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About the Book
In "God's Will is Prosperity," Gloria Copeland argues that it is God's desire for all believers to experience prosperity in all areas of their lives. She challenges readers to have faith, speak positive words, and take action to achieve abundance and success. Copeland uses biblical principles and personal testimonies to support her message that God wants his followers to be wealthy and prosperous.
Maria Woodworth-Etter
Maria Woodworth-Etter’s Early life
Maria’s early life was plagued with tragedies. Her father died of sunstroke when she was 11 years old leaving her mother with eight children to provide for. She married at 16 but fought a continual battle with ill-health, losing five of her six children. During her sickness she had visions of children in heaven and the lost suffering in hell.
She promised God, that if He would heal her, she would serve Him completely. She asked God for same apostolic power He gave the disciples and was gloriously baptized in the Holy Spirit. “It felt like liquid fire, and there were angels all around.”
The call to preach
Despite her personal struggles with ‘women in ministry’ and the prevailent hostile attitudes to female preachers, she felt compelled by God to accept the invitation to preach in the United Brethren in Christ (Friends) in 1876 and later associated with the Methodist Holiness church.
Evangelism with signs and wonders
Though simply evangelistic in the early days she was unusually successful and in 1885 supernatural signs began to accompany her ministry. Her ministry resurrected dead churches, brought salvation to thousands of unconverted and encouraged believers to seek a deeper walk with God.
She descibes one of her meetings
She described an 1883 meeting in Fairview, Ohio: “I felt impressed God was going to restore love and harmony in the church..… All present came to the altar, made a full consecration, and prayed for a baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire. That night it came. Fifteen same to the altar screaming for mercy.
Men and women fell and lay like dead. I felt it was the work of God, but did not know how to explain it or what to say. I was a little frightened . . . after lying for two hours all, one after another, sprang to their feet as quick as a flash with shining faces and shouted all over the house. I had never seen such bright conversions or such shouting….
The ministers and old saints wept and praised the Lord …..they said it was the Pentecost power, that the Lord was visiting them in great mercy and power …..(they) experienced visions of heaven and hell, collapsed on the floor as if they’d been shot or had died.” Subsequently, thousands were healed of a wide variety of sicknesses and diseases and many believers, even ministers, received mighty baptisms of the Holy Spirit. She soon became a national phenomenon.
1,000 seater tent
In 1889, she purchased a tent that could seat eight thousand people and set it up in Oakland, California. “The power of God was over all the congregation; and around in the city of Oakland. The Holy Ghost would fall on the people while we were preaching. The multitude would be held still, like as though death was in their midst.
Many of the most intelligent and best dressed men would fall back in their seats, with their hands held up to God. being held under the mighty power of God. Men and women fell, all over the tent, like trees in a storm; some would have visions of God. Most all of them came out shouting the praises of God.”
She declared that if 19th-century believers would meet God’s conditions, as the 120 did on the Day of Pentecost, they would have the same results. “A mighty revival would break out that would shake the world, and thousands of souls would be saved. The displays of God’s power on the Day of Pentecost were only a sample of what God designed should follow through the ages. Instead of looking back to Pentecost, let us always be expecting it to come, especially in these days.”
Her views of Pentecostalism
Initially she had grave concerns about the burgeoning Pentecostal movement, mainly because of some unbalanced teaching and reported extremism. Soon she came to believe it was an authentic move of the Holy Spirit and was enthusiastically welcomed within its ranks. She became both a model and a mentor for the fledgling movement. This association elicited another wave of revival between 1912 and her death in 1924 as she ministered throughout the country and her books were read across the world.
Etter Tabenacle
In 1918, she built Etter Tabernacle as her home church base and affiliated with the Assemblies of God. In her closing years she still ministered with a powerful anointing despite struggling with gastritis and dropsy. On occasion she would be carried to the podium, preach with extraordinary power, then be carried home again!
Her demise
Her health continued to decline and she died on September 16, 1924. She is buried in a grave in Indianapolis next to her daughter and son-in-law. Her inscription reads “Thou showest unto thousands lovingkindness.”
In conclusion
Without doubt Maria Woodworth-Etter was an amazing woman blessed with an astonishing ministry. Rev. Stanley Smith – one of the famous “Cambridge Seven” and for many years a worker with “The China Inland Mission” wrote this about her autobiography:
“I cannot let this opportunity go by without again bringing to the notice of my readers, ‘Acts of the Holy Ghost,’ or ‘Life and Experiences of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter.’ It is a book I value next to the Bible. In special seasons of waiting on God I have found it helpful to have the New Testament on one side of me and Mrs. Etter’s book on the other; this latter is a present-day record of ‘the Acts’ multiplied.
Mrs. Etter is a woman who has had a ministry of healing since 1885, her call as an evangelist being some years previous to this. I venture to think that this ministry is unparalleled in the history of the Church, for which I give all the glory to the Lord Jesus Christ, as Mrs. Etter would, I know, wish me to do. This ministry should be made known, for the glory of the Triune God and the good of believers.”
