Even though I did not voice my opinion very much during the first few months at the Bible school, I still did a lot of independent thinking. I kept most of the thoughts to myself, but I was able to make my own assessments concerning the interpretations of the Bible that we were taught. I thought that some of the interpretations were reasonable and that others were unreasonable or even completely wrong. At first I discussed some of my differences of opinion with a few of the friends that I made at the school, though we were discouraged from discussing our private opinions.
The pressure on the individual to conform to the prevailing ideology was immense, but at first I was not willing to give in to it. I had been used to thinking independently and making my own judgements on various issues. Although I was weakened by my state of confusion and anxiety, I still refused to accept some of the doctrines that were taught at the school. I wanted their help in certain areas, but I did not want to embrace all of their views.
I had to make daily efforts to resist the pressure to conform. We were constantly reminded that this was the new move of God. Resisting, or even criticising it or its leaders was paramount to resisting the Lord Himself. Critical thoughts or statements were believed to be inspired by Satan. Through the leaders making contemptuous statements, and ridiculing those who had differing views, we were made to feel ashamed of harbouring similar critical thoughts.
As the pressure mounted, I finally gave in. I found a sense of relief by giving myself wholeheartedly to what God was doing, and just letting go and flowing with the Spirit, as it was called. After months of trying to preserve my identity in the midst of the crossfire between ‘what God is doing’ and other ways of looking at things, I had become exhausted and unable to cope with the tension.
At last, I made a decision to receive everything that God wanted to give me through the speakers at the school. In the classes and evening services I absorbed every spoken word into my innermost being, as I had been led to believe that this would improve my condition. Although in theory I was still checking everything with the Bible, in practice I was beginning to accept the words of the speakers as the very words of God. I began, gradually, to resist any critical thoughts or statements against the accepted teaching, and I began to adopt the view that such thoughts were part of Satan’s attack on the revival.
After a while I became absolutely convinced that I was in the middle of the last great Christian revival on earth, and I was very grateful that God had led me into this revival. I remember talking to a friend about this, and saying that there were so many things that could have gone wrong on the way. What I meant was that I had hesitated to approve of a lot of the things that I was now seeing as the work of God. I came to believe that it was Satan who had tried to hinder me from getting into God’s plan for my life. It had taken six months of what was called renewing my mind with the new teachings before I was able to fully accept it as being the work of God. I saw all this as a proof that Satan was trying to deceive people with his smoke-screens and lure them away from recognising what God was doing.
I began to see it as my foremost task to try to convince my Christian friends that this movement was, in fact, the beginnings of the great end-time revival. I was fully aware of the negative reports in the newspapers and Christian magazines. In my opinion, some of the things these articles said were untrue and others were true. But even if some of the negative reports were true, I still regarded them as attacks by Satan. In my view, Satan was trying to focus public attention on all the bad things in the movement to make people hostile to the move of God. I also adopted the view that it was Satan himself who was responsible for the bad things that occurred in the movement by attacking it internally and thereby stopping the work of God.
It was said that Satan was working especially through people who were unrenewed Christians, who did not understand what God was doing. Above all, we thought, Satan would use Christians from the previous revivals, in order to resist this present one. One leader mentioned that, in his view, Satan had spread a lot of poison in some of the Christian groups he had come from. To me this amounted to my Christian friends outside the movement being in great danger, and I felt compelled to attempt to rescue them from the confusion Satan was spreading in the mainstream churches. If I could only get them to visit a convention or seminar at Word of Life, I was sure that this would convince them that it was a work of God.
