Pastor JackSample

The breakthrough came weeks later on a Sunday night in the little sanctuary that would seat only fifty people and thus made the dozen or so present that evening seem like more.

He began to preach but was dismayed as he watched his listeners either falling asleep or looking back at him with glazed eyes only thirty seconds into the message. Jack sensed “that something was happening here beyond natural explanation.” Without any obvious displeasure or irritation with the people, he simply stopped the message and told his listeners, “Folks … I really think we need to stop and pray.”

As he did, he saw a vision of “an indescribable blackness [that] began to churn like a cloudy veil.” Although he did not recognize it at the moment, he was “receiving a ‘word’—a prophetic picture-type message” [about] the suffocating “grotesqueness of sin” that blinded the “soul’s vision of God.”

I had only begun my prayer with the words, “Lord God, I pray that …,” when the vision burst over my awareness like a sudden storm. As it did, I could only begin to tremble with a sense of the horror of sins’ blinding capability. So I paused briefly, to gain my composure. And then continued with the words “… that You would help us see …” Then it happened. The word exploded from my lips: “Sin!” That single word rumbled up from out of my deepest being, breaking over my lips with force that shocked me. I virtually bellowed it. Just once. But the effect was staggering to everyone present: “Sin!” I cried out, almost as if pained by the word itself. 

Since the whole incident was un-calculated, Jack was not sure what to do after shouting so explosively. One thing was obvious: no one was asleep any longer. Jack lifted his head, and “every head snapped upward.” With boldness and authority that was uncharacteristic, he “pointed straight at those in the pews and ordered, ‘Bow your heads.’” Just as fast as the heads had popped up, down they went. 

For Jack, “what made the moment most memorable wasn’t the shock of any human behavior, it was the Holy Spirit’s presence. It was the unforgettable onset of a genuine spiritual awakening for a season in that small congregation’s life.” The fruit was evident immediately as the whole group passionately sought God, with the men kneeling at the altar and the women kneeling in the pews. “The room was vibrating with an aliveness unbegotten by man.”

Although the next day the phone “bounced off the hook” with people calling about how wonderful the meeting had been, the real issue was that Jack Hayford had turned a corner. God had surprised him, and he had learned the power of the Holy Spirit’s work in prophecy when God speaks a word to His people. Jack was now willing to be a Pentecostal not only privately, but in public ministry, as well.