Another
Coffee Break:
An Appointment With God
August 7, 2015
Let's shift gears again today
and talk about something that many of you have had, and many of you are about
to have -- in ways you can't even imagine -- an appointment with God!
We all know about making appointments, and we all
know about the appointment man has with death -- minus appropriating the fact
that Jesus kept our appointment -- but have you ever thought about making an
appointment to die – or even making other kinds of appointments with the Lord?
Let me share with you a few -- some of which I've
shared in time past. I was thinking back
to the first time I ever heard of someone making an appointment with God.
Dory and Jenny Pieters were two sisters who married
two brothers, both of whom were medical doctors. Between them, they had five daughters, Laura,
Alida, Twila, Terry and Patty. You never
met such a bunch of beauties in your whole life.
They have been one of the closest-knit families
you’ve ever seen. That said, the day
came when Dory and Jenny were exposed to the Gospel and made a decision to
accept Jesus Christ into their lives.
The five girls followed suit.
Laura was hardly bigger than a minute when she accepted Jesus Christ,
and Terry and Patty were in their early teens.
Twila was just behind Terry, and Alida was behind Twila by a couple of
years or so.
It wasn’t very long after the ladies and daughters
accepted Jesus Christ that both brothers/husbands decided they didn’t want any
part of their families’ relationship with the Lord; and both brothers divorced
both sisters at the same time. It was a
traumatic experience for the two sisters, and their daughters, and because all
of them had wonderful singing voices and had been singing together as a family,
their music became an outlet for them to deal with the emotional upheaval.
Dory, Jenny & girls all traveled as The Singing
Stairsteps. Not too long after the
divorces, songwriter, musician and choral leader, Audrey Mieir, introduced me
to them, and in the months that followed (I was Minister of Youth at Bethel
Union Church in Duarte, California at the time) I bought a home right across
the street from Dory and Jenny. We had a
really musical neighborhood in those days.
One of my friends was the Gospel singer, musician,
and recording artist, Andrae Crouch. He
would come over to our house and bang away on our old grand piano. It didn’t take long for the music to waft its
way across the street. Between Andrae’s
piano playing and singing, my guitar picking and singing, and the Singing
Stairsteps, we had ourselves one noisy neighborhood – musically, that is. It was wonderful!
Dory and Jenny closed off their garage and turned
it into a recreation room where the neighborhood kids could gather every
morning before going to school. I led
these kids in morning devotions before they left for school. Of course, for them to have the devotions,
they had to miss the school bus, so we used three different station wagons or
vans to ferry the kids off to their respective schools after reading and
praying with each of them. Our music was
a big attraction, and it didn’t take long before we had as many as thirty kids
gathering in that converted garage each morning for devotions.
Not long after the divorces, Dory and Jenny began
to realize that there had to be a whole lot more in their lives in the way of
spiritual growth that needed to take place.
There was a hunger for the presence of the Lord that knew no
bounds. In the midst of their travels,
they were asked to come to San Diego and sing in a Pentecostal church. It was the first time they had ever been
exposed to the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
What they saw and heard the night they sang in that church magnified the
spiritual hunger beyond all bounds.
Afterwards, they talked about the Holy Spirit among
themselves as a family and decided this “baptism” was something they should
have. Dory got on the phone as soon as
they got home that night and called the pastor of that San Diego church. “Brother, we would like to make an
appointment with you to receive the Holy Spirit.” The pastor was both stunned and amused. “You what?
You want to make an appointment…to receive the baptism of the Holy
Spirit?” Dory assured him that she was
serious and knew what she was talking about.
She told him they had another singing engagement in San Diego later that
same week.
“If it’s all right with you,” she said, “we’d like
to meet together in your office next Tuesday afternoon at 2:30. You can lay hands on each one of us, and we
will receive the Holy Spirit.”
Wow! This is novel! Never heard of anything like this. Making an appointment with God. This ought to be different. “OK. Sure.
I’ll expect you next Tuesday afternoon.
2:30.”
Dory, Jenny, and girls all showed up on
schedule. The pastor laid his hands on
each one of them, and each of them in succession received the baptism of Holy
Spirit with the accompanying evidence of speaking in tongues. That initial experience with Holy Spirit
unleashed a flow of new music and a new dimension in their walk with the Lord
in the weeks and months that followed.
Their experience with Holy Spirit inspired Dory and Jenny to write a new
song (lots of them, actually), and they called me up one afternoon and asked me
to come over and listen to it.