We agree and pray that such an anointing will rest upon God’s end-time people so that ‘this Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the world before the end comes!’ Matthew 24:14
Tony Cauchi
Reformation Day: Jesus Came Knocking
Sometime around A.D. 95, Jesus, through the apostle John, came metaphorically knocking on the door of the church in Laodicea with an unsurpassed invitation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20) Pulled out of its context, this verse can sound like Jesus was calling softly and tenderly. Paintings inspired by this verse tend to portray a gentle Jesus mildly knocking. In reality, he was anything but soft and tender, gentle and mild. This invitation came on the heels of a bracing rebuke and serious warning. Jesus was pounding on the Laodicean’s door with the urgency of emergency: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.” (Revelation 3:15–19) Jesus was pounding on the door of a church whose trust in an idol put them in grave spiritual danger. Their prosperous tepidness made him want to gag. But because he loved these lukewarm Christians, he lovingly disciplined them with hard words and called them to zealous repentance and reformation. When Jesus Came Knocking in Wittenberg On October 31, 1517, Jesus, through a little-known German priest/professor named Martin Luther, came quite literally knocking on the Wittenberg door of the Roman Catholic Church. Unrestrained corruption of power and wealth was a sin-cancer that had metastasized in the Roman Catholic Church and spread to many of her leaders and, through them, into her doctrines and practices. This cancer was killing the church. She too had grown very prosperous and yet did not realize how wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked she had become. She had not listened sufficiently to Jesus’s authoritative voice in the Scriptures, or to the prophetic voices of warning that he had repeatedly sent to her. The Lord was at the end of his patience. But because he loved his sin-diseased church whose idolatry put her in grave spiritual danger, he sent an unlikely messenger from an unlikely town — so very like the Lord — with a hard word of loving discipline. Professor Luther walked up to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg with a hammer, a few nails, and a parchment listing 95 stinging indictments against the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike what the Laodiceans received, Luther’s theses were not inerrant Scripture. In fact, later Luther knew a number of them did not go far enough. But still, they were a largely biblical call to zealous repentance, as the first thesis so clearly captures: When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. In the pounding of Martin’s hammer, Jesus came knocking. And his knocking set off a chain-reaction that exploded into the Protestant Reformation, a gospel detonation that is still shaking the world nearly 500 years later. A Reformation Detonation As a result of October 31, 1517, hundreds of millions of Christians all over the world have submitted to God’s word as their highest authority (Sola Scriptura) and his teaching that salvation is a gift given by God’s grace alone (Sola Gratia) through the instrument of faith alone (Sola Fide) in the death and resurrection of their one savior and mediator, Jesus Christ (Sola Christus), so that all glory would always redound to the Triune God alone (Sola Deo Gloria). Wherever the church opened the door to Jesus, repentance and reformation was like chemotherapy to the cancer of spiritual corruption and recovered belief in the gospel of Christ spread spiritual health through much of Europe, then on to the New World, Asia, and Africa. It spawned massive evangelism, church planting, Bible translation, and frontier missions efforts. And in its wake it brought about all manner of social good: stronger families, honest commerce, economic empowerment for the poor, hospitals and clinics for the sick, education for the masses, encouragement for the scientific enterprise, democratic forms of civic government, and on and on. When we really comprehend the massive floodgate of mercy that was opened to us because Jesus came knocking in Wittenberg, Reformation Day (October 31st) becomes a thanksgiving day — a day for feasting or perhaps for fasting and prayer for another reformation detonation in our lives and churches and nations. Is Jesus Knocking on Your Door? In fact, given the prosperity that most of us in the West are experiencing and the arid spiritual climate most of us live in, it may be that the best way we can observe Reformation Day is to do some serious, prayerful soul-searching. Have we allowed a Laodicean type of acedia to settle in? We know that significant portions of the Western church are diseased with various heresies. Do they provoke us to earnest prayer? And we should ask ourselves, is Jesus knocking — or pounding — on our door? Are we hearing him? Are we ignoring or even resisting him? Are we tolerating and justifying any idols? One clear symptom of idolatry is spiritual lukewarmness. Tepidness typically does not feel like a grave danger. It can feel like a tolerable and even nearly pleasant malaise. But it is deadly. In this state we do not realize how wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked we are. And because Jesus loves sinful people like us, when we fall into such a state he comes knocking — hard. We often do not recognize it as him at first because he can come in the form of a messenger, sometimes an unlikely one. And the pounding of their hard words can make us defensive and mad. But let us listen carefully and drop our guard. The hard words are painful, especially to our pride. But Jesus (or his imperfect messenger) is not being mean or condemning us. It is the loving discipline of our Savior to warn us. Lukewarmness means spiritual life-threatening idolatry. The cure is for us to “be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:19). If Jesus is knocking on our door, let us welcome him in fully that we may eat with him and he with us (Revelation 3:20). Accepting his unsurpassed invitation to joy through repentance and reformation may be the greatest way to celebrate Reformation Day. Article by Jon Bloom
