For Lovers Only TESTIMONIES

These are translations from testimonies voiced during our meeting in Jakarta Thursday, March 22.

Ria : After the retreat – family restored, blessings flowed beyond their imagination. She realized that they should invest the blessing they received and not keep it for themselves. She also realized that they should serve God better than before.

Tri : He wanted to run away the first day of the retreat, a mixed feeling of inferiority, incapability, and other negative feelings gripped him. But as time progressed he felt changes took place in him, a newness and freshness of mind and heart. He has a cell group at his house and asked for our prayers that God will enable him and guide him to minister to his cell group members who are all having marital problems.

Kim : Her dreams come true, for a long long time she wanted to have a spiritual father for both of them especially for her husband Tri. God answered her prayer in sending HK. Through the teaching that she got at the retreat i.e. to show respect to your husband, made her aware of her shortcoming in this area. She did some soul searching and apply self correction. Before the retreat their relationship was stiff/rigid but now a change takes place. They can express their love more freely. Their marital relationship has been restored.

John : This meeting is very important! His wife has cancelled a meeting in order to come to this meeting. Result of retreat: husband & wife relationship has been restored. Now he only sees his wife’s goodness while before that he only sees her shortcomings/weaknesses. Before he cannot take a correction, but now he realized that as a pastor and a husband he has to live a righteous life. Now he didn’t want to minister to the Word of God unless with a clean heart. How can he stand before the congregation if there is no unity in his family.

SHEPHERDS AND SHEEP - SPIRITUAL WARFARE

In my teaching, I say that the Holy Spirit provides us power to overcome the enemy, both within us (our human nature, for one) and the enemy without (demons, or spirits for one). The following stories are personal experiences which I present because both Shepherds and Sheep should not be ignorant of the enemy’s methods.

WITCH DOCTORS and ILLNESS

We were conducting a healing service in a remote town in the Philippines in late 1980's. The local people who had completed our seminar on healing prayer formed the teams that prayed for the sick of the town who had come at our invitation.

One team came to me for help. It seems that a young man had come to them for healing a stomach pain which he had had for several months. The pain had gone away, and he had sat down in his seat, where the pain came back. This was repeated three times. The fourth time the man came back to their group for prayer, they came to me.

I suspected demonic activity. In my experience, pain that inexplicably comes and goes, or that moves about in the body, is often caused by spirits. Spirits are either invited by our activities, or sent to attack us. Invitation usually is some occult practice, even such a simple thing as reading horoscopes (the Bible admonishes us not to participate). In questioning the young man, he revealed that he had been to a faith healer, or witch doctor. At first I thought I had the source, but he had gone to be healed of this ailment, so it could not be the cause.

I asked him what the faith healer had said. He told us the faith healer had said that a curse had been placed upon him, but the faith healer could not help because the spirit causing the problem was stronger than the spirit the faith healer used for healing. Knowing that the Spirit given to us by our Father was stronger than any spirit, we bound that spirit and cast it out. The pain was gone and never returned.

SOURCE OF POWER?

Another time, our team was walking for three days from village to village, praying for people and preaching the gospel. A man began following us the second day. My host said that he asked if we were forming a new group. He was head of a group PBMA - Philippine Benevelent and Mission Association - they also went about healing people. He wanted to join our group, because he saw that the power we had was greater than his power.

A few days later, I was teaching in a seminar and he came in and sat at the back. I had been teaching on the Holy Spirit and hearing God. I had an illustration on the blackboard showing three sources: God, Satan, and our own creative minds. During the break he came and talked with me. He also had seen miracle healings. I asked him which source of power he used, and he pointed at ‘satan’ on the board and said "that power." I asked him why, since by his own observation over the past few days, God’s power was demonstrably more powerful.

He replied that the demons would get angry and hurt him if he used God’s power. He said that it was convenient for a time to use the power of the dark side, but later he would follow God. And he only used it for ‘good.’ Many are enticed or coerced by this same lie and succumb to the convenience of compromise for comfort sake, or unwittingly submit to the evil powers ‘to do good.’

UNDERGROUND RIVERS

Another time I was invited to have lunch with the governor of Guimaras, a province and small island in central Philippines. There was a map of the island on the wall, and we were discussing the development of mangos as an export crop (today, Guimaras is known for its great export quality mangos). I asked the governor if she knew there were underground rivers, and pointed out three locations where I thought there were underground rivers.

