C O V E R S T O R Y
Revival in the Pacific NorthwestPosted Saturday, November 30, 2002 Jerry Gaffney
[Q:] What was your childhood like?[A:] I grew up in a heathen home, my mother was from Louisiana. Between the ages of three and six I lived in an orphanage because my parents were dysfunctional, as so many are today. They were out of control with alcohol and other excessive, compulsive behaviors towards us children. Although they did get us back after that, things did not improve. I was in prison by the time I was fourteen. [Q:] When did you first experience the reality of Jesus Christ in your life? [A:] I was shot in the knee while I was on duty as a Marine in Vietnam. They sent me back to Oakland, California, where I spent the next seven months in the hospital. My wife and I had been married the year before, and the pastor of her church, Bob Willis
[Q:] When did you first experience the reality of Jesus Christ in your life? [A:] I was shot in the knee while I was on duty as a Marine in Vietnam. They sent me back to Oakland, California, where I spent the next seven months in the hospital. My wife and I had been married the year before, and the pastor of her church, Bob Willis, came to visit one day. When he walked into the hospital room, he told me that he had a dream about me and asked if he could pray. At that point, I was not doing too well as far as the doctors were concerned. I had a massive infection throughout my whole leg and body. I was in the amputee ward, and they were getting ready to cut my leg off. So, when he asked if he could pray for me, I told him to go ahead and take his best shot. He came over, laid his hands on me, and said, 'Jesus, please do to this young man what you showed me in the dream.' That was the whole prayer, but immediately I started getting better and they didn't have to amputate my leg. I realized right then that whoever this guy knew, it had to be serious because He did something no one else could do. [Q:] Up until that point, what had been your thoughts about God? [A:] Oh, I had nothing to do with Him. This was the sixties. I drank a lot and did drugs. In fact, I called God Ralph. [Q:] What did you do after this experience in the hospital? [A:] I started investigating. I went to Willis' church, but it was a Pentecostal church. The only thing I had ever been to was a Catholic church, so the experience was far beyond what I was used to. I told my wife that I would never go back again, but she just prayed. Despite my initial reaction, I kept going back, mainly because the food was good. I was a Marine who made $20 a week, so we were hungry and broke. After a while, my wife realized that I wasn't understanding the gospel message, so she took me to an evangelist that she had personally travelled with before. As soon as he opened his mouth, I understood every word that he was saying. That was on April 18, 1968. I couldn't walk at the time and was still in a wheelchair, but I stood up and got saved—for what I call the first time. [Q:] What was you Christian life like following this? [A:] I would love to say that I went onward and upward, but I didn't. I would get my eyes on people problems instead of God, and that disappoints you a lot in life. Eventually, I walked away from the Lord in 1973. [Q:] What did you get involved with then? [A:] I finished my college education and went into business in California. I did very well in real estate, but I was miserable. I was drinking every day and doing drugs just to quiet the demons that were in me—all that hurt and pain that I felt inside. We moved to Hawaii later on where we lived in a two and a half million dollar house. I worked for the airline industry. My son worked for the T.V. program, Magnum P.I. We had everything we could ever want, and I hated it. I realized there has to be more. I was wealthy, but very unfulfilled. Then in 1987, God gave me a dream. You must understand that by this time I was drinking about a pint of booze a night and would chase it with a narcotic. I would have my chauffeur drive me home, and he would cry in the front seat and say, 'Mr. Gaffney, you have a beautiful family, a beautiful house, a wonderful job—what everybody wants—why do you keep doing this to yourself?' In the dream I saw millions of people coming into the state of Washington, and God told me that He wanted me to be a part of that. I had never been to Washington before, except for flight connections. Basically, He said to me that it was either this, or I was going to die. [Q:] How did you respond to the dream? [A:] I got up and said to my wife that I was flying to Washington the next day. I told her that I was going to get saved again, and she was really excited. She had been walking with the Lord every day. I would have been a dead man if it wasn't for her. She is the one who deserves all the honor and glory in this family, not me. We came to Washington right away, bought a house, and found a church; but my pride would not let me get saved right away. I went to a church for five Sundays in a row in Edmonds, Washington, where they had just fired their pastor. The interim pastor was a Swedish man in his sixties and he preached the same sermon five weeks in a row. By the fifth Sunday, I was betting that no one would have the courage to do this again, yet I was excited to see the reaction of the people if he did. It was a very large church that seated twelve hundred people. During the message, which was once again the same one he had done the previous weeks, the thought came to me that God couldn't make him preach it a sixth time. Each week as he preached, the pastor would look straight at me. I knew I needed to respond. So I got up and walked down to the front, but I was very angry. I thought at least God could have gotten someone else saved as well so I didn't have to do it by myself. When I first stood up from my seat, I was angry, not repenting, although I knew I had to do this. Yet as I walked forward, the question occurred to me, 'If I were my own son, would I forgive him with this type of attitude?' Then it hit me that God was telling me that He might not take me back. By this time, I was a mess. When I got to the front, I said to the pastor that I wanted to come home. He looked down at me and said, 'Took you long enough.' Then he gave be a big hug in front of everybody and said, 'Welcome home, son.'