They began singing, “That magic touch….that changed
my life one day….That magic touch ….that kept my feet from going astray…” And on and on the song went. Problem was, it was too slow. So I said to them, “Hang on, girls. Let me get my guitar. Let’s see if we can put a little life in this
song.” I ran across the street and
picked up my guitar and came back over.
They started singing it again, and this time I put a Latin beat to the
song. The new, up-tempoed song became a
staple in their repertoire, and I recorded a guitar track that they could take
with them in their travels.
Jump ahead a few years to our CBN years in
Fairbanks.
Besides serving as Senior Pastor of the House of
Praise and President of CBN-Alaska, Inc., I also served as an advisor to the
area board for Women’s Aglow International.
The Women’s Aglow board decided to have a ladies’ retreat at Chena Hot
Springs. As a pastor and an advisor,
they wanted my participation in the retreat, and I was able to help out in the
music of the retreat as well.
As the weekend retreat neared, two ladies
approached me and asked if they could make an appointment with me to be
baptized in water at Chena Hot Springs.
Not a bad idea in Fairbanks, Alaska, if you know what I mean. I contacted the resort management and made
arrangements to have the use of their largest pool (80-degree water) for the
Saturday afternoon. 3:00 PM was the
appointed time for the water baptism, and the two ladies in question showed up
for their appointment. So did about 20
others including two of the ladies’ husbands.
I’d never done water baptisms by appointment
before, but I wasn’t disappointed. Those
folks came up out of the water drenched in the presence of the Lord. The shine on their faces was a whole lot more
than water-shine! Some of them came up
out of the water speaking in tongues.
They got baptized in the Holy Spirit while they were being baptized in
water.
Let me talk about a different kind of appointment,
now.
A Canadian pastor and prophetic teacher who had a
great influence on me during the Charismatic Renewal of the 1960’s, 1970’s and
1980’s was a fellow by the name of Ern Baxter.
At one time Pastor of Canada’s largest church in Surrey, British
Columbia, Ern had a gift for putting the Gospel into terms common folks could
identify with -- a gift honed during his years of traveling and ministering
with William Branham.
He attributed much of his growth in the Lord, and
his success as a pastor to his mother whom he sometimes called “a tough old
bird” – a woman who absolutely knew her place in the Kingdom of God. When Mrs. Baxter reached her eighties (and I
forget the actual year this happened), she called Ern and the rest of her
family together and announced that she had made an appointment to meet the
Lord. The family was puzzled by her
phraseology because they knew that she already knew the Lord.
“No,” she explained, “I’ve made an appointment to
die. I’ve told the Lord I’m ready, and
He is taking me home to be with Him.”
Mrs. Baxter was such an integral part of the family’s life that Ern
objected. She pooh-poohed his objections
and gave him instructions on what to do with certain family items and the
disposition of her estate. She told Ern
that he and his wife, Ruth, were to meet her on a certain day at a certain
time. (Sorry, but I’ve forgotten the day
and time.)
Sure enough, Ern and Ruth showed up at Mrs.
Baxter’s house on the appointed day. She
had a huge smile on her face. She was
sitting in her old rocking chair, rocking back and forth. There was nothing weak or sickly about her or
her countenance that day. But she’d made
her appointment, and she intended to keep it.
After some last-minute instructions to Ern concerning his preaching, she
pulled her feet up off the floor onto the rocker extensions, laid her head back
in the chair, and was gone. Just like
that! She had made her appointment with
the Lord, and both of them kept it. She
chose the moment to exit this world and surrender her spirit to the Lord.
My dad’s sister and our beloved aunt, Avis Daniel,
was just about like that. The only
difference was that she was not in good health, having been suffering with
congestive heart failure.
Della was on the road traveling in Mississippi,
Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina doing jewelry shows, and had been keeping
in contact with Auntie A. (That was what
we called her.) Nearing the end of her
run just prior to the Christmas season in mid-November 2003, she called Auntie
A and told her that she was going to fly to Santa Clara (California) and pick
her up, and bring her to south Texas to be with us. Auntie A fussed about leaving her two dogs
and cat, and Della told her that we would just bring the pets with her. So she went out and purchased another
portable kennel, and picked up some supplies she thought she’d need in Texas.
In those days, I was on the phone nearly every day
with Auntie A, checking up on her, making sure everything was OK, and that her
needs were being tended to. First week
of December, she went through some pretty painful bouts and had difficulty
breathing.
