Me: Hi, I’m Mary, “Fire Starter for Jesus,” for online publishing. Welcome. I’m glad you’re reading this post. Consider watching while you read.

Me: Good morning.

Bill: Yeah. Hi, Mary.

Me: I am here with my friend Bill whom I met at Seattle Revival Center a bunch of years ago.

Bill: It’s been a while, probably ten years at least.

Me: Yeah, at least. Bill was leading a soaking prayer class at the time.

Bill, when I was in your class, we met in a couple of different spaces, maybe more, maybe three. Sometimes it was in the prayer room and sometimes it was up in the sanctuary. (People were laying on the chairs, bringing blankets and pillows.) Sometimes there was another room near the prayer room downstairs where we were meeting. So, over the years I experienced you leading “Soaking” as well as doing some Saturday morning, even all-day Saturday teaching seminars, on different topics that were related to developing one’s relationship with God.

You did a lot of leading in different ways. I appreciate you and your ministry and the spirit that you carry; the kindness and the gentleness that you lead with, and the way you help people encounter Jesus Christ. And I thought it would be good for the people reading to have a chance to meet you in this way and hear something about your story; how you began this journey of drawing close to God and then helping other people learn how to encounter God. So, would you like to tell your story?

Bill: Sure. Thanks Mary. I met Jesus in 1981. My relationship began out of crisis, dramatic crisis. I cried out to God. It wasn’t a deep commitment. He didn’t become Lord. I was just scared, simply scared, and I had no way out.

Initially I don’t honestly remember feeling anything during those first couple years. It wasn’t until later, in crisis mode, that I finally made a decision for Christ. That was where it began. It was probably around July of 1982, that I just said, “If you can do something with this life, do something.” I felt absolutely nothing.

About a year later after hanging out a lot with Christian brothers, all of a sudden I felt something! Something became real on the inside of me, which began a real journey and a quest to experience this person that was so distant.

I had grown up in a Lutheran church, and I had some perspective of God, but I didn’t know him. Yet I was craving for more of a relationship with God.

About a year or so after that, I was crying out to God, “What do I do with this thing, this relationship?”

Someone handed me a structured way of developing prayer, which I needed. I needed structure. I had known no structure most of my life. I had never held a job for more than three months. I was a mess in the military. Nothing was stable in my life. And so, I got handed this ministry that had structure at some level, making it possible for me to begin this relationship, pretty much one-sided, but it established me in a lifestyle of spending time with God that I’ve been able to maintain for the last 44 years.

It began to open up in me such a drive to know God. So, I spent gobs and gobs and gobs of time in the word. I spent gobs and gobs of time listening to ministries that helped establish me in a relationship with God. For the next 10 years I was grounded in God’s word. That was probably one of the most important things, to get grounded in God’s word. So, I had a sense of security and safety; knowing what and where I was going was focused on God. It was helpful during that season.

Probably about three, maybe even four years into this this initial relationship with God, I started to experience the presence of God. That’s kind of like hook and sinker for me.

There is a ministry out there by a guy, Chapman, called Five Love Languages. He talks about five different ways people are wired to be loved, and what really activates knowing that you are loved. One of those love languages which was a primary for me, I discovered, was physical touch. Without realizing until later, I just had this insatiable hunger for God’s presence.

So, late at night I’d have my pillow up against my face and I’d listen to old cassette tapes while wearing headphones. I would be worshiping the Lord as loud as I could, with my face in the pillow, and the presence of God would show up. I would have these amazing encounters with God!

That set the stage for my passion and quest. Who is this? Who is this presence? Who is this person? The word tells us God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Well, I wondered, what does all that mean? I had this quest to know. For several years, I found this presence in the things that I did. Yet I still, inside, felt very empty. There was something missing. I was searching for something that I couldn’t seem to acquire, even with all the time I would spend praying in the Spirit and time in the mornings with the Lord every day. I still felt there was something inside that was missing.

It keyed off in 1994. God started to pour his Spirit out in Toronto. I was just gloriously impacted and freed and delivered of a lot of stuff that I’d carried all of my life. I think the Lord told me 20 years of guilt and shame were instantly wiped from my life during that encounter. But even afterward there was still something missing.

