How To Increase the AnointingSecond, follow the Lord Jesus—He's the Head of the Church
—very, very closely.
Third, if you want the same type of ministry someone else
has, follow that ministry closely. If the desire for it is in your
heart, it's usually because God put it there. But that mantle will
not fall on you automatically, like ripe cherries off a tree.
In the days of the Voice of Healing organization, which
flourished during the great Healing Revival, I watched some of
those ministries. God sent me to some ministers to tell them not
to do certain things—but they went ahead and did them anyway.
They started following a certain person, and then that person
missed it—and I saw his followers miss it the same way. I saw
this happen to several men. Some of them died at exactly the
same age that the man they were following had died. You see,
they followed him too closely. You might learn something from
them.
It's like something I heard P.C. "Dad" Nelson, the founder of
Southwestern Assemblies of God College, say in the spring
before he went home to be with the Lord. (He died in the fall of
1942 at age 74.)
Dad Nelson was talking about John Alexander Dowie, a
Congregational minister who had a healing ministry long before
all of ours. Dowie got a revelation of divine healing from Acts
10:38 while pastoring down in Australia. Later he came to the
United States, settling in Chicago. He founded Zion, Illinois, as
a Christian city. Gordon Lindsay was born there. Dowie laid
hands on him when he was a baby.
Brother Lindsay, who headed the Voice of Healing and
founded Christ for the Nations, got some copies of Dowie's
publication, Leaves of Healing, and published some of his
sermons. Brother Lindsay also wrote Dowie's outstanding
biography, The Life of John Alexander Dowie.
The incident Dad Nelson related concerning Dowie had to
have happened before 1907, because Dowie died in 1907 at age
- Dad Nelson was still a Baptist pastor at the time of the story