GEOFF WINTER
"I was in and out of church for 17 years but I never knew God. I was to be 'confirmed' and did their one week training, and when Dad asked me if I was going ahead with that ritual, I said 'no Dad. Unless God makes himself real Dad, I am not going to serve him'. I turned my back on religion and decided to throw myself into work.
I made money shearing sheep, erecting fences and although considered young, took on a job as share milker on a rough farm in Tokoroa. Three years later I was given the opportunity to buy a 900 acre farm down the road a Maori lease and freehold it. I took in a half partner and after breaking the farm in, was milking 400 cows. I bought the 450 acre farm next door also, so turned into a workaholic. I was cranking along doing what everyone thought was wow he's making it, but inside there was a real destitution. I had many insecurities, didn't like myself and was hiding behind the demanding farm life. During this time I got married but it was so hard as I was running a big farm 1450 acres, working really hard and neglecting my family.
After my wife had our 3rd daughter, she got post natal depression and told me she wanted to leave the marriage. I feel into a black hole of depression. I had built this farm to support my family, but in the end I had lost my family. I couldn't love my wife, and I didn't know how to fix our marriage. I would have walked off the farm but my business partner, who wouldn't let me go. 'You built the farm, built the fences and cowsheds, you cant just walk away.' He suggested we put a share milker on, so at 30 years of age I was 'retired' with a sharemilker in place, but I was deeply depressed, clinically depressed. Once our daughters were old enough to all be at school, my wife wanted to sell the farm and take her half. She didn't want me as a husband and was never going to forgive me. It was a horrible time. During all this I sought the help of every Doctor and Psychiatrist taking all manner of drugs to try and get me through the depression.
After months of hell, my Mother who had become a born again Christian told me all I needed was Jesus. I thought this was ridiculous cause he had never helped me before and I wasnt going to believe in anything I couldn't see. I pushed her away and kept on the cycle of medical appointments and taking the drugs prescribed. A few months later my Mother challenged me again and asked me to just go to church with her. The Pastor said 'there is somebody here today who is stressed out and needs to give their life to Jesus. I looked around me thinking 'no one knows me here so it can't be me. But it was me! Eventually as my Mother nudged me, I went up the front and challenged God, 'if you are real, make yourself real. I know I'm a sinner and if there's a hell that's where I'm going. I can't serve you God unless you show me your'e real. I will repent of my sins and love you, and if you can forgive my sins and love me and make something out of a broken man's life, then I am yours. I started opening my Bible each night not knowing how to pray or seek God, but at the end of 10 days, Jesus came into my room. When I woke that morning the whole room was filled with His power and glory. My body overflowed with waves of love, joy and peace flowing through me. I didn't want to breath or move in case I broke the intimacy with God. It felt like heaven was there and I never wanted to leave that place. I didn't see a physical form, I just knew He was there. I felt my heart beating wildly and although I could hear other sounds in the house I knew that I knew that I knew God is real, my sins are forgiven and in Him I have hope! [Ephesians 2:8 for by grace you have been saved through faith] God will give you faith. I was an atheist but now had faith. As I got out of bed God gave me a song and a gift for writing songs. I'd never written a song in my life before but I was singing a new song and dancing. I looked over to check my meds to see if I had overdosed, but no. I had a profound sense of knowing I was forgiven, I had a destiny. I knew heaven and hell are real and God was real. My eyes were opened wide. 33 years of ignoring God, drinking, blaspheming, idolising the world, lusting and hating and now I am saved by a God who loves me. I wept and cried and cried".
"I phoned my wife and told her I had become a Christian. If she didn't love me before, she loved me less now! She said 'he was a workaholic and now he will be a religious nut!' If I tried to share God's word with her she would turn away. I felt there was no chance of reconciliation and my marriage was over. I didn't understand what I was really doing, but put my marriage and family on the altar before God. I knew God was real and I would serve him for the rest of my life. I started going to every meeting to learn and grow closer to Jesus, yearning for His love and closeness. I was so happy, it made my estranged wife so angry. I had ruined her life and she was never going to forgive me".