About 12 years later I was in a series of meetings in Canada when the Father himself met me. I had been a Christian already 26 years. The experience I had been looking for all my life, I had just now found. Before that time, I was a very driven, hard person. My wife, Linda, would have said that I was really, really, hard. Hard to live with until that time.  I had an intense passion for God, there was no question about that. I had incredible hunger for God during all those years. But it wasn’t until that encounter with the Father and knowing how much he loved me… that was the simple message from that encounter, he loved me. And all I could do was cry because I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing at that moment. I couldn’t believe that there was anybody who could love me this much.

Even though I had such a quest and a hunger for the presence of the Lord before that time, that is when the revelation of soaking prayer became a real thing to me. All I wanted to do was to soak, spend time, absorb, embrace, drink, feed on this incredible love that the Father had for me.

As a kid growing up, I never knew a father’s love. I never knew, really, a mother’s love. I saw… and during a divorce, there was all sorts of chaos. I became an orphan in my own home. So, I had no connection with real parents at all. I remember high school years were just horrible! Horribly alone! I’m surprised I didn’t intend to commit suicide during those times because I was so alone. So, I got into lots of drugs, lots of pornography, lots of anything that could somehow numb this pain that was on the inside of me.

But at that moment, in April 2006 when I had the encounter of the Father, something all came together. At that point in time. All of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God, I finally found you!” All I wanted to do for years is live in this experience of him loving me. That became the primary thing and largely since that time, to know that he loves me.

I have a particular scripture that I love: 1 John 4:16, “And we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

The discovery for me here was: 1) Know by experience. 2) And believe. Now, I believed God loved me before then, but I had never known the experience of it in a deep intimate way. The focus was not on me loving him; it was a focus on him loving me. This verse says, “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” If you see the context there, he’s talking about us abiding in his love for us.

That is so key to understand. It’s all about him loving us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his son.” It’s all one purpose, one focus, from the beginning, and it goes on to eternity. It’s all about being loved by God because from there comes all the fruit. I remember a pastor leader spoke on this a number of years ago. His name was Jack Frost. He said, “The revelation of the Father’s love for you and I is the bookshelf where all the rest of the books rest!”

So everything’s founded on the fact that he loves us. James Jordan said, “It’s learning to live in the ongoing experience of him loving you.” That’s key. You  want to know about the meaning of John Chapter 15, the vine and the branches and the bearing fruit passage? True fruit flows from an understanding of him loving you. Also, it’s in 1 John Chapter 4, “We love because he first loved us.” We know that the first commandment is love God. Love our neighbors as ourselves. But you can’t give something that you haven’t received. You can’t walk in something you don’t know. And so, this becomes the essence of what soaking prayer is about: learning just how to receive.

He is more excited and hungry to spend time with you and I than we could possibly imagine. So, when we soak in prayer and become still before him, he becomes the God who loves us on a personal level. “Be still and know that I’m God.” Learning to be still in a receiving mode gives you the ability to encounter him. And you know what? We are built to encounter God! It really begins from a place of intimacy, where he comes to us and reveals himself. And you know what? Our lives become an ongoing, one after another, encounter of him. First and foremost, him loving us. Then we have the grace of God to love others and do the ministry that he has for us.

So soaking prayer is simply learning how to receive. When you’re an infant, the first few years you don’t give a whole lot, except the kinds of things that come out of your body that you really don’t want, you know? As a child, we learn how to receive. Soaking prayer is just learning how to be a child again and just receive in simplicity, the heavenly Father’s love, the love that he has for us because that’s how it’s all built. So anyway, that’s my two cents and the short version of my testimony.

There’re so many things we’ve seen, so many miracles. We’ve seen people healed. We’ve seen people delivered. We’ve seen all sorts of things in a group setting. And we still to this day we do Tuesday nights. We do a soaking prayer because we value learning how to receive from God.

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Copyright 2025

Links:
Bill’s website: https://www.encounterhislove.com/

Entire video interview: https://youtu.be/KewCM5SGPlI