Chapter Six – Signs, Miracles, Wonders, and Visitation
Russ:
The first miracle I experienced as a young boy at the time, was a resurrection from the dead. My elder brother brought home a dying baby rabbit on a church night. Dad put a desk lamp on the creature to keep it warm, and we hurried off to service. Upon our return, the thing had died, and rigor had already set in. While three wide-eyed little boys looked on, Dad laid hands on it, and miraculously it came to life. We named it Hezekiah because the Lord gave him a new lease on life. I was only about six at the time, but the impact this made on me was profound. We had heard all the stories in Sunday School and certainly absorbed the thunderous preaching of many Latter Rain ministers (no children’s church in those days), and now we had experienced the reality of God’s power at work in the earth to heal the sick, cast out devils and raise the dead.
You can’t ever underestimate the impact of spiritual realities on very young children. I think we do a grave disservice to our children when we excuse them from the service as though what takes place in the adult church is of no interest to them. Is there any wonder that when they grow up they often just opt out of church altogether? When I was pastoring my second church back in the ’80s, our congregation made a commitment. We declared as one that God’s presence was our priority. That meant that anything, any program of our church that did not directly defer to and open us up to God’s presence would be set aside. One of the programs we did away with was the children’s church and nursery. God was moving in our midst, and we wanted our children by our sides to experience what the Holy Spirit was bringing about. It was a decision that paid off in young people who grew up under the move of God going on to become dedicated believers. It isn’t necessary to dumb down the message of the gospel, so it is palatable to young minds. Children who are pandered to in this way grow up to be dense and unteachable adults. On the other hand, when you expose children to anointed teaching and preaching and the signs and wonders that go with them the dividends for the church and those children as they grow to adulthood will be immense.
In the late ’70s, I mustered into the air force and left my parents and my home for the first time. I wasn’t living for the Lord, then in fact, far from it. After walking away from the voice of the Lord at the tender age of 12, I became immersed in the dark underworld of drugs and the counter culture of the ’70s. Moving into my late teens, I began dealing drugs and developed a heavy addiction to methamphetamine and illicitly obtained prescription narcotics. When I entered the air force, my duty station was in Spokane, Washington. I saw this as my chance to really make it as a drug dealer, and I got involved with a drug ring that was smuggling drugs into the country. I became so hardened during that time that even hard-core drug dealers would blush at my foul mouth and ungodly ways. More than once in a drugged stupor, I recalled waking up the next morning, realizing that I’d had a gun shoved in my face the night before. Only my parent’s prayers kept me alive during that time.
While I was stationed in Spokane, I was billeted in the single man’s barracks with a room all by myself. This was because no one wanted to sleep in the same room with a drug fiend filled with darkness and sin. I would turn all the lights out to make the room completely dark and then turn up my records of Satanic music as loud as I could. It was the only way I could sleep; the only way I could drown out the tug of the Holy Spirit on my heart. Even in this horrible state, I would dream about lying at the sawdust strewn altar where I was baptized in the Holy Ghost years before. My hands would be lifted up, and I would be talking in tongues. This would wake me up, and to my shock, the lights in my room would be turned on, and the music was turned off! Then as my mind would clear the lights would be turned down by an unseen hand, and the deathly demonic music would return to its pounding volume. I would lower my upraised hands with my heart racing. The Lord would say, “it’s lonely out there isn’t it son? You’ll be back…”
Those experiences drove me to cut off my ties to the drug culture. I processed out of the military and made my way to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where my parents were pastoring at the time.
The call of God was on my life, and in just a few years, I took the pastorate of my first church. God was moving in my life, and we experienced many signs, miracles, and wonders because we took God at his word and accepted the scriptural declaration that Jesus was the same yesterday, today and forever. I’ll never forget the day that a young pastor’s daughter from another congregation came with her family to one of our meetings. She came to the altar for prayer (we actually had altar calls in those days). She had discharged from the hospital the day before, and the doctors had called her to come back in immediately. She was diagnosed with an inoperable malignant tumor in her brain. We laid hands on her and commanded healing. She was instantly delivered, and I sent her back to the doctors to verify the diagnosis
