Revelation Through "Experiencing"

By David Hobbs

God is a God of infinite variety. He speaks and reveals things to people in any number of ways. I have found that He usually develops patterns of revelation in each person that tend to repeat themselves. To some people He gives open visions; to some He speaks through the thoughts of their hearts; to some through dreams; while others see angels and demons and things in the supernatural realm, etc. Rather than giving one person an endless variety of ways of revelation, He tends to use a few for each person and then develops and repeats them.

I say all that to say that the Lord has given me a method of revelation I’ve never heard about, even in the Bible.

Those of you who have read my book Walking in the Spirit, will recall the chapter “Friday Night at the Garden House” (p.107) where Jesus personally came into the garden house as I was praying—my greatest personal encounter with Him. I knew exactly where He was: in the far corner of the room.

But though I knew exactly where He was, I couldn’t "see" anything. I could sense a great light emanating from Him, but not only could I not see it in the natural, I couldn’t see it with my spiritual eyes either. How can I explain it? My spirit sensed the light without “seeing” it.

I have puzzled over this ever since. But just a week ago I had a similar experience and now I think I understand it.

It was Saturday and I was having a bad day. The devil was harassing me as I was walking around the house trying to pray. First he told me my son was going to die on this expedition he’s about to undertake, and not only that, but he was going to die without producing any offspring so his line would die out. As I was pondering these things (and concluding they were from the devil and not the Lord), out of nowhere a spirit of sadness came upon me. It was the most amazing thing—all of a sudden this feeling of sadness washed over me and I just felt like weeping! I realized it was a spirit and not from within me because there was no reason for it. I cry all the time when the Holy Spirit comes upon me, but He comes with a revelation of something that makes me cry—usually a revelation of His goodness or my sinfulness. But there is always a reason. This was just a generalized spirit of weeping that wanted to move through me. (And the next spirit after the weeping spirit would have been the spirit of self-pity!)

[If you want to see a place where this happens in the Bible: in 2 Sam. 18:33 David is prophetically weeping God's tears for fallen humanity and expressing the heart cry that brought Jesus from heaven to earth to die for us. But by 19:4 his tears have slipped into human emotion and self-pity and he has to be rebuked back to reality by the man who caused his weeping to begin with.]

So these were the kinds of things that were happening to me. Even though I didn’t yield to those thoughts or that spirit, just encountering them left an oppressive effect. When I went to church that evening I couldn’t enter in when in the prayer room, and felt completely out of it when I went into the sanctuary for the service. But God … and thank goodness for that … but God! As we began singing and praising the Lord, God started stripping away the oppressions.

Then we sang this new song that I can’t remember very well, but there was a part about the elders and the creatures around the throne crying out to God, and suddenly I received revelation. I didn’t have a vision of the throne room, I couldn’t hear the heavenly worship, yet I was experiencing it exactly as if I was there, just like in the garden house with Jesus.

Actually I was there, in the Spirit. My spirit was in the throne room and I knew exactly why the creatures and elders and angels were crying out, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty!” I was experiencing exactly what they were experiencing that made them cry out. (Remember this: they were not crying out because they had been commanded to; they were crying out because they were experiencing the holiness of God and it was the only possible response to such an overwhelming revelation!) For the rest of the song I was totally caught up in worshipping and experiencing the holiness and glory of God.

Then the worship leader took us right into another song. “Whoa! Not so fast!” To go back to singing, even a worship song, would have taken me out of the throne room to a lesser place. It might still have been the inner court, but it wouldn’t have been the throne room. “I’m going to sit this one out,” I thought. I sat and covered my face with my hands and relished the throne room a little while longer as the rest of the crowd sang away out in the court.

I was blown away by the experience, and days later I’m still jazzed by it. That’s what I want! Hopefully it’s what we all want—the Presence of Jesus, experiencing the glory, experiencing what it is that makes the elders and creatures cry out nonstop day and night “Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord!”

But getting back to my original point: all this without seeing or hearing anything supernatural! It was a revelation of experiencing. Please tell me that makes sense! I don’t know how else to describe it.

I may never see anything supernatural; I may never again hear the sound of the worshipping angels like I did once long ago. But God has other ways to reveal supernatural things to us. Praise God for that!