About The Beginning of My Walk
My dad and his 3 brothers were all Assemblies of God Pastors. The oldest brother, Herman, who just died about a year ago, was on the A.G. board of 13 for many years. My mom's dad was an A.G. Minister also, though things were different back in his heyday. At his death in 1963 we counted at least 39 churches in the mid west which he'd started that were still going. He was the best friend I ever had. So, I grew up in a pentecostal ministers home, in church never less than 3, usually 4, 5, or more times a week most of my first couple of decades of life. I first asked Jesus into my heart (when all alone) at less than 4 years old and was filled with the Spirit, speaking in tongues at 8.
I left home halfway through my senior year of high school before I was 18. Until then I'd never even heard the word "marijuana." I reveled in immorality and drugs in 1967-1968, lost in San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury. Then I wandered about barefoot and in a robe in Berkeley, a true "flower-child." This was followed in Minneapolis by shooting up harder drugs and bondage to what in it's start had seemed beautiful.
One day I injected what was supposed to be LSD; but, instead of taking about half an hour to come on to it I was immediately plunged into where everything was another world of brilliant colors and flowing movement. It seemed I could see the molecules in my arm. I realized I could die. I got a friend to take me to find a Doctor I knew that I hoped could help. We chased her down to a prayer meeting in the basement of a Presbyterian Church where a bunch of students had been filled with the Holy Spirit. Next door, in a living room full of people loudly praying in tongues for me, I was very disoriented. Dr Judy put her hand on my arm and spoke simple words of such clarity and peace. "Just tell Jesus what you want." So I got on my knees and told Him, "I want You, but I like to sin more. I believe You have to be right about sin being wrong and bad for me, but I can't help liking it anyway. Please get me to where I can stop sinning and follow You." After a couple hours, when I felt better, I ran away from these people.
It took me about the next 10 days to go around to all my friends and all of them rejected me for whatever reasons. With nowhere to turn, all alone one day, Jesus convicted me of sin. I was bored and decided to figure out why and what to do about it so I began pacing back and forth. Things I thought were beautiful when I'd started now had me enslaved. It was to be 2 1/2 months before I became aware that I'd had a vision; but, the tears flowed and I began sobbing when I realized I'd kicked the Son of God out of my life. In a strong visual thought I saw Jesus on the cross and knew it meant I was forgiven. I thanked Him and asked Him to come into me. I remember exactly where I was in the room and how the late sunlight fell golden on the wall before me when He entered into me. I said, "God is in this place. God is in this place." I felt so very amazingly clean for many weeks, like a gunk clogged steel pipe that had been so thoroughly flushed clean it was empty and stainless.
The next day, singing, I determined to follow Him no matter what. If I fell down, rather than give up and go back into sin as I'd done in the past, I'd get up again and keep going on. He'd started with me and I was going to find out what it meant to be His disciple.
The third day, bored again, I determined to seek God. He'd met me before. And I entered so into His presence it was as if I was drunk and it was difficult to get up off the floor. I prayed in tongues for hours until I was hoarse.
Right away I began to read the Bible, something it had never occurred to me to do except once for a couple days when I was about 7. Then I forgot it after the prologue to John's gospel. I like to say, "When Jesus came into my life I lost my "hippie" friends. Then, when I read the Bible, because I kept on reading it, I lost my Christian friends." I began reading in Matthew. I got no farther than chapter 6 and discovered something different than what I'd ever heard. Jesus promised to reward secret prayer, fasting and giving. I knew Jesus keeps His promises. Here was something I could do.
In the next few years I entered into the heavenlies. I saw the lake of fire. I had many teaching and prophetic dreams and visions. God spoke to me many times. People were healed when I prayed for them. I experienced miracles. God opened my eyes to see into the heavenlies, to see angels and demons and...do you realize it is literally true that, in the light of God, our sins stain our spirits red like scarlet or crimson? Everything that people say is spirit. Their mouths, all that I've seen, are unclean with varied black, gray and reddish stains except when they're praying in tongues and sometimes when prophesying. God even lifted up the water in front of me and there was dry ground where it had been, saying to me, "With God, all things are possible."
For 4 1/2 years, not because I had to, but by choice I read nothing but the Bible and sometimes regularly as much as 14 chapters a day. I'd stand and run in place to not fall asleep in order to read God's word.