[Q:] How did God deal with you from this point on? [A:] The day I got saved, in August of 1987, He took a lot of stuff away—things like smoking, cursing, drinking, and drugs—but He still had to work on a lot of stuff in my life as well. He started by asking me the question, 'Jerry, do you trust me?' I thought about it for a moment and told him, 'No.' It's stupid to lie to God; He already knew. He directed me to read all the verses in the Bible on trust for six months. So, I typed out all the ones I could find and read them every night before I went to bed. After six months, He asked me the question again, "Jerry, do you trust Me?' After all this time feeding on the Word, I said, 'Of course, I trust You.' Then He hit me with another question, "Jerry, can I trust you?' I told Him, 'No,' and we've been working on that one ever since. God also said that He wanted me to pray two hours a day, which was quite a step to take. I assumed that He wanted me to do it at the church, so I asked if I could hold a men's prayer meeting there in the mornings. When I was told that I couldn't, it was a test for me. I had to learn not to be rebellious. But God didn't say I had to pray in the church, that was my idea. However, I still wanted to do it at the church somehow, so I obtained permission to do it in the parking lot. I went out and found some other fellows like me, guys who were hurting, and told them we were going to have a men's prayer group at 6:30 each morning. When we began, I drove to their houses and beeped the horn for five minutes to wake them up. They would come out screaming at me, asking me what I was doing, and I would just tell them to get in the car. By the third day, all of the men were up and waiting for me by the time I got there. Their wives were petrified of me. After six months, we were allowed to meet inside the church and eventually it grew to where we would have as many as two hundred people there. For seven years, I prayed for two hours a day. [Q:] When did you begin to embrace revival? [A:] During this time, God brought some granny commandos to morning prayer who had been involved with Azusa Street and other ministries such as Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, and William Branham. These women knew the fire of God and started to pray for me for a couple of years. At that point, I was not used to praying in tongues and prophesying publically. The church was a very evangelical, non-charismatic church. It was in this type of atmosphere on February 11, 1994, that the Holy Spirit suddenly hit me and told me to tell everyone as they were leaving that He was going to move 'right now.' When I did, all the people in the room fell out under the power of God for three hours. I had never seen that before and had no frame of reference for what was happening. There was a lady rolling up and down under a pew and I wondered if that was a holy roller because I had never seen one before. I was still working in the airline business at the time, plus coaching track, but we were praying between twenty and sixty hours a week. It had become a consuming desire of ours to be in the presence of God. After this incident, I was told by the church that they wanted me to stay away for ten days because they needed to know if this was God. After the ten days, they brought me back, lined up twenty leaders from the church, and asked me to pray for them. I wasn't allowed to touch them, look in their eyes, or personally prophesy to them—which was fine because I didn't know what personal prophecy was. All I did was say, 'Jesus, bless them,' and every one of them fell down under the power of God. [Q:] How did this affect the church? [A:] It was decided that it would be best to investigate this more by getting wisdom from other people. Someone in the church paid for the pastor and I to go and investigate, so we went to see David Wilkerson, Jim Cymbala, and Rodney Howard-Browne to be exposed to the entire spectrum of revival. My pastor loved David Wilkerson's and Jim Cymbala's churches, and they were both awesome experiences for me as well. Rodney's meetings, on the other hand, were a stretch for him. By the second day he wanted to go home. [Q:] What was your reaction? [A:] Personally, I embraced it right away, even though I had never seen people run around church or dance in the Spirit. There was a lot of activity going on. I did not want to be rebellious in any way because I loved my pastor and would even die for him. So I asked the Lord if there was a way of doing so without seeming stubborn, I would love to stay. The next morning, there was eighteen inches of snow on the ground and the airport was closed, and we ended up staying the whole week. [Q:] How did the meetings with Rodney Howard-Browne