Sonlight Devotional

I had no theological training, no understanding of what the name of the THING was that had happened to me.  I grabbed an old Bible my mother had put in the suitcase and began to analyze it systematically in order to find out if God speaks to people, for by this time I was hungry for the Word.  I applied the process of analysis and, before daylight, came up with some astounding solutions.  Yes, God speaks to thieves, murderers, and He will speak to me, too.  It was simple to conclude.  All I had to do was to get all the names of the men of God in the Bible and read how God dealt with them.  I was thus convinced that this was a prayer-hearing and speaking God who would also speak to me.  I thought that if Jesus, that I did not know, could love me so much to save me, then surely He can talk to me and tell me about the Scriptures. By then, it was almost eight o’clock in the morning, time to go to work.  I asked Jesus to meet me at four o’clock that day when I was off work.  It was a naive request, but full of faith and confidence in God. 

At a few minutes to four, I was in my room waiting.  At four, a man came through the door and I was not frightened.  I expected Him.  I made an appointment with Him for four o’clock and He came.  I just barely had a glimpse of Him and before I could get excited he was behind me, standing right behind my left side.  The knowl­edge that it was JESUS came to me with His presence.  The power of His presence was so great that it stilled the spirit of the warrior within me.  For the first time in my life, I was at PERFECT PEACE.  My mind, my will, my desires, my emotions were all caught up into a heavenly tranquillity, which stilled my whole body and being for the space of nine hours while He talked with me.  The Scripture describes it thus, “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”  (Phillipians 4:7)  I sat down all night with Him until one o’clock in the morning.  I do not know why, but He always left at one o’clock.  It was probably the time I got tired.

He began to teach me the Bible.  When I was going to take notes, He told me, “No, you don’t have to do that.  When you need them, the words will come back to you.”  At first, all the questions that I wanted to ask Him went out of me.  The only thing I could ask was about the mistakes in the Bible.  He calmly said, “There are no mistakes in the Bible.”  I was not allowed to verbalize my questions, but as soon as they came into my mind, He would answer them.  For instance, I wanted to know why the Scriptures said, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:38)  I had asked Him about this, because I had read it and it baffled me that He was saying that waters were going to flow out of our bellies.  He answered, “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.” (1 Corinthians 6:19, 2 Corinthians 6:16)  I said, “Yes, but Jesus, I do not see that in the Scriptures.  There is no other place in the Bible that would say that waters are going to flow forth out of my belly.”  I said this because by this time I had read the whole Bible through.  Having a photographic memory, I felt that if it were there, I would have remembered it.  He replied, “Turn to Ezekiel 47.”  So I turned to Ezekiel 47, and there it was right before me.  Verse 1, “Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house; and, behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward: for the forefront of the house stood toward the east, and the waters came down from under from the right side of the house, at the south side of the altar.”

Immediately, my understanding was opened to see that He was talking about spiritual water flowing out of a spiritual temple.  The water is going “eastward”.  It is going towards the sunrise.  It is going towards the people who are to be made alive.  In John 7 verse 37 it says, “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”  “In the last day” was in the time of the “feast of tabernacles”, the last feast for the year (Deuteronomy 16:16), which is a symbol of our times, the “seventh millennium”.  In this last day Jesus cried, “…If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.  He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”  When you take this drink, when you take Him in and absorb Him into your being, you become a fountain of living water.

Another time I would say to Jesus, “Tell me about the ‘trinity’.  I cannot understand the trinity, the fact that ‘God is one, yet God is three’.”  He answered, “It is simple.  Look at yourself.  You are (1) spirit, you are (2) soul, and you are (3) body; and yet you are one person.”  It shut me up completely.  I understood it right away.  I understood that you do not come up to someone and say, “I don’t want to talk to you, I just want to talk to your spirit,” or, “I am not talking to you, I am just wanting to talk to your soul.”

When I went to the church and told the bishop about my experience, he said, “It is impossible!  Man, you have been listening to the devil!”

I then said to this brother, “The devil has the power to come into my room as a man to deceive me.  Do you think God would have the same power?”

He said, “No.  God doesn’t deal that way.  Jesus Christ went away and He is not coming back that way any more.  You cannot see Him as a man!”

I asked, “But didn’t Paul see Jesus?”

He replied, “Oh no!  It was a vision!  You can’t tell me that Jesus would come into your room every day at four o’clock!  You can’t tell me that!”

Since Christ is a living person, I asked Jesus quietly, “What do I tell this brother?  Tell me what to tell him.  I do not want to rebuke this old man, who is the head of the great big organization.”  He whispered back to me, “Give him your testimony.”  So I said, “Brother D,” (this is what they called him), “Brother D, do you think the devil would, in order to catch me, take away my sins from me?  Do you think he would stop me from drinking, from smoking, from carousing, from dancing, from wickedness, from all my wild ways, just so that he could catch my soul?  Do you think he would do that?”

He looked up in the ceiling and said, “Oh, no, no, no!  The devil cannot do righteousness.  If you are righteous, it is God.”  At that point, his theology was right.  The devil cannot do righteousness.

I said, “Thank you.  Then it is Jesus I was talking to.”

For hundreds of years, the church has been preaching that Jesus Christ is alive, but many do not really believe it.  Some preachers do not believe that Jesus Christ can talk to someone or manifest Himself in a vision or a dream.  Much the less do they believe that He could come and stand and have a conversation with me for nine hours, but that was the reality of the situation.  This manifestation was not an isolated incident, but continued for seven months, from August to February, when He led me into the baptism into the Holy Spirit.  There are many skeptics, like this bishop, who will say that I dreamed it or maybe had a vision.  But if it was a vision, then it was a serial vision in which I was not asleep and which lasted for seven months.  Jesus Christ revealed Himself to me as a person, a man whom I got to know and love.