Anthony Stanley recently shared his testimony about askeing God to show him if He’s real.
Right then and there, he encountered God.
His Life Growing Up
At a very young age, Anthony knew Jesus. But when he went to college, he struggled with sexual sin.
“I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, that was nothing I wanted to do because of, again, looking at my family, seeing them strung out on drugs and drinking alcohol, it’s just something I said I’m going to stay away from,” he said.
Even though he tried to stay away from those, sex was something he couldn’t resist.
“I would have different girls like all the time, and I reached a moment in college to where I said I’m tired of this lifestyle I said I need to know if this God that I serve, that I felt when I was young, His presence, I need to know if it’s real,” he said.
He Asked God to Show Him if He’s Real
So, he prayed. “It was a Saturday night. I’ll never forget it, it was from 9:00 a.m. all the way to 9:00 p.m. I prayed that long, praying to God, asking Him to come into my life. Asking Him to show me if He’s real,” Anthony said.
He prayed: “Lord, if You’re real, you need to show Yourself to me, like right now.”
Anthony recalled some of the services he had attended over the years.
“And you think you’re different but then you go back with the same struggles,” he said.
So he prayed again: “God, no, I don’t want any of that to happen here today. I need to know that You are real and You’re the true and living God.”
The Encounter
He kept praying and crying and nothing happened. He didn’t feel anything.
Anthony concluded that God’s not real. That’s until He showed up.
“So I grab my broom and I begin to sweep, and like a mighty rushing wind, here comes the Holy Spirit into my apartment, knocks me face first on the ground. And for the first time, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. I’m speaking in a whole another language, and I’m like this is totally new for me. I looked up and here’s this cloud hovering over me and I knew it was real,” he said.
Anthony thought he was hallucinating. But as he looked up, out of the cloud a voice came and it said, “Anthony, I called you to be a prophet to the nations.”
He Asked God to Show Him if He’s Real And He Appeared
Furthermore, the voice said, “I’m going to use you and what I want you to do at this time is I want you to leave school and I want you to go back home. I’m going to raise you up to be a worship leader and I’m going to use you in a great capacity. The prophetic is going to be something that you master and I’m just going to do a lot of different things in your life.”
He called his mom and she had just been praying for him!
“I said, “I just had an encounter with Jesus,” and she started crying on the phone. We were just crying on the phone and man, I can tell you that was the day that I fell in love with Christ because He showed himself to me. He showed me how real He really was,” Anthony said.
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