Article
God is love
February 4, 2019
In a few days, I will arrive at my anniversary of forty years since I was called to preach. That approaching landmark has had me in a reflective mood. I have been reviewing my life of walking with God. Although it was fifty-two years ago, my mind’s eye distinctly can see myself being saved at age five.
During the revival, the evangelist asked something odd for our church. We always prayed with the men at the altars on one side of the church and the women at those on the opposite side. That night I was at the altar on the woman’s side. The evangelist had asked us to come and pray as family units, and my family prayed at the woman’s altar. I did not understand why at the time, but I found myself weeping. I wasn’t even sure how to pray, so I start praying the go-to-bed prayer. Someone instructed me to ask God to forgive me and believe Jesus had died for me. Suddenly, I understood why people weep, sin.
The next day I could tell the difference in how I thought and felt about things. I knew I had been changed. Two years later at seven, I was baptized with the Holy Spirit. My father always took my brother and me to the front to pray during altar services. We did not pray at the men’s altar, per se. We prayed on the men’s side at the side of the platform on its steps. Many times, I watched my shy dad begin weeping in prayer. At some point, he would straighten his back, lift his hands, and turn his face towards heaven. With tears running down his face, he would begin speaking in tongues.
One night, following his example, I lifted my hands and head and started praising the Lord. I remember my pastor’s wife coming alongside me and, after instructing me to “just praise Jesus,” praying with me, “Glory, glory, glory, glory.” Suddenly, my soul erupted. I heard another language tumbling out over my lips. My praying and worship were never the same afterward.
Through the years during prayer, the Holy Spirit would move upon me in episodic, memorable experiences. When I was twelve after one of those “episodes,” our new pastor told my parents that he believed “God has His hand upon Clifford to preach the Gospel.” Turbulent teen years brought times of spiritual coldness and distance into my life.
One winter’s night when I was seventeen, we had a rare Oklahoma snowstorm. The weather was so bad that my place of work closed. My little Pentecostal church was in a revival that night. The weather closed businesses but not that small church with a dedicated band of believers. Free from work that evening, I went to the revival. As cold in my soul as the night outside, I felt my need at that service’s end to go to the altar.
As I began wrestling in prayer, I sensed a strong impulse that God was calling me to preach the Gospel. I doubted. I asked God for confirmation, "God, if you want me to preach your Word, let three people tell me that.” I had hardly gone back and sat down in a pew, when a brother sat down beside me and slipped his arm around my shoulder and said, “Clifford, I really feel God is calling you to preach His Word.” Back towards the foyer doors when I was leaving the church that evening, a second person stopped me and said much the same. That was only two. The next morning a dear, elderly saint, came by our house for another reason, but she saw me and began weeping: “Clifford, I feel like God is calling you to preach.” That was three! God had confirmed His calling.
Almost immediately I began preaching. While yet in high school, I started preaching revivals. Now, forty years later, I look back where answering that call has taken me: Bible college, seminary, revivals across the nation, conferences and camps, mission trips in several countries, teaching Bible college for seven years, principal of a Christian school for two years, and a pastor for twenty-eight years.
It was at Bible college I met my wife, a missionaries’ daughter whose father had given his life for the sake of the Gospel in the Philippines. We have four children all who are serving the Christ; the three married children’s mates serve the Lord as well. They have blessed us with nine grandchildren with one more coming this year.
Had there not been those experiences at five, seven, and seventeen, my past forty years would have been a completely different story, probably, a bad story. Fortunately, Jesus changed my story. My change happened forty years and more ago. Someone’s story could change today.
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