My Story

We all experience pivotal moments in our lives. Often times, we are totally unaware of the significance of those moments until much later. September 1, 2013 was one of those life-changing days in my life though I didn’t recognize it at the time. My wife and I were sitting in our home church’s sanctuary like any other Sunday when we heard our pastor recount a bizarre experience he recently had involving brown smoke. I still recall turning toward her in bewilderment and asking her, “Did you hear what he just said?” At the time, I had no idea what my pastor was talking about, but I would come to understand more than a year later.

A couple of weeks later, sitting in the exact same seats on another Sunday morning, our pastor again said something that left us dumbfounded. This time, I made an appointment with an associate pastor to get some answers for what I thought at the time was strange and unusual behavior. Minutes after entering the associate pastor’s office and expressing my self-righteous consternation, he patiently walked over and reached into a half-empty box sitting near his door and pulled out a book entitled “Surprised by the Power of the Spirit”.1 He handed me the book, asked me to read it, and encouraged me to come back if I still had questions. I left his office that day thinking, “Clearly, I wasn’t the first confused visitor he’s had this week!”

My Box

It was only a few days later when I read these words:

“Our environment, our theological traditions, and our teachers have much more to do with what we believe than we realize. In some cases they have much more influence over what we believe than the Bible itself … The majority of Christians believe what they believe because godly and respected teachers told them it was correct.”

J. Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, 1996.

As a man who prided himself on the diligent reading and study of the Bible for nearly 23 years, Deere’s statement greatly offended me. But as I continued to read his story and reflect on my own thinking, I came to realize he was absolutely correct. My theology had been influenced more by the church I was saved and raised up in than what Scripture actually said.

Every one of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, puts God in a box. I know that’s probably offensive, but stay with me. Our understanding of who He is, what He’s like, and how He operates is based on our thinking and experience. Just like Adam and Eve in the garden when they believed the enemy’s lie that God was keeping something good from them (the knowledge of good and evil), we project our own limited and often sinful ideas on what we think about Him. We put God in a box. Our boxes may be different shapes, sizes, and colors, but we all put Him in our own personal boxes where He’s safe and predictable to us. That is, where we are in control of Him!

Though we may have read the following verse hundreds of times, and we probably believe it, we’re easily deceived into ignoring the implications. We act like we don’t believe it.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my [God’s] ways than your [mankind’s] ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” – Isaiah 55:9

One Experience Away

I blew through that first Jack Deere book and immediately bought and read the sequel.2 I went from there to another book and then to another, often getting reading recommendations from trusted counselors in my life. And while I continued to read respected authors, I began to reread what the Bible actually said. I actually became the Berean3 (Acts 17:9) I thought I had always been. I found myself seeing things in Scripture I had totally missed or glossed over for a couple decades. And I found my box getting blown wide open!

All of us are one experience away from our theology getting totally upended. I had once been convinced my old cessationist4 theology was correct, but now found my thinking being transformed by God’s truth in ways I never expected. After all, I had witnessed numerous examples of “Spirit-filled” Christians say and do crazy, foolish things over the twenty years I had been in different churches. But, “Brown Smoke Sunday” started a chain of milestone events that wrecked, or maybe better said, renewed my faith and matured my theology in ways I never anticipated.

My Purpose

God wired me to love reading and teaching. So, when I got challenged, I did what came naturally to me. I poured through books and listened to a host of gifted pastors and teachers about the Holy Spirit, spiritual warfare, healing, the gifts of the Spirit, demonization, deliverance, and hearing God. I sought after and learned from a variety of faithful men and women who simply knew more than I did, and I finally began to hear the voice of God that had always been there.

That chain of events resulted in the series of discipleship courses found on this site.

God has taught me that this amazing life Jesus died to give us isn’t for when we die and go to be with Him in Heaven, but that a Kingdom Life is available to us right here and right now. The Apostle Paul put it this way:

12 Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 3:12-14

To gain that life – to apprehend it, each of us must expose and remove a lifetime’s worth of lies and deceptions of the enemy and fully embrace Biblical truth.

Immediately following Pentecost, the apostles conducted the very first altar call. Luke writes that the Pharisees and Sadducees were more than a bit upset and threw the apostles in prison as a result.

19 But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, 20 “Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.” – Acts 5:19-20

Since that pivotal Sunday in 2013, I’ve experienced the joy of escaping a prison of incomplete theology and a life without the Holy Spirit’s power and presence. My purpose in writing these courses is simple – to help my brothers and sisters in Christ fully live the life, a Kingdom Life, that Jesus died to give us. If you get offended along the way, take it in stride. Allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you … He will direct your steps.

May God richly bless you on your journey, and may your journey bear much fruit for the Kingdom.

Dave Wessels

Flagstaff, Arizona 2023

  1. J. Deere. Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, 1996. ↩︎
  2. J. Deere. Surprised by the Voice of the God, 1998. ↩︎
  3. A Berean according to Acts 17:9 is one who receives the Word readily, and then goes and checks what he/she heard with what Scripture actually says. ↩︎
  4. Cessasionist theology is a set of beliefs that hold that the gifts and miraculous manifestations of the Spirit (1 Cor 12) ceased with the passing of the Apostles and early church fathers. ↩︎