Impartation is Real!

I began to pray for people and see miracles at a conference with Global Awakening in which I became convinced that it is always God’s will to heal. The main thing that really drove me to pray for the sick was the scriptural conviction I gained about God’s will and the revelation I had of Jesus through the healings. It was all very rooted in scripture, God’s promises, and the nature of Jesus.

Global Awakening’s founder, Randy Clark, emphasizes and preaches about impartation a lot. It’s one of the focuses of their events. And there is a strong scriptural foundation for impartation in both the Old and New Testaments. Impartation is the giving of some spiritual deposit, often through the laying on of hands but also through the direct action of the Holy Spirit or angelic activity. The idea is “Do you want to minister healing? Get around people who minister healing. Have them lay hands on you and pray for you. Do you want to see in the spiritual realm? Get around people who see in the spiritual realm and have them pray for you.”

In my daily life, supernatural ministry became more and more firmly based on the nature of Jesus and the promises of scripture that anybody can grab a hold of. That conviction was behind my actions. We talked about those promises in the last post, “Supernatural Power in the Gospel.” But I was also eager to receive impartation when I went to Global Awakening events, which I did regularly.

At my second Global Awakening event, they prayed for the Holy Spirit to come upon people in power. They brought up to the front those who were feeling fire, shaking, weeping, or having similar manifestations to receive more prayer with the laying on of hands. I was watching the Holy Spirit move and people were crying out, shaking, jerking, weeping, and falling on the floor. After a while, I was feeling really bummed out because it wasn’t happening to me. I thought I had missed it. I was hoping the Holy Spirit would choose me.

However, I saw a girl near me begin crying out and weeping and they started dragging her up to the front. And it was so holy and precious that for a moment I forgot about myself and I started to thank God for how he was touching her. When I did, I also began weeping and getting the “crunches.” (Doubling over) Then they brought me up to the front to receive prayer as well. I was already seeing people healed regularly before that, but I began seeing more.

At another conference, I didn’t notice anything special happen at any specific time. But before that conference, I had wanted so badly to receive words of knowledge for healing and it seemed like I was the worst for getting words of knowledge or hearing God! But there was a huge difference immediately after that conference and I started hearing God specifically and accurately and giving words of knowledge for healing.

Something similar happened at various events where Brandon Hess preached. (Yes, he’s a filmmaker now) Brandon’s eyes had been opened on a Global Awakening missions trip to see the activity of angels and demons. After one event, I began experiencing a marked increase in manifestations of angelic activity. And another time, I saw a rainbow-colored angel with my physical eyes as Brandon was preaching. Ten minutes later, Brandon saw the same angel, and after that, I saw it again. I had never, to my knowledge, seen an angel with my physical eyes before that.

Another time, when Randy Clark laid hands on me it felt as if God’s hand reached inside and grabbed my stomach. I physically felt something twist in my belly. The KJV of the Bible talks about “bowels of compassion.” Well, I had already experienced many, many miracles, healings, and supernatural events before that. But after that, I cried a lot. I still do. It would be like God’s love would just possess me and take over and I would see people healed one after another.

The Conundrum of Impartation Vs. Fullness in Christ

When I went to those conferences, I honored how God touched people in power. And I received from God while I was there. However, the more I went on stepping out in faith, the basis was the promises of scripture. I would feel like I didn’t have enough or wasn’t sufficient to deal with a situation, but I would find a promise in scripture, act on that, and see God’s power manifest.

I was living like that, and then I would go to a conference again and get discouraged at the end because I wanted to see more of God’s power manifest through my life but I felt like I missed it. I was hoping I would be knocked 20 feet back and have a thousand volts of electricity flowing through me for hours on end! And then after the conference, I would feel like I was lacking or missing something. Maybe I didn’t have enough anointing or power for that person in front of me to be healed of cancer.

And then I would think “Wait, what am I doing? Before this conference, I was grabbing a hold of God’s promises and acting according to them, and it was producing miracles. Am I going to stop now because I feel like I’m lacking something when the Bible says that if I believe nothing will be impossible for me, that I have everything needed for life and godliness in the knowledge of Jesus, and that Jesus gave me the authority to heal every kind of sickness and disease?”

So I would go back to relying on God’s promises and see more miracles. Always looking for another impartation felt really frustrating. However, I also always knew impartation was Biblical and what I had seen of God touching people in that way was very holy and precious. I had experienced it myself.

