God Rejoices in Your Yes
Testimony by Wes Hall
Organization: Gospel Forum Church
Position: Pastor and Bible School Director
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
I grew up in England in a Christian family.
My father was a farmer who went into full-time ministry when I was 6 months old. He is an evangelist. He was part of the overspill of the 1970s Revival that became known as the Jesus People Movement. That outpouring touched the United States, had massive impact there, and then leaped over to Europe with many young people getting saved. My dad got saved, filled with the Spirit, and started preaching the Gospel almost every weekend. Then he was offered a position as a youth minister and felt the call of God. He sold our successful family farm and went into full-time ministry. My dad’s life was marked by, “There must be more.” That was always his cry, as he pushed for more of God. I grew up with that same sense of holy dissatisfaction.
I wanted to experience more of God, not just go to church on Sundays. I wanted to see the power, the signs, the wonders, and the revivals I had read about in history and in the Book of Acts. That said, it was not always easy growing up in a ministry family. If the Lord wanted me in ministry, He would have to make it very clear. I studied law and worked in a large, global corporate law firm in London for a number of years. During the day I was a corporate lawyer, but in my free time I was leading worship and the Lord was drawing my heart into the place of prayer. My strong passion was revival, and every revival I studied was birthed out of sustained corporate prayer.
I was searching for a place to really learn how to pray when I discovered Mike Bickle and the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOPKC). They were holding prayer meetings three times a day in their church throughout the 1980s and 1990s and experiencing the supernatural. In 1999, they started IHOPKC with prayer and worship 24/7, which was pretty uncommon back then. I remember thinking, If there is a place on the earth doing 24/7 prayer, there is going to be revival. I wanted to learn from them. I asked the Lord if I could go and He said no. About a year later, in 2000, the Lord spoke to me in a very supernatural way and said, “I want you to go to Kansas City.” At that time, I didn’t want to go anymore, but I felt it strongly from the Lord.
I joined a group of about forty young people who were praying night and day in a little trailer. The only jobs were leading worship or leading prayer. People know IHOPKC today as a large international prayer ministry, but at that time most of the prayer meetings were just two people in a room playing guitar and praying. Our mission and rallying cry were to keep the fire on the altar. We learned this from Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians, one of the longest 24/7 prayer and missions movements during the 1700s in Germany.
Over time, the ministry grew. I helped to establish and build the Bible school, which, while I was there, grew to 700 full-time students. It was a school of ministry with a curriculum based on prayer. But my passion was not to build a Bible school, my passion was for revival. In 2009, we experienced just that. Holy Spirit visited our community in a profound way, starting in one of my classes in November 2009. We were meeting every night, six hours a night, in a community revival. Over ten months, we saw 8,000 written testimonies of healing, 2,000 people baptized, and people equipped with boldness to preach the Gospel at a new level. There were also 195 nations watching on live stream.
How To Tell When It Is The Right Time To React To What God Is Showing You
Revelation 3:7-8 (New International Version) says, “…What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut….” A lot of people go around knocking on the doors and trying to push the doors open because they have a calling. That may be true, God might have showed you things that you are called to do, but we don’t always know the exact timing for the fulfillment of those words. I personally advise waiting for God to open the door for you. If God is speaking something to you, then He is the going to open the right door at the right time.
If you push your way through a door that isn’t open yet, you have to defend that open door. Bill Johnson has a great way of phrasing this, “Whatever you gain through self-promotion, you’ll have to sustain through self-promotion. When our promotion comes from God, He sustains it.” The way you get there is the way you’ll stay there. If you force your way through, you live out of a place of war rather than a place of rest. It is better to wage war with your promises in the place of prayer and wait for God to make a way. Just stay faithful to what God has given you in the season you are in.
What Does Unity Look Like in the Body of Christ?
Unity looks like relationship. It looks like deep relationship. What does unity look like in a family? It is not the family all dressed up nice on a Sunday morning, sitting in the front row together. There must be genuine love and relationship. The standard of unity is John 17:11— that they would be one as Jesus and the Father are one, in family. It’s common purpose. It’s common destiny. It’s not high fives once a year when we were all sitting in a room together, but then we go and do our own thing.
Unity is when we love one another deeply, we honor one another, and we fight for one another. It is the koinonia (Greek for communion or fellowship) of the New Testament: you belong to me, I belong to you, and therefore my calling is to fight for your destiny even when your calling and destiny are different from mine. It’s not just being part of the same church or using others to fulfill our own dream. I see God is moving in this area, building deep relationships across boundaries, across denominations. We need to know one another, and love one another, and trust one another more. We need to move from saying we have unity to actually living unity.
