Minister to Minister Part 2 – Gene’s testimony

Oh, I got an opportunity. Wait a minute. I’m ahead of myself. Oh, am I ahead of myself. At the conference, I was praying on my knees, and Beta was in the back room. Well, during that conference, I picked up a disease. It’s got a name about that long. It’s called disseminated histoplasmosis. Its distinctive feature is that it is more deadly than cancer, more destructive than cancer. And I am told that at that time, only one out of every 100 people who contracted it survived. There’s no way to tell you how destructive that disease is to the human body. But a young, powerful, fiery evangelist got his prayers answered in ways he didn’t expect to.

My wife drove me home in my evangelist big car. She came all the way to the East Coast, picked me up, and drove me home. I was coughing and spitting. I made a big mistake in the sovereignty of God. I was home for a few days, and the doctor said, “It looks like pneumonia.” I decided to go to another conference, and then it hit me in its totality. I was a-looking for brothers, I was a-looking.

I started running a fever, and I ran a fever for 10 days. I was on the West Coast now, and it was evident that I was desperately ill. I was put on an airplane, and when I got on that airplane, I could walk, but I was carried off of it about six hours later when we landed in Dallas. I was carried off of that airplane and put on a little four-seater and flown from Dallas to Tyler and taken straight to the hospital and I did not get out of bed for one year and my disease was never diagnosed, and if it had have been, it wouldn’t have done any good because there’s no known cure for it. This is a fungus gone wild in the body that does exactly the same thing a cell gone wild in the body does.  And I think I’m going to tell you tonight exactly what happened to me, I got good reason tonight for telling you.

I believe my wife will verify that this is something I have never allowed to be discussed in my life. It enters the lungs through dust. The body, most human bodies, can throw it off. Mine must have been very down that week. It passed the lungs and entered the bloodstream, and from the bloodstream, it enters the lymphatic system, which is a large part of you, one of the largest parts of you there is, destroys the lymphatic system, which in turn destroys the one major thing that gives nutrition to your body. It also follows the glandular system and, in my case, left my liver scarred. My pancreas enlarged with the worst case of low blood sugar you ever heard of in the world. My adrenals were virtually nonfunctioning, my pituitary damaged, you can only get it from dust, so don’t be afraid to get around me. It cannot be gotten any other way, and the dust has to be has to come from droppings of a pigeon. That’s why it’s called a “Histo” disease; it comes from animals.

I thought that at the end of the year I was well. I weighed about 210 lbs. At least I thought I could get up, and I had the opportunity to go to the Far East, and I got out of bed by grit, by gum, and by golly, and I went to the Far East. Oh boy, this is hurting just talking about it. But brothers, it was worth the trip because I saw something that was to forever change my life. I may have seen the only genuine organic expression of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ on this planet. And I want to tell you this story because this story is pivotal to my life.

In reading the New Testament, I came to one obvious conclusion that is there again and again and again. One of them being there ain’t no such thing as a pastor there, not the way we call all of it. Another one is that churches were started by church planters and consistently abandoned without leadership.

Now, the word abandon is too strong, but let me use it for a moment. In every case of the five or six or seven known stages of the church in the New Testament, without an exception, in every case when a cluster of churches were raised up, they were left by those who raised up the church, and they were left without elders, left without leaders, left without direction, left without anything. Which mesmerized me as I began to ask this simple question. What in the name of heaven had been preached to them to allow them to survive without elders, gifts, without the church planters in a hostile world, in most cases illiterate, and in virtually all cases, without Scripture.

Some kind of message being preached, some kind of experience being had, some kind of building being done. And I believe that a church could be raised up and left, and that God’s people could and would naturally meet under the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ in their meetings, and that those meetings would be as rich, if not richer, than anything on this earth today. I believe that, and that’s without you present. Now, you’ve got to think about that a minute because that gets rough, brother. That really gets rough, that means you ain’t there.

Now, you think about the implications of that and you think of what kind of a message must have been preached and what kind of men must have been and how they must have known God in order to do this and how they must have been able to give that Lord and to give those people practical help and something that happened to those people in their experience of body and community and church or whatever you call it. I believe it was possible; those church planters came back, and years later, there were elders, but in the beginning, there were no leaders at all, and the churches survived.

Well, I had heard about it, and no one had seen it, but somebody had received a letter from a group of Christians in a place called Toyama, Japan, on the east side of Japan, who had been meeting for seven years without any human direction. And they had written this particular group of people, and those people had one Chinese Christian there in the far east who spoke Japanese, who was going there, and I was going with them, and I went, and I crossed Japan on one of those trains, and I came to Toyama, and I stepped off in heaven.

Now here’s their story. It was just perfect. They had been on a campus, and a bunch of Christians, white men, missionaries, moved in there and led them to the Lord. Had been with them just a few weeks, and all the missionaries spoke in tongues, thought they had been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and had been called to go back to America and turn the world upside down, and they walked up and left their little sheep, and those little sheep were doomed to die.

This little group of sheep found out there was a conference somewhere in the far east, and they raised enough money to send two of their little college students. These kids were all about 21, at this conference that lasted, you know how long that conference lasted? Ask me how long that conference lasted. How long did that conference last? Six months. Six days a week, three meetings per day, and these poor Japanese sat back there, took notes, took notes all day long, took notes on stuff that those people who were preaching didn’t practice and didn’t believe, but it was all perfect, what they were hearing, and they went back to their little group of about 25 or 30, and they taught it to these people that it was possible for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ to live under His headship.