Between 5 to 7 years after such an explosive conversion experience, repeatedly jobless, homeless, God not seeming to answer, back in sexual temptation that had been removed from me for those years, I felt like I had before He entered my life. Do you realize how few churches offer any help for jobless and homeless persons? Yet what was to be done with the Old Testament tithe after it was collected was 25 to 33 % for the poor. Though unaware of it at the time, (trying to find what was wrong with me rather than what was right with God) I believe that the simplest explanation was He meant me to learn His ways and how He does what He had done to me. But, that is another story.
It seems I was a bit of a scandal to some of my Pentecostal family. For years I couldn't understand my dad (who was a pastor on the other side of the country) asking me: "Who're you with?" I just so much saw the the body of Christ as only one, though of much variety and as having entered in varying degrees into God.
In the early 70's, the first few years of my walk with God, I went to a different church every night of the week except Monday: Tuesday was an independent community of several families who lived in a large facility where they had meetings. They brought to me a deeper understanding of Scripture and some of it's allegories. Wednesday was Salvation Army for a while, then a woman preacher that used long sentences like Paul in the beginning of Ephesians. Roman Catholic Charismatics were on Thursday, where there was free and spontaneous participation from as many as 750 people, musical worship on Friday; Saturday was a hall where one man held forth preaching several hours every night of the week. Sunday was at a Presbyterian Church with a Methodist pastor who was a very studied and careful teacher and Sunday night was a mostly Negro congregation where I could get over my prejudice and we could dance and sing and pray with all our might. I could see Jesus in many people who disagreed with each other on many different doctrines. What was I to think or do? Certainly I continued to uphold truth as indispensable, something that had to make an important difference. It's God's express will to make it known to us. We are partkers of the Spirit of Truth. Yet certain ideas must be of lesser importance for God to leave them uncorrected while relating to us person to person.
Often I held hands in a circle of all sorts of people who came from or were still in about every kind of Christian Church. I held my chest out and my chin up, proudly singing with a booming voice, "We are one in the Spirit..." The end of the chorus, "and we pray that our unity may one day be restored," was ignored as a minor irritation since I was sure we were already one. The phrase was just tacked on by carnal minds trying to restructure institutions of men rather than walk after the Spirit. However inadequate my view was, I still believe it's right as far as it goes. I recognized many intimately involved with a non-human entity, a religious system in their minds where only God should be. "No man can serve two masters," is Jesus's assessment. I believe this is the whoredom of Mystical Babylon. Rather than mankind as bride to Christ, it is really men submitting to other men who believe this way. This releases the same perversions in the carnal realm. Also, if I joined one church, as some (without scriptural warrant) said I must do, it would be the same as repudiating the others. Not wanting to sectarianize yet willing and able to submit to other men I asked God about it. His answer showed me I had been baptized into His body when I was baptized into Christ. My good and great Shepherd is Jesus. And yes, He's in many people besides me.
Back then I tended to judge everybody, though I accepted a Biblical doctrine of unity of the Spirit and even experienced it in truth. It was quite a battle to come into the "no condemnation" realm. Now, if I discern Jesus in someone else, we have whatever God grants. If I don't recognize Jesus it doesn't mean He's not there. He's either slain or risen in every human being. Now I initially take at face value anyone as a "Christian" if they say so, regardless of affiliation with any part of Institutional Christianity or not. After all, we're justified not by what God does in us, but by what he has done in Christ, reconciling the entire world to Himself. (2 Corinthians 5: 16-19) People belong to God whether they recognize it or not. For me the big change from those days is now I value much less unity with other men compared to honoring God. Nevertheless, I'm "...endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit...until we come to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God..." (Ephesians 4:3 and 13)
Until God brought me into so much more understanding about the Church a few years ago, one thing I held for many years was that God's purpose was to make us, not just me, but us in His Image and Likeness. "Till we all come...unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." (Eph 4:13) Each of us who have Jesus in us have all He is and does as potential to develop. This purpose before me as a child of God and as a standard of what we who are the many membered man (1 Cor 12:12) should be producing in our meetings made me realize something was radically wrong with Institutional Christianity as well as almost all independent churches. Nobody but the man on stage could function. That is like someone in bed with a man and his wife, telling the wife that she has to go through him to love her husband. How do you expect the Divine Bridegroom to respond to that? None of us were developing anything in their "services." Be hearers only, not doers of the word is their tradition. There was no corporate "fulness of Christ." Nobody, certainly none of the audience was expected to "walk as He walked," or even pursue that goal; absolutely, not in the meetings. We're led of the Spirit...until we come to church. It's simply unbearable! Like trying to give birth with your legs tied together!
This was only one area of difference that has been developing between me and whatever they are, those other people that are supposed to have Jesus in them. What will God grant us to do?
---James Rohde