TIMES OF FIRE, REVIVAL, AND GLORY .....
A couple of years ago I was talking to a dear old friend, Pastor Johnny Trossö in Sweden. Johnny was a Worship Pastor and a very close friend. He used to travel with me to Poland in the 80s when Britta and I lived in Sweden.
Johnny brought back to the surface many memories from glorious days long gone. We began to talk about the meetings that we had in Poland in the early 80s and onward. We were two young guys still in our 20s, and we traveled all over the then-communist nation that was Poland. We used to drive vanloads of food and medical supplies, and ministered in Catholic Churches.
Poland was right next door to Sweden, and I used to go to preach there around 4 times a year, spending 3 weeks there on each trip. Military Intelligence agents used to come to our meetings, and very often they were thrown down to the floor by the Power of God where they stood. They would then get up and run away in sheer terror.
First it was only Johnny and I, then others also joined me... Curt and Eleonora Lahti , Liv Olga Ommedal Rosales , Marie-Thérese Sundberg , Evelina Shippee , Mikael Micke Lewin , Evert Hedin and so many more. We saw thousands receive Jesus and receive the Baptism with the Holy Ghost. We saw lame and deformed children healed, paralyzed people walking, blind eyes see, the deaf hear, and we saw God do amazing creative miracles. We saw scores of miracles in each service. It was like in the Gospels and the Book of Acts.
Soon Catholic priests, monks, nuns, and lay people were eagerly devouring Dad Hagin's and Pastor John Osteen's books that we had translated. I had up to 12,000 people at a time in our meetings. I held seminars for priests and in monasteries. They even had me preach on "The Blood of Jesus" on nationwide TV. People were eagerly reading their Bibles and had personal prayer lives.
Many Catholic Charismatic groups were formed at that time and a powerful atmosphere or Revival was prevalent.
After some years the climate began to harden. There were many priests who felt that they were losing "control" of these Catholic Charismatic groups and began to shut them down and even throw them out of the churches. I had stopped going to Poland after 10 years of intensive preaching there because I sensed in my heart that the "grace" that the Lord had given me for Poland for that season had lifted.
Then years later I began to hear how many of those charismatic groups that had been started through our meetings and had been thrown out of the churches had become Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. Many young men, women, and teenagers who had been Saved, Baptized with Holy Ghost, and touched by God in those meetings were now pastors and leaders in Churches.
The seed sown while preaching during those hard years of Communist military dictatorship had not been in vain. At times it takes a decade or two before one sees the lasting fruit of a move of God. All God wants us to do is to be faithful and steadfast in preaching the Gospel.
Today it is a new day in a new Poland, and I have not been back there for around 30 years, and I look back at those days. I marvel at the mighty power of our Lord Jesus, and of His Gospel. We live in a world of variables, of shifting sands, but then there are the rock-solid Absolutes that never change.
Our Lord Jesus, His Word, His Gospel, His Holy Ghost, and the power of the Gospel still remain the same. That is what we preached then, still preach today, and shall preach until the end.
"Wherefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire".
-Hebrews 12:28-29
Originally posted on Facebook by Pastor Christopher Alam