Sensing the Whole
Art by Rebekah Dominguez, age 10
By Jessica Greer
On February 8, 2023, in Wilmore, Kentucky, a generational outpouring of the Holy Spirit generated national buzz. The small Methodist college, Asbury University, experienced an unexpected spiritual awakening after 53 years.
In October of 1969, an Asbury student named Jeanine Brabon felt God leading her to host a short prayer meeting before the college’s regularly scheduled chapel services, and was granted permission to do so.
In January of 1970, Brabon began inviting fellow students to commit to 30 days of a 30-minute prayer and Bible study called The Great Experiment.
On February 2, 1970, more than 200 students who had joined The Great Experiment pledged themselves to another 30 days of prayer and Bible study.
That night, a group of students prayed into the early morning for the next day’s chapel service.
During the routine chapel service the next day, February 3, 1970, a revival of the Holy Spirit began to overwhelm students and faculty.
For the next week, for 24 hours a day, students from all over the campus were coming into the presence of God, where they began finding repentance and reconciliation.
From this original revival, Asbury sent out over 2,000 impact teams throughout the United States to share their testimonies in 130 schools.
The experience of the witness is not simply a subjective perception, but a uniquely personal connection with God. It is an awakening to the spiritual truth that surrounds us, a glimpse of the wondrous and vast eternity that lies beyond the material world.
While Postmodernism’s moral relativism and battle of the narrative has destabilized our society, perhaps the most destructive war on truth has been the attack on the witness.
“My truth” has replaced a true testimony. The post-truth era has blurred the line between a declaration of an evidenced experience and the deeply subjective.
In October 2019, Kanye West released a self-described Gospel album titled Jesus is King.
For the following six months, multiple songs from the Jesus is King album were played on secular radio stations, while mainstream media outlets interviewed Kanye.
Even Hollywood fools were forced to utter the words “Jesus is King” every time they introduced Kanye’s new album.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2022, an NPR journalist (in true NPR fashion) asked Holocaust survivors why it was so important for them to share “their story and their truth” with the public. One survivor’s response destroyed the interviewer’s postmodernist elitism with a single statement.
“I’m not sharing my story,” he replied. “I was a witness to one of the greatest human atrocities in the twentieth century.” Distinction matters.
The paradox of the witness is a deeply Judeo-Christian characteristic. A witness is a person who relates something they have personally seen and heard that points to a reality outside of their own perception – which, when further verified by corroborating experiences all pointing to the same objective source, can be evidenced as truth.
The witness is the standard for academia and science, and since the very beginning, it has been the traditional mode of the spreading the Gospel.
Even Jesus cited this standard in verifying His claim as the Son of God: “My judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent Me. It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true. I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me” (John 8:16-18).
A witness does not tell “their own” truth, nor can they validate their own reality.
Isaiah 44:9 says, “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed” [italics mine].
The powerful mystery of the witness that testifies of God’s truth is that he has experienced a uniquely personal encounter.
Take Nathanael’s interaction with Jesus in John chapter 1. When Nathanael asks Jesus how he knows him, Jesus simply replies, “I saw you under the fig tree.”
Nathanael is immediately quickened to the reality of Jesus as the Messiah because He relates to Nathanael’s personal experience.
Jesus has a similar encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4. Jesus makes a deeply personal request of her: Go, get your husband.
“I don’t have a husband,” she says.
“You have had five husbands,” Jesus tells her gently, “and the man you live with is not your husband.” As she realizes she is conversing not with a prophet but with the Messiah Himself, she rushes off to tell the whole city.
Both Nathanael and the Samaritan woman were overwhelmed as they became enlightened by the awareness of their own sin nature, their lack of holiness, and the realization that they were seeing and being seen by God Himself.
“He is the Savior; I am the sinner,” is the only natural response possible in these moments.
Jesus had seen them from the most objective point of view, as God who judges soul and spirit. The Samaritan woman’s testimony led to personal encounters by more witnesses, as it says in John 4:39-42: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’ So, when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.’”
Perhaps Hagar’s response is one of the most poetic and articulate expressions of such an encounter. Genesis 16:13 says, “Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees; for she said, ‘Have I also here seen Him who sees me?’”
The experience of a true witness is an awakening to the reality of God, His holiness, and our sin.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Door Church Tucson, and consider the many couples sent out to plant churches, the many conferences, music nights, bands, skits, plays, Bible studies, outreaches, youth rallies, impact teams, and the over 7,000 sermons preached (not including revivals and conferences) we see there has been a steady flow of witness over those 50 years.
Every testimony, every Jesus encounter, witnesses God’s reality. We sense the whole of it, even if we cannot see it all in this earthly realm.
This is not merely a community of stories, or of good people remembering religious journeys. Each member, each witness, joins in the choir of voices to project together the reality and truth of God’s glorious plan of salvation.
Thank you, Pastor Warner and Sister Mona, for being our original witnesses.
1 Peter 1:8-12 says, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.”