affect you personally? [A:] On the Thursday night we were sitting twenty-three rows back, and Rodney walked up to my pastor and said that he wanted to pray for him about a revival coming to the Pacific Northwest. He said it would start with hundreds of small fires that would eventually become thousands and even millions. As he prayed for my pastor I saw a vision of a prayer shawl falling to the ground. I'm Jewish, and I said, 'Lord, that's not supposed to happen to a prayer shawl. His mantle hit the ground.' Then God told me to pick it up, but I said, 'I don't want to take another man's anointing.' My heart's desire was for my pastor to have it, not me. All I wanted to do was serve him. It made my week if I could do something for him. When he would go and speak somewhere, I would go along and pray for him in a side room, interceding while he spoke. It was never my desire to do what I am doing now. But God kept telling me to pick it up. So finally in my mind I bent down and took it. As soon as I did, Rodney immediately turned to me and laid his hands on me. When he touched me, it felt like a lightening bolt hit and I had millions of volts of electricity going through me. I was screaming, Rodney was screaming, and he kept saying, 'Take this and go do it.' [Q:] What happened when you returned home? [A:] When I came home I was asked to speak at another church. I had only done this once before when I testified at a Baptist church. As we were walking out to the service, the pastor said, 'By the way, you're the speaker.' When I asked him what that meant, he said that he wanted me to testify what had happened but also to give a message afterwards. I told him that he must be kidding, but he wasn't. So after I had testified, I will never forget the words that came out of my mouth. I said, 'You bunch of wimps, wooses, and weasels, you wouldn't even be saved if it wasn't for your women,' and the pastor hid his face. I told the men that the women had been holding the fort for all of these years and we had been absent without leave—we had deserted the Lord and things of God. I said that we wouldn't be in church half the time if it wasn't for our wives and that it was time for us to report back to duty and take back the land. I said, 'If you know that's you, get right with God right now,' and two hundred men ran forward. Then God told me to pray for them, but I didn't know what to do because I had never done this before. I said, 'Jesus, bless them,' and they all fell out under the power. Afterwards, the pastor asked if I would come back for a Sunday evening service, which they didn't normally do. That night the building was full, and we gave an altar call around 8:30. People were coming down to get saved from all over the church, and then they would go back into town and bring their friends from the bars and movie theatres to the service. By 9:30, I had a whole new church again to pray for. They weren't even asking for a message. They were just bringing others down to get saved. Once we were finished, the pastor wanted to know if I would stay and hold meetings. I asked him what meetings were, and he said we would hold services twice a day, six days a week. I told him that I would need to make arrangements with my work. I took a two week vacation initially which turned into twenty-six weeks in different churches, doing two services a day. [Q:] What were some of the things you saw God doing during this period? [A:] The biggest miracle we saw was with a baby who was born deformed. His legs were on backwards, and he couldn't talk or even sit up. The parents brought him for prayer, and they themselves were touched by the Lord. The were lying on the ground, holding their baby. A boy from the Baptist church across the street was there the same night, wanting to experience the infilling of the Holy Spirit with his heavenly language. When I prayed for him and he received what he had came for, I told him that Jesus wanted to pray a prayer through him in his heavenly language for the little baby. I said that if he would allow God to do that through him, by the time I returned, the baby would be healed. There were a lot of people at the altar that night who wanted prayer, so about an hour went by when I suddenly heard a scream. A miracle had occurred, and the baby had sat up. Of course the Baptist fellow was quite excited, and I helped him understand what was going on. The child was seeing Christ in him, so I told him to point to him and say, 'Walk to Jesus.' When the child got up and started walking, everyone went crazy. We walked around the room, holding his hands, singing, 'Jesus Loves Me This I Know.' His feet were still backwards at this point, totally deformed. As we were walking around the church, God turned