"One day an Evangelist came to town and my wife heard he had the same story as me. Successful multi millionaire who had an encounter with God and now he's left it all behind and is an evangelist. She decided to go to the dinner meeting so she could challenge him. As the meeting began asked 'if anyone here is not saved put up your hand'. She thought she would play his silly game and put up her hand. At the end of the meeting, an invitation was given to anyone who wanted to give their lives to Christ, to come to the front. My wife thought she heard him say anyone who put your hand up at the beginning of the meeting come to the front. She found herself at the front and being led through a prayer to give her life to Christ. She thought I don't know how I got up here and this is not what I want. Later she told me, 'she turned and saw me weeping and thought ,even though I don't love him, I didn't mean to give him hope that I would become a Christian'. When she returned to the table she said 'I'm sorry Geoff, I haven't done anything". I replied "the Bible doesn't say get all religious or go to church, it says seek God and you will find him. How long will that take? she asked. Well it doesn't say in the Bible, but I suggest 10 days. So for the next 10 days my wife cried out to God 'well God this is your chance. If you're out there here I am, otherwise I'm out of here and leaving for good with our girls'. On the first Sunday in that time frame she came to church with her armour coating on. Arms folded she wanted no one to touch her or be loving towards her. People commented to me how hard she was. The second Sunday, again she came to church with folded arms pushing people away. Nothing happened. That afternoon at home one of our girls became sick. 'Well Geoff' she said 'I've done that dare thing and and this is day 10 and nothing has happened. I will stay home with our daughter and you go to evening church'. I told her I would stay and she needed to go to church on her own. She entered the church alone and sat by herself. In the middle of the service God flooded her with His presence and the love of God came all over her. All the bitterness, pain and hurt, He took away. Absolutely transformed her, melted her. I had a brand new wife. This lovely lady, my wife, who had become so hard protecting herself, now it felt like, we had heaven on earth. It was phenomenal for us both.
GEOFF WINTER continues
God had transformed my world. "I had my health back, and my wife back so I decided one day to challenge God to find how He wanted to use me. I got down on my knees and cried out to God, “Show me Lord if You can use me on this farm or show me clearly if you want me to move off?” Our farm was on a main road and as soon as those words came out of my mouth there was a person banging on the back door of our farmhouse. I got off my knees and went to the door laughing: “This is going to be God showing me how he is going to use me?” It happened so immediately after I had just let the words out of my mouth asking Him to make it clear to me, so I thought it couldn’t possibly be God, because it was so fast. Little did I know about the ways of God at this early stage in my Christian walk. I opened the door to find a man seeking help for his broken-down car. 'Can you help me? he asked. I told him I’d have to take him half a mile down the road to the cowshed workshop to help him get it fixed and as I was going down to the workshop, I found there was a second vehicle broken down outside my farm gates with a family of Indians inside. I was thinking how bizarre this all was that within just a few minutes of my prayer these two cars were broken down outside my gate and people were knocking at my door, could this possibly be God speaking to me? As I took the first car down to the workshop, I yelled out the window of my car to the Indian family, “After I’ve fixed this man’s car I will come back and help fix yours!”. I went down to the workshop and fixed the first man’s car, and he wanted to pay me, but I said, “I don't want your money, see all the farm out there as far as the eye can see is mine, but I do want to tell you about the amazing way that Jesus has healed me and my marriage and changed my life.” I didn’t even know any Scripture, but I just shared the power of what God had done in my life. The man replied, “my wife is a born-again Christian and I've been mocking her for years”. At that stage I didn’t know what had happened out of my conversation as I watched the that man drive off with his family, but a few weeks later the man's wife drove a few hours up from down country to the farm to tell me that her husband was so challenged by my story, that he’d gone to church and he and their son had given their lives to Christ and they were now born again Christians. Hallelujah!
