THE LORD PROMISED to pour out His Spirit upon all flesh: young men and old, servants and handmaids (Joel 2; Acts 2). This clearly is a prophecy of an outpouring, wide and general in its scope. According to Peter, it began on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). Efforts to limit this to the twelve apostles or a chosen few, cheats some from receiving what God has freely offered and given to many. It took me years to see this simple truth, but having seen it and embraced it, I too received the promise (Acts 1:4-5).

It was extremely difficult for me to receive this truth, so different from what I had been taught in the Church of Christ, nurtured as I was on one of its most orthodox religious journals, The Firm Foundation, reared in its churches, and trained in its colleges - Harding, Abilene Christian, and George Pepperdine. My father as a boy attended what later became Freed-Hardeman College, which is also a seat of orthodoxy of this very strict religious people.

My Health Was a Serious Handicap

I accepted Christ and was baptized in water at age 14, began to work in the church at once, and began to preach regularly at age 22. I had one serious handicap - my health.

As a child, I had pneumonia several times and chronic cough all winter, every winter. By the time I was 23 this had developed into tuberculosis. I was preaching for the Church of Christ in Casa Grande, Arizona in 1943, when this diagnosis was confirmed by two doctors independent of each other and then by X-rays.

Two elderly sisters (one of them in the congregation I served, and the other a Christian and Missionary Alliance woman) said they would pray for me and I would be all right and be able to continue my ministry. This I did not believe; but they did and it came to pass. I, a doubting preacher, was healed.

Being hard to convince, I made no announcement of these facts until further X-rays and considerable time had passed, but continued my work and my studies without further difficulty, moving from Arizona to Abilene, Texas and then to Los Angeles, California. I was working twelve hours a night, attending college in the forenoon, sleeping in the afternoon, and preaching on Sundays as I had opportunity to do so. Finally, being sure in my own mind that I was healed, I began a serious and prolonged restudy of the Scriptures relative to healing and the work of the Holy Spirit.

From 1945 until the present, I have preached and worked in El Paso, Texas. The last fourteen of these years I have done full time secular work as well as having the responsibilities of a small church. In these fourteen years I have missed only five days due to sickness, and these only one day at a time.

As a result of the healing and my restudy of the Scriptures, plus the prayers of some Pentecostal friends, I began to seek the baptism in the Holy Spirit. This continued for some three years without complete success. I was too full of starch to become free in the Spirit, but I did receive repeatedly very great blessings which I had not known before.

Once in a small prayer meeting a man prophesied that I would receive the Holy Spirit baptism alone in prayer. A few months later I was alone praying and received such an anointing that I felt that my feet hardly touched the ground when I walked. I continued in that state for about three days. It was then perhaps that I would have spoken in other tongues first, had I not had so rigid a background against this that my subconscious mind prevented it. But I felt certain that I had reached a new dimension. A few months later when I was in the chapel alone - trying my best to pray for President Kennedy during one of the crises with Russia that my language changed from English to something I had never spoken before. I continued praying in this new language until the burden was lifted and I was satisfied the prayer was effective, although I didn’t know more than a few words of what was prayed. Since that day (August, 1961) private prayer in other tongues is a part of my daily Christian experience. And I can say with Paul that it edifies me to pray in this manner.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Comforter; and He has been such to me as He entered my life in this new way about the time my small son was killed in an accident. He taught me how to be happy in the midst of sorrow. My wife did not accept the Comforter and her sorrow was almost as tragic as the accident.

Great personal trials and difficulties flooded my life for the next few years, but in it all I felt the presence and joy of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. And in the midst of the trials came also numerous victories, including the miraculous healing of my second son, Stephen (a grade school boy), who had been born with defective vision. The healing has proved permanent, for today he still has normal vision without the aid of glasses. He has not worn any since he was prayed for and anointed with oil, according to James 5:14, in a Sunday evening service when he had just completed second grade.

Jesus has sent the Comforter and He gives the victory as we travel the way of the cross.

A few others of our Church of Christ in downtown El Paso, Texas, likewise have one at a time been baptized in the Holy Spirit. We continue a small church in the inner city, open to all people of all nationalities. I teach school nine months of the year, and continue to preach in El Paso and Juarez, and occasionally in other places. We have had no division over these matters, although a few of our people placed their membership in other churches when these things began to happen. Without changing the outward form of our services very much, the power and glory of God are much more evident, and we are experiencing what previously we had only talked about - worshipping God "in Spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).