his right leg around, but not his left one. I asked the Lord about this and He said that the parents had no discipline to stay in My presence. They were both professional people and had been married at least eight different times between the two of them. God wanted them to have a family altar each day and pray in the Spirit over their child the way we were doing that service. They agreed. Seven weeks later they called me, screaming. God had healed their child's left leg. [Q:] What were your own thoughts when you saw things like this happening? [A:] Frightened. I didn't want to do anything that would offend the Lord in any way and quench the Spirit. I knew I didn't deserve it, so I spent hours a day in prayer, afraid that I would do something that would stop it. But the Lord just continued to move. We went from church to church without a break. In the past seven years, I've been on the road ten and a half to eleven months each year. Although it has been hard at times, it has been one continual glory walk. What I saw in my mind's eye was a chariot of fire coming to me with a hand stretching out of it asking the question, 'Will you get on?' When I asked the Lord where we were going, He simply responded, 'Does it matter?' I told Him that it didn't, and He said that as long as I held on He would take me where He wanted to take take me. So it has been that way since 1994. [Q:] Have you seen a growing hunger for God in the places that you have been in response to His manifest presence? [A:] Yes. In one church that I was at for five weeks, we put three hundred and thirty-five people in a building, without air conditioning, that only seated one hundred and eighty. There were even two hundred more crowded into the foyer. We saw miracle after miracle there, it was awesome. People would sit in lawn chairs three or four rows deep around the outside of the church. It was 100° outside and 107° inside, but they would stay there all day long just to keep their seats. [Q:] I imagine you have faced a number of challenges along the way ministering in this type of flow of the Spirit? [A:] When we were in Blaine, Washington, there was a man there named Henry who had fallen off a train and hit his back on the railway track. He had experienced great pain and was fitted with a very large brace that supported the weight of his back. As I went to pray for him, I saw much anger in him toward his wife and children. I asked if he wanted the Lord to heal him, and he said, 'Yes.' So I told him that, if he went home and apologized to his family and came back the next night, the Lord would heal him. He did this and was back the next evening. Around eleven o'clock that night when we were worshipping God, I looked at Henry and asked if he wanted to be healed 'right now.' I told him that there was a lot of stubbornness in him and that the Lord had a task for him to do. When he asked what it was, I said that he was to take off his brace. He told me that I was nuts because that would collapse his spine and the pain would shoot through his whole body. I said, 'Well then, we are done. You obviously think you know better than what the Lord is telling me.' So, he did take off his brace, and there was an immediate scream of pain. When I told him to bend over and touch his toes, he asked if I was crazy. He couldn't even stand up, and here I was telling him to bed over. Of course he did try to touch his toes, but his back locked and he couldn't stand up. By this time, people were booing me. I took one of my fingers and lifted him up, and the power of the Holy Spirit came upon him. I told him to do it one more time, so he bent down, screaming. When I lifted him up again, I said that there was one more task that he had to do. He had to run down to the front door of the church, turn around, and run back. If he did, I told him that he would be healed. God showed me that this man had a choice. He could either go to the front door, decide that he didn't want to do it, and leave, or he could turn from his stubbornness and be healed. By this time he was in a lot of pain, and people were thinking that I was being cruel. Henry turned to do what I had said, and when he got to the front door, he decided to return. The moment he did, it was like a tornado filled the room. When it hit Henry, he screamed and began to run through the church. Now I weigh three hundred and thirty-five pounds; but when he got to me, he picked me up and started carrying me around. I don't ever want that to happen again. [Q:] You have had some unique adventures in your travels as well? [A:] There was one pastor who was starting a new church and he called me to come. We began holding meetings in the back of a Mexican restaurant in a space no larger than a normal living room. We