I went back to the second car to see what I could do to help them, and I remember thinking to myself, this will be a hard job, because they are probably Hindus and they will probably want to stone me if I talk about Jesus. But Jesus was now the greatest thing that had ever happened to me and the most powerful blessing in my life and I wanted the whole world to know about Him. I had determined I would speak up to anyone that would listen, and I wasn’t going to draw back now. After I fixed their car, and it burst back into life, they were nodding their heads and saying, “we want to pay you, thank you, thank you, “ but again I said I don’t want your money, I want to tell you the best thing that’s ever happened in my life, and I shared my story of Jesus and his incredible power. I was expecting an adverse reaction, but they all began smiling profusely. I asked them what was going on here and they replied, “We’ve all just become born-again Christians, and we are on our way to be Baptised, and when our car broke down, we were praying and asking God to show us He was with us, and He led you to us to tell us your story and fix our car.” We were all rejoicing at the goodness of God". God brought this ministry to my back door and God was making it very clear he wanted to use me where I was on the farm now!
The Scripture in Matthew 10: 32 – 33 really convicted me that I needed to stand up and confess my faith man or God would be ashamed of me, because he said, “whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. 33 But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven."
This struck so deeply into my heart, because I thought, I can't preach, I’ve never been a public speaker, but maybe I could write my testimony and publish it in the local newspaper. I wanted to stand up for Jesus and tell the world how Jesus had transformed my life. No one at my church had done anything like this before but I determined I would do it. Unfortunately, my skills as a farmer weren’t in writing, and I procrastinated because I couldn’t get the thing written, and while I was delaying, things on the farm seemed to go backwards. I was getting really concerned about the way I seemed to have lost the blessing of the farm when a friend of mine challenged me that maybe it was because I hadn’t put my testimony in the paper like a said I would? This was a real struggle for me, but I forced myself to stay at home till I had written it and sent it into the newspaper. As soon as I sent the testimony in, things on the farm seemed to start going well again. I kept checking the newspaper to see when my letter would come out in the press, but it was never there. But at the end of the season when the dairy farmers have their final milk fat pay out, there it was. It had been published in the newspaper alongside an announcement for the final payout for the milk fat that year. Every farmer was looking to see what was going to be paid for that season, and right alongside their announcement was my letter titled, “Farmer finds Jesus after tough rural life.” I had not put the title on it, but someone in the office had put that great title on it. I now see that God had held it up all this time so that it could be published alongside this announcement for the final payout so that every dairy farmer in the South Waikato would see it. God is amazing and all things are possible with Him! People were so encouraged because I was standing up for Jesus, and it provoked other Christians to stand up and share their faith and people got saved through this public testimony of Jesus Christ as my God and healer"!
"God kept me on the farm for 9 years with so many people breaking down outside my gate. He raised me up, called me out of nowhere, gave me a gift of writing songs and I produced an album. Then, He told me it was time to leave the farm, leave it behind and walk by faith. God had taught me how to pray, how to heal the sick and how to drive out demons. But now he was calling me to leave the farm behind and walk by faith. God took me to a small-town where he began get me ready for my real call and mission in life. For a start with all my zeal I found I wasn’t finding a place to function in the local church but for the next eighteen months I kept up a prayer vigil for the town, even though I felt there seemed very little happening. Doubt was creeping in, and my family was struggling with our decision to leave the farm if God wasn’t going to use us? I cried out to God, 'Jesus, I didn't leave my farm for this. I want to see souls saved, healings and miracles, please use me?” That same day yet another car broke down outside my property and a Maori man of local marae came in to ask me for a tow rope. I could see he was in pain and he told me he had a bad back. I asked if I could pray for him and God healed his back. They were so encouraged they brought a lot of the Marae people down to meet me and they asked me if I would I plant a church on their marae. God performed miracle after miracle amongst the people. I was introduced to a big man in a gang and warned I would never get him to church. The following week this guy’s father died, and the tangi was held on the marae. I was speaking to a group of people and noticed a baby stroller roll off and over the bank with a baby in it. I dived over the bank to rescue this young one and give it safely back to the parents. It was the gang leader's son. He bawled his eyes out as I gave him back his son. Within a week he was attending church with his partner and family and revival began. 120 young people coming on a Friday night. Families healed and set free".