I began teaching others and saw them experience miracles just because they learned that Jesus teaches us to heal the sick. I taught people based on the promises of scripture that apply to all Christians, and the results were incredible. I also saw other people like Fielding Goharvest and Curry Blake teaching people to minister healing solely on the basis of Jesus’s commission for all Christians. When I heard Curry Blake’s Divine Healing Technician Training on Youtube almost all of it was what I already believed and what I had heard Dan Mohler teach, and I consider it the most Biblically accurate and thorough teaching on healing I have heard anywhere. It is all based on the concrete promises of God in scripture. I knew what was going on at Global Awakening was God. And great miracles happened there. But just as amazing miracles were happening around people who didn’t even emphasize impartation and just taught that we have fullness in Christ and can heal the sick. I knew very well that children and new Christians could pray in faith and see extreme miracles happen.

As I walked more and more in the supernatural, I also came to understand that things which seem really mystical to some people are actually very simple, based on spiritual principles that work for everybody. Any Christian can hear God’s voice, release God’s power, heal the sick, and cast out demons. But not understanding how God’s power is released and how spiritual things work hinders a lot of people.

There are in general two “camps” among those who teach healing ministry. One tends to emphasize impartation, receiving the anointing, spiritual gifts, words of knowledge, spiritual roots of disease, etc. The other emphasizes the Bible, God’s promises, and acting in faith no matter what you feel. I’m much more in the camp of those who emphasize faith and scripture. You don’t have to feel anything. The power is in the gospel. And as I have recently explained, I don’t even believe in “spiritual gifts” in the sense that they are most often taught, as special superpowers given to certain people. I have shared that there is a strong Biblical basis for all Christians to walk in every one of the supernatural manifestations of God’s grace. I have seen that every one of the so-called “spiritual gifts” can be taught. I have taught groups of Christians to minister healing to each other based simply on the gospel facts that we have authority in Christ and access to God’s presence, and nearly everybody in the group who had a need was healed.

I have seen a quite lot of people miss out because they thought they needed something more before they could minister healing. If they just start acting instead of feeling like they are lacking something, they see miracles.

I’ve seen this so much in Brazil. So many people believe in miracles but don’t act because they are always thinking they need something more. I tell them “You have everything you need in Christ. Just act.” For example, there was a young guy in the Northeast of Brazil who had been told “You need to have the spiritual gift. You need impartation. You need to pay the price for the anointing.” And he was discouraged because he wanted to minister healing. I told him he had what he needed in Christ. I told him “If you can get someone to pray for you for impartation, do it, but don’t think you don’t have what you need to minister if you don’t. Jesus lives in you. Impartation can help you step into walking in that, but the most important thing is that you start to act and pray for people. If you keep obeying Jesus’s command to heal the sick, you will see miracles.” He said he was going to take my advice. Soon later, he saw his first healing miracle.

In fact, even Randy Clark who emphasizes impartation so much also teaches that healing the sick is a ministry commanded by Jesus for all Christians.

Do impartation and fullness in Christ contradict each other?

I struggled for years to understand how impartation and fullness of Christ could both be true and not contradict each other! If it seems like the Bible contradicts itself on some point, then we usually need to receive a deeper understanding. If we don’t understand something yet, it’s all right to say “I’m not sure how all of this fits together yet!”

If you have everything you need in Christ, nothing lacking, then why would you need impartation?

But impartation and the laying on of hands are in the New Testament!

Some people in the “fullness in Christ” camp which I relate to more strongly have totally rejected impartation and are even hostile to those who teach it. I understand where they’re coming from. It’s incredibly frustrating to always be hoping for more impartation, anointing, etc, rather than just grabbing a hold of God’s promises. Having a perspective of lack and constantly needing something more is unbiblical and hinders so many people from obeying Christ and living a life of miracles. But at the same time, there is more! You have it all in Christ, but there is more that you can walk in than you have experienced so far!

I could never totally reject the idea of impartation even though there have been times that it has frustrated and confused me! I don’t think we can just discard scriptures about the laying on of hands. Nor can I discard what I have seen and experienced with impartation as if it were not from God!

I teach people to heal the sick based on the fact that we have an open heaven, we have authority, we are raised with Christ, and the nature of the God we are in communion with is to heal the sick. I say “You are spiritually rich if you have Jesus. You have everything, so act like it’s true and start giving away His riches to the world. We are Christ’s sheep, so we hear His voice. We are His body, so we do His works.” Yet at the same time, I recommend to anybody who wants to walk in God’s power to get around people who are, and to let it rub off on them. And if you can, have them lay hands on you.

Well, this post is getting long and I guess I’ll have to leave you guys hanging until the next one! Do you see how the concepts of “impartation” and “fullness in Christ” seem so contradictory? But I now feel like I have come to an understanding of how impartation works without contradicting the truth of having fullness in Christ! I believe this understanding will really help people who want to walk in God’s power. And I also feel like it will increase my emphasis on impartation personally, without diminishing the truth that we have received fullness in Christ and every “grace manifestation” is available to every Christian! In the next post, we explain how both impartation and fullness in Christ are true without contradicting each other!