A friend bought Jim Ling's Eagle Ranch and invited half a dozen of us to come down and spend the weekend just talking together. There was a young man I assumed to be English with clipped moustache and wearing an ascot but he was running a big ranch in South America. In the evening's conversation I was telling about going to a laymen's meeting and from the platform I could see the effect of the speaker on the audience. Every once in a while I would see God put a hook in somebody and inevitably they either came up and argued or started thrashing around in the water. The ones who came up to argue with me I would generally say, "looks like God has put a hook in you, and you can thrash around in the water all you want to and there's going to be blood all around but it's going to be yours, because Christ has already shed all he's going to. When you decide to come in He'll be ready for you." About one o'clock that morning I was getting ready to go to bed and this quiet knock came on the door. I opened, and there was my English friend, who motioned me out on the porch and without anyone seemingly in earshot he whispered to me, "How do you know when God has got a hook in you?" I said, "It looks pretty obvious to me," and then I couldn't think of a thing that I thought was appropriate to say. I felt a total failure as a witness, but then I just asked him the question, "What do you think you'd have to give up to be a Christian?" He said, "That's it, that's it. I'm afraid I'd have to be a preacher." And with that he started running down the long porch to his room. I went in, got down on my knees and confessed to the Lord that I had done a lousy job of trying to land that fish. The next day we were walking out on the ranch and came to a large spring with a promenade of rocks around it where you could circle the spring like a horseshoe. As we stood there and looked at this pool of water about five feet deep and possibly five yards wide, he asked one of the men, "How cold do you think that water is?" The fellow replied that he thought if you got in that water you'd speak several decibels higher. With this, the young man started taking off all his clothes and got down to his jockey shorts. Then he jumped in, feet first. He threw himself backwards as he hit the water to break the fall, climbed out, put his clothes on and we went on about the day and night. After the night session he sidled up to me and said, "When I jumped in the water today, that was significant. I baptized myself," I don't know whether you can baptize yourself but I am perfectly willing to accept it. When I asked him what happened, he said, "When I left you I went back to the room and I said, "Sir, if you want me to be a preacher I'll make you a damn good one." He has been a very content Christian since then.
It's exciting to know that the Holy Spirit is alive and working in the life of ordinary people like you and me. However, we have to see the power before we can feel the joy. I see a lot of Christians who have very little joy, and it's because they don't really see or realize the power of God in their life.
