After I received the baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1974, everything changed. Though I had served God, I had not led anyone to a personal relationship with Jesus. But as a product of the Jesus movement, I was used by God to win hundreds of souls and saw many awesome healings. The next 10 years were great.
The decade of my life after that was a wilderness. I thought God had lifted His hand off my life. Looking back, I can see that wasn’t true. But I simply didn’t know how to transition from a corporate move of God to personally staying filled with the Holy Spirit.
While working on my doctoral degree at Fuller Seminary, I took John Wimber’s now infamous class, "Signs, Wonders and Church Growth." Instead of receiving his insights on the depths of being filled with the Spirit, I had a cavalier attitude of "been there, done that."
In fact, I was consumed with a desire to quit ministry after the hardest year of my life in 1993. I was so depressed, I had to exercise my faith to move from depression to discouragement.