One of the team members who normally goes to Juvenile Hall was away, so I filled in for him. I said to the guys, “Imagine if every mirror in the house you grew up in was warped. Would you be able to describe yourself to me?” They said no. I said, “It’s that way with how we see ourselves.” I got their attention. I prayed for them and broke off old mindsets from the past and also received words of knowledge for them. To one I said, “I see God’s giving you this crazy artistic mind and the ability to draw and paint.” Wide-eyed, he said he had saved his life by doing art on the street for people who were mad at him. I kept prophesying over them. They said, “Man, you are giving me the chills. How did you know this?”
We had a great time last week. Some of the guys had gotten rocked with the words of knowledge, just hearing the voice of God. So they went back and told their friends, “You guys have got to come next week. There’s this guy there, and he’ll tell you all this stuff about you.” So they brought more guys, and I asked the guys when they got there, “Hey, why’d you come? Why’d you want to come today?”
One looked at me and said, “I’m here to ‘get read’ today.”
I said, “OK. We’ll see what happens. We’re going to talk about hearing the voice of God.”
I asked them what it means to follow Jesus. They all said that they had decided to follow Jesus. They had “prayed the prayer.” They give different answers to my question. I took them to Matthew 3, where Jesus was baptized, and the Holy Spirit rested on Him, and He heard the voice of God. I said, “You know, basically what it means to follow Jesus is you hear His voice, and you choose to follow Him with your life.” I just wanted to break it down really simply, and we talked about that for a while. I ended up prophesying over some of them and getting words of knowledge. They were just lit up.
One of them said, “Last week the word you gave me changed something inside of me. I came back because I wanted to hear that voice again.”
I said, “You are talking about what Jesus experienced in that story we just read how the voice of the Father was like bread to Him. That is what you’re hungry for. You’re hungry to hear the Father’s voice about you.” It opened up to more words of knowledge. There was a real grace there. I had some specific words for these guys, and they were just getting rocked. Then at the end, I asked one of them, “Hey, do you fix cars?”
“Yeah.”
“Does your family own a car garage?”
“Yeah, they do.”
“Is it your uncle?”
“Yeah.”
They were freaking out. “How do you know this stuff?”
The best part was at the end. I prayed for them and said, “I want you to close your eyes, open your hands, and ask God what He thinks about you. Ask the Father to tell you how He sees you.” A lot of them heard different things. Some of them said they just felt this buzzing all inside. “I just feel this energy buzzing all over me.” The last guy shared, “I did not hear anything, but my hands are red hot!” His hands were red and dripping with sweat. He didn’t even hear anything, but he just felt God all over him. These kids are experiencing the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but we had to wrap up right then. It was an amazing time, moving in the voice of God and seeing these kids experience the voice of the Father. I said, “My prayer for you is that you would get addicted to the voice of God.”