An Encounter with the Holy Spirit in Worship

We went to chapel one evening, and this heavy-set woman with a very beautiful, strong voice came in and was leading worship. The songs were talking about God’s omnipotence, omnipresence, power, almighty King of Kings, Lord of Lords. The Great I am. Worshiping the Lord, our Lord, and the Holy Spirit fell on me, I hit my knees, and time stood still, and I could just do nothing but weep and thank God for His presence.

As we were being ushered out by the guards out of the chapel back to our dorms, the Spirit of God spoke to me saying, “That’s just a glimpse, that’s just a glimpse of what being in my presence is like for eternity.” I cried out, “God, please don’t ever let me leave that place. I want you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.”

God showed me that when I was so undeserving, He poured out His grace and His word. I began to stand on and began to quote Scripture against the enemy of God, and he began to show me revelations of things that I had experienced in my life, where he was always there in spite of me. So that’s what happened. So I saw God do tons of different miracles in prison. He began to show me different visions and dreams that he was giving me as I obeyed him and told everybody about him.

Baptism and Joe’s New Family

I got baptized in prison on the Joe F Gurney unit in Texas, and I took the Lord’s Supper with other prisoners with crackers and orange juice on a steel table, and the Lord’s Supper was very significant in my being accepted and adopted into the family of God. He restored my relationship with my family, and I was able to actually tell somebody I loved them and not hurt them or deceive them. I was able to get out and show my mom the true love that Christ had given me before she died.

I joined a ministry because I knew that my life was not my own. It was bought at a price, and I was going to go back into those same prisons that he rescued me from to bring that hope. During that time, God sent an angel, my wife, who is the exact opposite of me, she was a missionary, had lived in Iraq as a single woman, and had lived in France on mission.

She has a seminary degree of a Master’s of Theology and she’s a neonatal intensive care nurse. She walked into the coffee shop one day, and we fell in love. And again, that is just nothing but the grace of God, because he sent me a daughter that he graciously allowed me to walk with.

Overseas Missionary Work Begins

In 2012 we got married and four months later we moved to what was known as the graveyard of missions, in north India. And God just again, showed up and showed out in more ways than we ever could have imagined. We were, at that point, trained and taught how to take the gospel to areas where it is not. We saw God move in just miraculous ways. We saw a man healed miraculously. We saw people, demoniacs, being delivered. It was awesome to see the hand of the Lord moving.

Simultaneously, I’d never experienced that type of poverty before. The wage of someone middle class was $1 to $2 a day. The poverty would break your heart. We had a house that we had moved into and there was nowhere to dump our trash, so we would dump our trash over the wall. Within 10 minutes, the children would come out of the woodwork and start digging through our trash to find food or various things that we had thrown away so that they could figure out how to survive.

I would take a train from one station, where we lived, about three hours north, to areas where we would then go out into the villages to do evangelism. Three days a week, I would be living in the villages, preaching the gospel with our local leaders and then doing training at the same time. And on those train tracks, we would see children who were addicted to sniffing glue and being trafficked. Their parents were either prostitutes or had been put in prison, or some of the parents couldn’t afford to take care of their children, so they would leave them at the train station.

Hearing and Responding to the Holy Spirit

It was literally little gangs of kids. It was not uncommon to see a 10-year-old little girl taking care of a one-year-old little baby. Me and my wife decided we had to do something. And this was the miracle of His Spirit and His word because I had people telling me, “Joe, you have no money, how are you going to provide for these kids?” Every time I would read the Bible, it would tell me to not turn a blind eye to the poor, or you are going to receive many a curse.

The Bible says when you feed the hungry when you visit those who are sick and in prison, and when you clothe the naked, it’s the same as doing it to me, so don’t turn a blind eye. But I heard the question, how are you going to eat an elephant? I know that’s not the scripture, but that’s what God kept saying, like, “How are you going to eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right?”

You’re going to love on the children that you see right in front of you, and I will show up and show out as you are faithful to my word and to what I’m asking you to do. We met this one young kid named Deepak at the train station, my partner and I went up to him. By this time I had learned Hindi, another Indian man came up to me and said, “What are you doing talking to this dirty kid. He’s a thief. He’s no good. Be careful. You should not talk with him.”

Right in front of that man who spoke those words, I told that kid, “Do not listen to him. It doesn’t matter what anyone at this train station tells you. What matters is what God says about you, and what I’m telling you now. You are loved. I love you, and I’m not afraid of you. You need to meet this Jesus who created you. He wants to adopt you into His family.

We went and fed him after that, and it cost us a quarter to feed Deepak, and we went back every day for a few weeks until Deepak trusted us and started inviting some of these other kids off of the streets to meet with us. And so we had the children sit down at the train station, and we would just pray with them. We would sing songs with them. It continued to bring a crowd, and the police were seeing what was happening, and trying to break us up.

God’s Love for the Outsider

No one would rent us a room to house these kids, because they’re untouchables. Outcast. Ganda bachcha (dirty child) is what they call them. The heroin dealers down the street rented us a room. We would preach the gospel to them, and they opened their home up to us. And so as they’re selling drugs, we would walk down the street with all of these kids, take them into this room, and teach them about Jesus.