She was surprised, and asked how I knew. They had hired geologists at great expense and time to survey the island, and they had come to exactly the same conclusion. It was easy for me. A pastor friend had experiences with spirits who traveled through underground passages, and in dreams and visions understood that these were rivers and knew the locations of at least three of the accesses to these rivers. This is one case where science confirmed information revealed in dreams and visions.

BLOOD IN THE GROUND

In Iba, Zambales I was called to clean house for a family who claimed the house was haunted. As I walked through the house, I could sense many spiritual doors and windows through which spirits came and went. Usually spirits use physical openings, but they are not restricted to them, and there exist spiritual doors and windows through physical walls. We have the power to close those openings. I have not studied nor thought much about it, but possibly these passages are between realms rather than just place to place on earth.

It was in the front yard that I really got the creepies! The knowledge that there was blood in the ground, a horrible murder, possible more than just one came into my mind. Against all of my doctrinal thinking, I believed there were really ghosts. I spoke aloud to the spirits, now I can’t even remember what I said, but I spoke peace and comfort and gave them permission to go on to where they belonged. Whatever I said, something changed about the place. The people said later that they never experienced ghosts again after that.

Later, in town, I was talking to friends about the experience, and they began to excitedly tell about stories of that place, there was a feud between brothers, or something, people were indeed killed, and the house was vacant for many years.

NO PEACE

In Hawaii, some friends asked me to help them pray for their home. They had a daughter in her ‘20's who had begun behaving very strangely, was often ill and ill-tempered. She had recently gotten a boyfriend whose mother practiced witchcraft of the ancient Hawaiians. As we prayed in the girl’s room, there was a heavy, oppressive feeling. She came home while we were in progress, we explained what we were doing, and she willingly submitted and participated.

As we continued praying, she became violently ill, throwing up. After cleaning up, physically and spiritually, the oppressive feeling was gone. A few weeks later my friends said that their daughter was back to her joyous self and had left that boyfriend behind.

Shepherds and Sheep - Lovers Renewed

FOR LOVERS ONLY

. . . was a Walking with Jesus seminar specially designed for Pastors and their wives. I have done several Pastor and Wife seminars in the Philippines and Vietnam with Gisela, my partner, coordinator, and hostess in the Philippines (she is now in Germany, her children and grandchildren are operating the mission station in Manila). This was the first in Indonesia, and while similarly formatted, had several elements added or changed. Gisela is the originator of most of the material and flow of the seminar - Thanks Gisela, for getting me going!

The thing that drives me to desire to do these seminars is that for more than 10 years I travelled (mostly in the Philippines) doing seminars for pastors. I usually stayed in pastor's homes during these travels. I discovered that the pastor's wife is the loneliest person in the world: the pastor travels, either locally or away, and comes back tired and full of the problems people have dumped on him. He dumps them on her, and she has no place except Jesus. If she utters a peep, it becomes gossip. Besides this, she is expected to be a co-minister and perfect wife and hostess and . . . so many expectations from husband and congregation - all with no acknowledgment or thanks. The husband is too busy with 'his ministry,' 'serving God' to pay attention to wife and family or to minister at home. I realize that in most pastor/wife relationships this condition exists, so there exists a great need for creating awareness in the pastor and restoration for both.

Shepherds are subject to the same human frailities and failures as the sheep, but are limited in their opportunity to confess and recover from the festering wounds caused. Thus we created FOR LOVERS ONLY for Indonesia.

Most common comment or testimony from pastors and their wives:

Thank you for creating for us an example of a loving community for our families and congregations. Among variations were that it would help them be an example and lead in those two areas; that the environment created allowed them to experience a personal change in their attitude and ability to surrender to love; that their spouse had been demonstrably changed; etc.

The teaching methods were new and interesting. We never experienced such deep and heavy teaching in such a simple way, with exercises and games so it was really fun and we got it!

We never experienced such a seminar (retreat) as this. We hope you will follow-up so we can continue in the loving community and the teachings and practices we learned here. We want to help you if you will do this seminar again for others.

During the testimonies I frequently heard the words 'restoration' and 'breakthrough.'

Click on Dream Maker for our dream for the retreat FOR LOVERS ONLY
--HWK--