would pack two hundred people in there without chairs.We were there for five weeks, and the meetings grew so large that we had to go to the convention center. It was in that place that a man walked in who had been given ten days to live. He had cancer in his kidneys and was basically sent home to die. He was a pastor and said that he had come to die in a God meeting. I told him to leave because death was a bummer and I didn't want him to die there. He said that was very offensive to him. I told him that Jesus came to give abundant life and asked, 'If you want to live, will you do what the Lord is asking you to do?' He said that he would. I told him that I knew he had been a pastor for forty years, but that he had a lot of 'snot' in him because of the hurt and pain. I said that he was to stand in the back of the room and say, 'Holy Spirit, move for Jesus,' which were the words that were spoken by Jonathan Roberts in the Welsh revival. He did this, and we counted down the days after which he was supposed to die. He ended up living for five years. I have a letter from his doctor that says this was the first miracle he had ever seen that the cancer totally disappeared. [Q:] What do you say to pastors who desire to see revival in their churches? [A:] We have to learn to pastor revival. When the Holy Spirit comes, it is not business as usual. If you turn on your headlights in an open field at night, you are going to attract a lot of bugs. If you turn the light of Christ on, a lot of buggy people are going to come. Revival is a lot of work, and it is also going to drive some people away. So we must learn to have patience. The other thing is that we must keep our eyes on Jesus and not the business of ministry. I can't tell you how many men I have been around that don't like what they are doing anymore. They have lost their enthusiasm for everything. They straighten out the hymnals or wonder who is there during praise and worship and are so involved with the mechanics of ministry that they fail to concentrate on bringing the glory down. We need to lead the people close to the fire instead of worrying about the church. God is looking for some people who will have childlike faith. When we walk to the pulpit, the people want to see fire in the pastor's eyes. They want to know that he has been with God. [Q:] Do you see churches embracing the spirit of revival and running with it, rather than having an experience and going back to business as usual? [A:] We have seen churches that catch a revival vision which the Lord has given them. They don't have just a 'church planting' program, but a 'take over' program. Has every church been like that? No, because it is hard to break out of that mold. It is hard to have somebody that you love say that they don't like the pastor anymore, and you don't want to lose those people. But you have to be a leader sometime in life. [Q:] What do you think God is looking for in His people today? [A:] God is looking for people that will embrace a bit higher of a calling so we can take back what the enemy has stolen. He is looking for some of us that will get our eyes on cities made by God and not the hands of men. I have been allowed the privilege to be one of the chaplains of the Senate here in Washington. In 1999, I was going to open the session in prayer for the second time and told the Lieutenant Governor that I wanted to give an altar call. He wasn't a Christian, so he didn't understand what I was talking about. He said that I had five minutes to invoke the presence of God, but that I wasn't to get offended if no one paid any attention to me. Usually people were talking on their cell phones during this time. I said that if I were a man of God, everyone would have their heads bowed and know that God came into the room. I prayed a prayer that morning and read a poem written by a little girl who was saved in one of our services. She asked, 'Where are the families we see on t.v. where no one gets drunk and everybody is happy? Where are the families we see on t.v. where people can play and have fun and not hate one another—where you don't lay in bed at night, afraid afraid of who is going to come in?' I said, 'Guys, we've got to do a better job of leading the kids.' When I finished, I told them that if God touched their heart and they wanted to talk about it or receive prayer, they could meet me off to the side—and the senators came running over with tears in their eyes. God is calling out those who are hungry, those who have an ear to hear the call to totally give themselves to the Lord. He is looking for people who don't want to play games. God wants everybody to be saved. He wants to empty jails. He wants to save all the prostitutes. He wants to build His kingdom. ...wwww