Sometimes the drug dealers would come in and they would listen to the stories of Christ. We would provide clothing to them. We would provide medical to them. It was just a phenomenal thing, but it wasn’t enough. And so because they had to continue to go back to the streets, and we just didn’t have any resources at that time. But what we had, we were giving it away to these kids, and God showed up and showed out.

One of my favorite things was, you just can’t imagine, the feeling of walking out onto a train station and one kid would see us, then the word would spread across 1000s of people, and then they would start coming out of the woodwork, and they would be jumping up and down, screaming, “Hallelujah!” They’d run and jump in your arms, and they would surround you. Before the police would get there, we would usher them off of the train tracks, down the street.

Ministry Impact in India

What is amazing about that story is we now have 70 children, 67 to be exact, that we’ve rescued off of the streets, and God, to this point, has provided enough resources to purchase land, and we’re in the process of building a home that can house 150 children.

We got kicked out of North India about three years after starting that work, and that was in 2015. Today there are more than 5000 churches across three different states. 20 of our older children go out with those pastors to minister and share the Gospel. Some of those village churches provide food, rice, and vegetables, back to support our kids at the home. So healthy churches are being established, and God is continuing to move across North India through that work.

God’s Supernatural Leading in Iraq

My wife, like I said, previously, lived in Iraq in 2006 post Desert Storm, and she had a heart for that region. So we moved from North India to Northern Iraq in 2016, and ISIS had control about 30 minutes from the house that we moved into. Our vision and our goal was to find broken and contrite people who had fled from Syria, who had fled from other areas of Iraq, and teach them about this love that Christ had given us so that they too could be set free. We saw many Syrians come to faith and start house churches.

We have a family that fled from ISIS, and they were not believers, but for whatever reason, the father was preparing their hearts. One of the young ladies found a cross on the road and grabbed it. She held on to it as they were being bused out and then stopped as ISIS came onto their bus. She held on to that cross and prayed to God, “I know you’re real. Would you protect me?” She didn’t let go of that cross, and they didn’t find it, and she made it to northern Iraq, and into a refugee camp.

One night, as we were doing training with Syrian and Iraqi believers, I woke up in the middle of the night and started praying, “Jesus, would you please let me lead someone to you and not just train others how to lead them to you?”

Two days later, I was sitting in a house with a Syrian family and I shared the story of the girl with the cross, and the Holy Spirit touched my heart and said, “This is the family that I woke you up in the middle of the night to pray for, and you have a message that you need to give to them, that I’ve prepared their hearts to receive.”

It was beautiful. They said, “We know that Jesus is real, and we don’t know how to follow him, but we believe that God sent you here to teach us how to follow Jesus.” We were weeping. We baptized them the very next day, and God continued to use that family to lead hundreds of people to faith, to start multiple house churches and refugee camps, and to baptize hundreds of people.

Through us, God began to open up the floodgates of funding to help resource them to give funds to their people who’d lost everything. And when I say funds, I mean blankets, food, and tents so that they would have a place to live. These were families who had just come out of a society where they had homes and jobs, and then overnight, they had to flee for their lives and lost everything. Family members were killed.

We saw God use them to reach their own people. That’s one of the greatest things that God has continued to show me, is that my responsibility in God’s kingdom is to, first and foremost, love Jesus with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love others, love my neighbors in the same way that Christ has loved me, and teach them how to love their neighbors, so that his gospel will be preached to every tribe, tongue, and nation.

Ministry Starts in Iran

One day a Korean friend of mine who had been in prison in Iraq, we helped get him out, he said, “I want to introduce you to my Iranian friend.” This Iranian brother said, “I want to reach my people in Iran. Can you help me?” We started praying and brought some Iranians across the border. We taught them about Jesus. We baptized them.

We didn’t just baptize them and say, “Okay, you’re good to go.” We taught them how to abide with Christ. We taught them that the Word of God is sufficient and that they, too have the Spirit of God, and if they will read the Word of God and obey the Word of God, that his gospel will change their nation.

They would go back into Iran, call us back, and say, “You’re not going to believe this, we just boldly started telling people about our story and started giving them a little bit of the gospel you taught us, and they’re very receptive. They want to hear more about this Jesus. We were like, okay, praise God. We started bringing more people across the border.

We didn’t want to bring them across the border so that they could look to us as the pastor or as the leader, but we were developing them to start their own churches and to grow in Christ-like character, to grow in Titus and Timothy characteristics of a godly man and a godly woman is so that they could lead their churches.

When the Holy Spirit starts moving, we just want to we want to figure out where God is working and help serve those people as the Holy Spirit is moving, and God just continued to move in power. I will tell you one story of a young Iranian woman who, through one of the brothers we had trained, gave her life to Jesus.

She has a psychology degree from one state in Iran, has a business in another state in Iran, went to college in another state in Iran, and has family in a fourth state in Iran. When we first met this lady, her friend, had shared the gospel with her, we brought her out from Iran, and we started teaching her and training her.