During that week, I was pretty busy campaigning (in
my run for Congress), and missed a few days of talking on the phone. On Sunday, she called me.
“Reg, I’ve decided that it’s time to go home. There really isn’t any reason for me to come
to Texas. There’s nothing that I need to
do down there, and I’ve finished everything the Lord has instructed me to
do. I’m done. I want to go home this week.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “NOOOO, Auntie A! Noooo!
We’re not ready to let you go, yet.
There’s plenty for you to do.”
Her voice, though weakened by the physical problems, was firm. “No, Honey,” she said. “It’s time for me to go. I’m going to get a few things in order this
week, and I don’t want you praying against me.
Don’t you go praying for the Lord to keep me here. I’m done, and I’m going home.”
She meant it, too.
Come Friday night, she gathered herself together, combed her hair, fixed
herself up, set out some papers of importance and things she thought we ought
to know about, went to bed, pulled the covers neatly up to her chin, folded
them back, crossed her arms and went to sleep with a smile on her face. She’d made her appointment with the Lord, and
kept it. That’s how the neighbor found
her the next morning when she came over to check on her.
I’ve got lots of these kinds of stories – folks
who’ve made appointments to get saved, folks who’ve made appointments to be
baptized in water, folks who’ve made appointments to be healed, folks who’ve
made appointments to receive the Holy Spirit, and – of course – folks who’ve
made appointments to go home to be with the Lord.
It’s a funny thing about these kinds of
appointments. Something happens in a
person. Call it faith. It becomes a certainty between them and the
Lord Jesus Christ. No matter what the
appointment is for, there is both faith and a determination that both ends are
keeping that appointment.
One last story for today involves a woman (I’ll
call her Elsa, for the sake of this story) in Anchorage who was dying of
cancer. The doctors had given her up,
and – sadly – so had her husband. He was
just waiting for her to die. Funny
thing, though. She hadn’t given up on
the Lord. Neither had her two young
sons, whose faith was bursting at the seams.
Elsa called me up one day and asked if Della and I would come over and
lay hands on her. “I want to make an
appointment with the Lord for my healing,” she said. “I know God isn’t finished with me….not yet,
anyway!”
The appointment was made for the following evening
at 7:00PM.
Della and I went over as promised and met with her,
her husband and her two sons at 7:00 PM.
You know how it is with folks who are dying with cancer. Their faces are sunken in, the color of their
skin is almost white, and they look like death warmed over. That was the way Elsa looked when we arrived.
I like appointments! Especially when those appointments are made with
the Lord! There is a release of faith
that’s almost indescribable. To borrow a
phrase I used to hear Oral Roberts use 30 or 40 years ago, when you touch
someone who’s made an appointment with Jesus Christ, that touch becomes “a
point of contact” between them and the Lord.
When the Lord touches you, look out!
Things are going to happen!
They did, too, for Elsa! When we left her later that evening, her
sunken cheeks were filling out, the color had returned to her face, and it was
obvious that the Lord had kept Elsa’s appointment with Him. Della and I moved from Anchorage not too long
thereafter, but we stayed in contact with Elsa for at least a couple of
years. For a woman who was supposed to
have been dead from cancer, she was very much alive.
If you've never made an appointment with God to
receive your healing, or your deliverance, or the baptism in and of Holy
Spirit, now's the time to do it! An
adventure awaits you, the likes of which you can't even begin to imagine! See you next week.
I remind those of you in need of ministry that our Healing Prayer Call
takes place on Mondays at 7:00 PM Eastern (4:00 PM Pacific). Again, the number
to call for healing is (805) 399-1000.
Then enter the access code: 124763#.
We also want to alert you to the fact that come September 14th, our
prayer call number is going to change.
Our current conference line has experienced drop-outs and periodic audio
quality issues, so this is needed! We
will keep you apprised of the new number in the days ahead.
At the same time, in case you are missing out on real fellowship in an
environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday worship gatherings are available by
conference call – usually at about 10:45AM Pacific. That conference number is (559) 726-1300, and
the access code is 308640#. We hope to
make these gatherings available by Skype or Talk Fusion before long. If you miss the live call, you can dial (559)
726-1399, enter the same access code and listen in later.
Blessings
on you!
Regner
Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES
CAPENER MINISTRIES
RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Sunnyside, Washington 98944
Sunnyside, Washington 98944
Email Contact: Admin@RiverWorshipCenter.org
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