"I continued to challenge God. 'Show me God what you can do with a man who says yes. I'm going to say yes, and you can do whatever you want with my life'. In 33 years, God has taken me all round the world. I now preach to churches around the world in Pakistan, Uganda, Kenya and have a ministry all over New Zealand praying for the sick, casting out demons and bringing people to Christ".
"I spent 8 years on the road after a move to Hamilton in a job that took me into people's homes. God used me to heal the sick, restore families and bring them into encounters with Him. Then I felt God lead me to plant a church in Hamilton, Manifest Love Church that has grown to several hundred people and outreach all round the world, and if he can do it with me can do it with you! All glory to God who leads us in triumph and all things!"
GEOFF WINTER
Part 3
Pastor Geoff remembers vividly the day he drove away from the business meeting with his partner and share-milker after feeling the Lord tell him it was his time to let go of the farm and step out in faith. It had now been nine years since God had made it clear he wanted me to stay on the farm, but now during a meeting with my partner and share milker, God made it abundantly clear that it was time to let go of the farm and step out and trust him for the rest of my journey of faith. I thought I’d already made the decision in my heart to let go of the farm and it wouldn’t be painful, but I could feel that I was soul tied to the land which I had broken in and developed, and I was grieving as I left my partners after telling them my farming days were over. My partners were crying, because they knew I’d built the farm, but I knew I couldn’t carry on getting more and more involved in the farm while the call of God was calling me to go and preach the gospel! They were trying to convince me to wait until I was a multi-multimillionaire and then go and serve God, but I knew I couldn’t serve God and money and made the choice to serve God!
As I drove back home, I was crying, and just saying, “I’m yours Lord Jesus, take me wherever you want to take me, I trust you for my future!” At that moment I felt I had a little bit of an understanding of what Abraham went through when he left his hometown and just stepped out to follow God.
I knew this is what I’d always wanted to be doing, and it had seemed to have taken so long to get here and often felt as if it would never happen, but now I was here, it was more difficult than I thought it would be to just let go. I drove back home and as I drove into the drive another car pulled in right behind me. I wiped the tears out of my eyes and tried to compose myself to be able to speak to the man. It felt very inconvenient right now when I was in an emotional mess to be talking to anyone but, I would take the time and try and find a way to share my faith with this man. The man was trying to sell me something for the farm, but as I had just openly declared to my partner and share milker that I was selling the farm, I just reaffirmed it now by telling this man that unfortunately I had just sold the farm and I wouldn’t be interested in anything he had to sell, but if he’d like to come inside I’ll give him a cup of tea. When we walked inside, he commented on the Bibles he saw on the table and asked me what was going on, so I quickly shared my story. He then began to explain to me that he had been on his way to deliver materials to somewhere near Whakatane when he got a call to go and deliver some more stuff to Tokoroa, and as he was driving back past my farm gate, he heard the Holy Spirit say, “come into this place and pray for this man!” I was overcome with emotion, as I realized God had set that man up early in the morning and ordered his steps all through the day so that he would arrive at my place at exactly the moment that I drove back into my house after many hours of being away. I felt so loved and blessed that God would have put all this In order so that I would have someone there right at the moment I needed him to pray for me. The man had been on a similar path as me following Jesus and was powerfully anointed to minister to me! I felt so loved and affirmed in this step of faith, and I just howled, because I believe God was using this man as an angel to minister to me as I was taking my step out of the boat onto the water!
