“If you’re going to be a successful leader, you have to hear from God.”
That advice comes from Dr. Charles Green, longtime pastor of Word of Faith Temple in New Orleans, Louisiana, and mentor to many, including Dr. Steve Greene. As a young pastor, the Lord called Green and his new bride, Barbara, to Port Arthur, Texas, Green says on a popular episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. God spoke to him on their very first night in the new city.
“He told me two things to do,” Green says. “The first one was to start having services every night until further notice. So the following Saturday, I put a 1/3-page ad in the paper … I didn’t realize what had happened, but that began to be the talk of the town. And the first thing you know, we left the place of obscurity. …. The second thing that God spoke to me to do was to start a radio broadcast.”
Right away, Green contracted with the strongest station in the city and began a radio broadcast every Sunday night.
After only two shows had aired, he received a call one Monday morning: “Are you Charles Green? … the one who preaches on the radio?”
“I started laughing,” Green says. “I said, ‘I’ve only had two programs.’
“Well, my wife has heard both of them, and she likes the way you do it,” the caller told him. “But my wife is an invalid. And she can’t come to church. She can’t even stand up.”
The man asked him, “Would you come to our home and pray for her?”
About an hour later, Green and his wife were at the couple’s home. As they entered, they learned that the man, J.P. Logan, was the city mayor. They sat and talked with Logan and his wife, and then Green said, “Well, Mr. Logan, we’re going to agree together in prayer” and spoke with him about what that meant.
As he prayed, “There was no lightning from heaven … And I just thought, Well, I guess I prayed an average prayer,” Green says. He and Barbara both felt disappointed when they didn’t hear any more from the Logans all week.
But that Sunday morning, Green says, he taught a Sunday school class and then went into the sanctuary. “I was just getting ready to say, ‘Let’s stand for prayer’ when the back door opened, and the mayor and his two children and his invalid wife walked in the door. And she was on spike heels, walking down the aisle of my church. Well, what I didn’t know, because I’d only been in town for a month, was that everybody knew this woman was just an invalid.”
For more about how God used this miracle to fill every seat in Green’s church in less than three months, listen to the entire episode of Greenelines here. Be sure to subscribe to Greenelines on your favorite podcast platform for more inspiring stories like this one. {eoa}
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