How to Pray the Scriptures and Experience Jesus Personally

Then I remembered something. I forgot to tell you this. I told you that it was my wife who sometimes reads to me, but I forgot to tell you how that got started. Do you know how it got started? It started with periods of time in my life when I was so depressed. I would have resigned if I had ever found a place to resign. I would have quit or walked out, I was below the bottom. I had to reach five feet to get to the bottom. I was below the bottom rung. I was below anything you could find. Just gone, broken, crushed, weeping, defeated, and my wife just read to me. The Lord stirred my heart and my spirit, and I just began to gush out prayers. When I would finish, and be very, very still and totally spent, she’d begin again, and then I would begin again. That’s how I learned to listen to my wife read the scripture to me and other things. Now, do you recognize that that cannot be patented? That can’t be explained, and that can’t be taught. But it can be had.

Well, what can you do? I want you to know that if you have had a real, deep, abiding experience with the Lord and have found something that worked, I would want you to tell me and explain it to me. I would want to sit down with you, and I have something to tell you that will knock you off your foundations. It was an overwhelming experience, but I cannot give it to you. You’re going to have to find it all on your own. But if you seek, you’ll find. I want to come back and say again about reading the scripture: I want to be really practical. When I have talked to brothers about dealing with the scriptures, I’ve usually sat down with three brothers, one, two, three, and myself, four. We take a passage, and I say to the brothers, “Now you’re going to start, and you’re going to be next, and you’re going to be next, and I’m going to be next. We all agree, and the brother begins, and it’s pretty tinny. It’s pretty tinny. The next brother. It’s tinny. And the next brother, it’s tinny. Maybe even me, it’s tinny, and we start again. We go around, and about the fifth time around, it’s not tinny anymore. Somewhere along the line, we get to the Lord.

Now, other times I’ve sat down with four brothers, and a brother, you know, does something, but maybe he prays two words over his verse. I don’t know what happens, but the next brother gets confused. He doesn’t take that verse. He goes somewhere else. Then this brother breaks in and prays. That brother breaks in and prays. I pray, and we’re sitting, waiting for that brother to come to his verse, and nothing happens. We sit, and we sit, and we sit, and we sit, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, and that brother hadn’t done his part.  These two brothers don’t have the simple Yankee initiative to take that verse and do something with it, and if they do, this brother now says…something’s going on in his mind. What it is, I don’t know, but when he sees someone else take his verse, he either gets his feelings hurt or something, he still won’t say anything, and the whole thing bogs down.

I want to suggest that you do a little experimenting with the scripture, but that all four of you take an old pirate oath. You’re going to carry your end of the log. Continue with this until something comes out in your life. You’ll need some help. That is one way to pray this with the scriptures. It is not the only way; it is one way. Another way is two of you. Another way is for you to simply read a scripture, then turn it to prayer. Read a scripture, turn it to prayer. Read a scripture, turn it to prayer. There is another way. You don’t read the scripture at all, and frankly, brothers, this is what I usually do when I’m alone. I do not read it at all. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I think you can catch on. I look straight at the scripture, and as I go along. I pray, without first reading that verse.

Brothers, I don’t get very far, although it may take me a while to even get to a verse or two, because I’m not going anywhere fast. I’m not here to learn or study. I am there to absorb. As I told you, there is yet another way: have someone else read you the scripture, and you do not even look at it. You need a good reader. Pick on my wife. There are two or three other sisters. I’ve forgotten now who they are, but I’m sure there are many more than that, and a few with whom I have prayed. It’s just a glorious thing to sit there and have the scripture read to you, but maybe that’s postgraduate. Maybe you can’t handle that, but I do want you to know two things, and I wish you would listen to this.

I don’t know what holds my life up, but whatever the foundation is under my life, my experience with scripture is one of the largest pillars holding my life up, and it will be 40 years from now. If I had to choose between speaking in tongues and taking the scripture to the Lord, I would, without question, take the scripture. What else can I say to contrast? I don’t know. It is…I’m talking about any particular given morning. I would forgo…I would forego my mornings in the scripture to raise a dead man. But if I had to choose between the two on a morning-to-morning basis, there’d just be a lot of people who’d stay dead. Because otherwise, I’m afraid the dead would be raising the dead. My heart must stay the Lord’s.

Then what can I say to the brothers in Goleta, California? I can say that, on this sheet of paper, which we’re all carrying around now, there are verses of Scripture. I’m a little concerned that some of you may have just boiled down to the place of reading passages of Scripture to one another. That’s no good. You did that in Sunday school. You know, you open it, read it to one, then close it, and you’ll pray. That was never my intention when I said, ‘reading the scripture to one another.’ It’s far different from that; it’s an encounter with the Lord. How will you deal with the scripture? I don’t know. But I can tell you this. There is a way… There is a way that will shake your whole being.

Now I just got one other thing to say, and this is again the sounding of a note that will be sounded again and again and again and again among us. We are not having morning devotionals. Here’s what a morning devotional is. I get up in the morning, I go to a brother’s home, and spiritually, I’m about here. We get together, and we begin something, and in the process of a moment or two, we move to about here. We go for about 45 minutes to an hour, then stop. We praise the Lord and say goodbye. Now that’s a morning devotional.

Brothers, if that’s all, if that’s as far as we in Isla Vista, California, are going to go, I am for taking the chairs we have and dumping them in the Pacific. Taking our three chairs, mimeograph machines, pouring gasoline on them, burning them, and taking our lamps, giving them to the poor, and taking our sofas and putting them on the junkyard heap. What else is there? Anything else? The podium…we’ll make firewood out of it, and all of us will go back to where we came from. That is not my fault, not my intention, and certainly not what God wants. That is pure religion, and if it’s not, it’ll become that.

My brother and my sister, my Lord, if my Lord didn’t live, I would never have dared to introduce to you the things that have been introduced in the last two months. I am gambling that you, the brothers and sisters in Galeto, can have experiences with Jesus Christ that are better, absolutely shattering. That you can come out of morning encounters with the Lord. torn to shreds by the presence of His Life. Shaken, filled with glory, weeping, or shouting, or crying, or something, but somewhere in that morning time, you have met, encountered, known, the living God.

I know one thing, that when you get to that plane, you can’t level off. Something inside you has got to crumble, that natural human resistance to emotion, or the loss of clear consciousness, or what am I trying to say, I don’t know, but somewhere there before the Lord, there’s got to be a yielding, a crumbling, and then a disappearing right into Him. Every day, Gene? I don’t know how to answer that question. Alright, praise God, for right now, yes. Later, God gives postgraduate experiences, but after postgraduate experiences, there are experiences beyond that. And sometimes you get right back where you started. I will tell you this, that He will not always be so real, because He will not allow you to fall in love with an experience. Phil, your words are wise. For right now, yes, it is possible. It’s possible, and it is not only possible, but it can also be more or less normal. I’m here tonight to put you under the pile.

Your Lord has been known, and you can know Him.