Baptism in Kiddie Pools in Iran

She went back across three different states in Iran, within one month, and shared the gospel with more than 65 people. They all accepted Jesus. She came back to us and said, “Now what do we do?” And so we told her, “Well, you haven’t baptized any of them.” She’s like, “We don’t have water. Where are we going to baptize them?”

What was cool was one of my friends, another missionary had flown in, and he had been working in Afghanistan. He said, “In Afghanistan, what we do is we buy little kiddie pools and we fill them up in the showers, and then you can baptize them in the shower.” The next thing we knew, she went back to Iran, and within a week, she had baptized all of those 65 believers.

It was just a phenomenal experience to see people so excited about the gospel that they had received. They recognized that their people were receptive and they wanted to know more about this Jesus. They’ve been oppressed by Islam for so long. They want freedom. And so this an exciting thing, when they realize, God’s doing a work, and he is preparing hearts to receive the message that we have. I mean, they’re on fire for the Lord and God. The gospel is spreading.

Smuggling Bibles Inside Iran

Today, after starting in 2017 we have 10,103 baptized, born-again believers with 2100 house churches across all 31 states, inside of Iran and God is continuing to do that work. One of the cool things is, is, I won’t go into too many details, is that through our relationships, some of these people that we had been leading to Jesus were also involved with smuggling, smuggling people, but as well as anything you can imagine, and we realized that as people were coming to faith, we needed to get the gospel, the word of God, to them. And so just this last year, we used these various smuggling routes through relationships that we’ve built to move 87,274 Bibles to six different states inside of Iran.

Before that, we moved 400,000 Bibles since 2017 across 19 of those states inside Iran, where we have taken the gospel and gotten his word into those areas. One of the reasons I love those things is because I was involved with smuggling drugs, cooking methamphetamines, and what the devil meant for bad, God means for good. To turn it about this day, to save many lives.

Jesus shared a story that the sons of this world are more shrewd in figuring out how to live than those of us in Christ, and so we’ve become shrewd as serpents, but harmless as doves, to get his word into a nation that will kill you for the gospel. It’s been an awesome opportunity to partner and facilitate the movement of God’s word into a country where it’s totally illegal. The love of God is moving in power, and the gospel is moving in power.

A Healing of an Iranian Brother

I will tell you a story of healing that was personal to me. I hear of dreams all of the time. It’s very difficult for me to remember all of the stories. I have tens of thousands of photos of people being baptized and churches meeting together. What I get to see and experience is phenomenal.

Just three weeks ago, I was in another country and we had brought some people out from Iran that we’d trained. One of these brothers that I had seen before, I knew I knew him. He had to retell me his name but I had trained with him before.

We were all going around sharing our testimonies with each other, and this young man said, “When I came from Iran to meet with you the last time, I was wavering and doubting in faith. I wasn’t really sure. I told my friends that I wanted to follow Jesus. I was baptized, but I wasn’t really sure that I fully believed.

You taught me all of these things, but at the end of the training, you laid your hands on me, and you prayed for God to heal me. He said, “I went back to Iran, and the next day, or the next night, I had a dream, and Jesus was standing with a staff, and he hit me in my leg and said, just get up and walk. When I woke up, my leg was straight, and I started walking.”

Doubting God’s Power

I’m just going, to be honest with you, I doubt my faith at times, like I struggle, like I said, there are times when I question the authority and the power of God, and that’s maybe that thorn in my side or just my weakness. But, I looked at that brother, and I remembered that he was crippled, the last time I saw him. I spent five days with him and the whole time he couldn’t walk. His leg was turned inwardly.

I said, “Oh brother, are you serious? Get up and walk.” He stood up, and he started walking, and his leg was straight, and the Lord, like, crushed me. I just was like, Oh, my Lord, there was no doctor could have done that. The Lord turned his leg straight. And I was like, “Lord, forgive me for doubting. Forgive me for doubting that you still operate in that same way.”

It’s crazy how I’ve seen God with visions. I’ve seen God with dreams. I’ve seen God do miraculous things, things that I could never imagine. Sometimes, I waver, sometimes I struggle, and sometimes I doubt the goodness and power of God. He for whatever reason, is faithful, even when I’m not to show me that he is good, that he is alive, that he is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

I just fell on my face, and I’m just like, Jesus, Lord forgive me. I love you, right? God is faithful even when we’re not. That is my most recent healing story. I was telling my Iranian brothers and sisters, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, just like the healing last week and the healing before that. And I’m just sitting there going, alright Lord forgive me for doubting.

Joe’s Ministry Reach and Close

Those are some of the stories and the highlights of what God has allowed me and my family to be involved with. We are very Kingdom-minded. We wear multiple hats. We cooperate with multiple different organizations to get to God’s vision of taking his gospel to every tribe, tongue, and nation on this earth. We have leaders in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, you name it.

God has allowed us to play some part in being involved with Acts 1:8 which says, You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. God’s Word is true, and it has been true in my life from the day that I met him in a prison cell, so undeservingly, he said, “I’m going to show up and show out in your life. My word is alive and I’m alive, and my spirit is alive and well and moving.”

That’s my story. I have hundreds of other stories that God has done throughout the years, but those are the ones I wanted to highlight. So thank you.