Because every moment walking with and following the Lord, is different, we have to remember that no two moments are the same. So, what do we do? How do we respond? In an encouraging and uplifting discussion with Jack Hollis, a hilarious and humble man who watched the Lord doing mighty miracles for over 50 years of his life, from the beginning days of the Jesus Movement in the 1970’s, until today, highlights how there are three things we can always do.
“One of them is survive. In order to survive you just got, just got to make it through everything. Then, through that, you become an overcomer. Now, ya know, the enemy is shooting at you with a machine gun nest. You’re dodging bullets until you can sneak around him, and you can whip him, and now you’re an overcomer. You take that from him. And the third step is becoming more than a conqueror. When we become more than a conqueror, that’s when we turn the guns on him. Everything that satan shot at us with, we shoot back. It’s now holy and sanctified.”
Jack recalls his own memories from his life, recounting how the Lord delivered him from alcohol addiction, and loved him through every step of the journey. “That’s all I needed to know, and that’s how I needed to love the people.” Greg fully understands that reality as he shares, “God gives us an anointing and a passion for where we came from”. Jack brings to mind a recent encouraging word from Charles Simpson, “expect the unexpected”. This is what we can all expect of God in our lives. He loves us unconditionally, and He is good. Charles Simpson was another man who also experienced and lived through the exciting moments and widespread wildfire of God’s presence in the Jesus Movement in the 1970’s.
There is no better wisdom to have than experience as opposed to having an opinion. Charles Simpson saw this mighty, holy, and sovereign move of God in the Jesus Movement. He described what the Lord was doing in those days as, “an explosion! You had to get in the middle of it and figure out, ya know God what am I supposed to do?”. When you’re in the middle of an explosion, all you can do is the best that you can do. So many things were happening in this “explosion” that people were accepted at the simple awareness of having a “gift”. But what was missing, was a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. As Jack points out, “you can have a gift, and if you didn’t use it to make money, to make a living with, you were really different back then. Everybody that had a gift wanted to make money with it. Wanted to get rich from it.” It wasn’t
supposed to be this way. When we look at the Book of Acts when the Church was birthed, there were no organizations. It was just the Church. Jack points out that things began to change when man started putting its hands on what the Lord was doing. “Man began to organize God’s Kingdom. That’s when it messed up.” This is where our idea of committees and meetings began to infiltrate what God’s design was for family. Jack even points out how a local congregation recently elected a chairman to head a committee that oversaw committees.
Amidst man trying to jockey its own ideas with committees, the Lord was moving so mightily, and so fast, that few were
even able to keep up with what the Lord was doing. There was no time to form a committee. If someone had read the whole Bible, they were the leader. If they had read the book of Revelation, they were an elder! As Greg highlights, “The Holy Spirit, like you say, was moving in a way to be able to carry His Church to the place that He wants to carry it.” Jack understands that it’s the Lord that does the work and carries out His plans. As the former head pastor for Christian Center Christ in Marianna, FL, Jack shared with the congregation that “this is going to be THE GREATEST year for Christian Center Christ”. If we were to focus on the natural, it wouldn’t appear that way. But, Greg understands exactly what Jack is talking about as he was shown by the Lord an outbreak of His Presence taking place at Christian Center Christ. As he shares, “I saw an outbreak of revival take place, and you know it’s going to take more than revival where we are. But Christian Center Church was part of it, and God was moving, and the Glory of God began to move inside the church there”. If we get focused on what we see with our natural eyes, we’ll miss it every time. As Greg continues, “normally it comes on the edge of difficulty. It comes on the edge of, we give up on our own, our committees. We give up on our committees. And we finally say, ‘God You don’t move.’ Like desperation.”