"I was kept on the farm for another year while my partners sought finance to buy me out, but I recognized this was God's timing and provision". The Bible explains that “the times and seasons belong to the Lord, and we need to trust Him for the times of release!” We are all impatient, but we can’t afford to run ahead of God. If I had left the farm all those years earlier when I first got saved, I would not have been equipped or able to fulfill the call of God that was on my life. I needed God’s discipline over the last nine years leading up to this time of release, so that I was carrying the anointing, gifting, and wisdom that I needed for the next season ahead! Never run ahead of God, His timing is perfect, and we would all save ourselves so much heartache and grief, if we would only recognize that God truly is in control of our lives and destinies. Character isn’t formed in a moment, but it’s your character, not your gifting that will sustain you through the various faith seasons of your life. The spiritual battle that comes against people is real, but the battle belongs to the Lord, and if we cooperate with the Holy Spirit, He will always cause us to prevail!
This powerful testimony of God’s commissioning of me as I left one season to enter another was truly remarkable, but the next year as I was waiting on the farm it was a year of real testing! I no longer had to work because I was receiving interest on the money that the farm was worth, which paid my wages, but I couldn’t get a hold of anything more from the sale of the farm till the partners had refinanced completely.
You’d think this would be an amazing season of holiday, but God was at work still preparing me to be ready for the ministry ahead of me. The first thing that happened is that I put my back out and was in such crippling pain that I had to stand down from my position in the church as the worship leader, because I couldn’t even hold the guitar to function properly. This began a long season of wrestling with God about healing, and the truth of God’s word as to whether He really is my healer, or should I be using doctors. I read all the Scriptures I could on healing, and wrestled with God through Isaiah 53, over and over and over, claiming His provision for healing, but nothing seemed to come. I went to every healing evangelist I could to try and get healed, but nothing happened. I carried on doing my early morning prayer meetings at the church, but it was in agonizing pain, and I would come home and lie on the floor of the lounge waiting for my day of deliverance. After months of this seemingly endless challenge to my faith in God’s word to heal, I was more convinced than ever that there was no place in Scripture for me to look for another healer apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, but I still wasn’t healed. One day coming home from church I was groaning in pain as I tried to get up the back steps of the house, and I felt God saying to me, “Who do you serve, pain or Me?” It was a eureka moment for me, as I realised that subtly I had made my whole life about avoiding pain, and trying to get healed, and that no, I didn’t serve pain, I served the living God! I chose right then to make a stand in faith, and I crawled my way outside to where I had some big poles on the ground. I put my arms around them and went to lift them, my wife was distraught thinking that now she would have a cripple as a husband, but as I lifted them out of that hole in the ground, I was healed and set free! God had used this whole season to teach me so many lessons about the walk of faith, and I believe if I hadn’t taken that step, I would have still carried on being crippled a whole lot longer. What I’ve come to understand is that faith is spelt R.I.S.K, and it’s never faith if you can see your way through to the other side, but the Bible tells us that, and the word of God is our daily bread, and that His word is our medicine, and there is nothing, nothing too difficult for our God. If we will only believe Him and allow Him to use the process of our circumstances to raise us up, shape us and prepare us for our destinies in the greater things of God, we would be free from so much unnecessary anxiety, and see a much greater fruitfulness and peace in our lives. And so the story goes on!
GEOFF WINTER
Pastor Geoff recalls a healing meeting one night with some visiting prophets from America. "I had never seen demons manifest before, but one man manifested and was spinning on the floor as demons twisted and turned him around and around and he was throwing people off his arms. The prophets commanded the demon to come out of him but all it would say was, “I've lived here all my life and I’m not coming out!” It didn’t seem to matter who prayed or commanded this demon to obey, it just said the same thing repeatedly, “I’ve lived here all my life and I’m not coming out!”
I had just begun conducting early morning prayer meetings and felt like I should have had power to drive a demon out in “Jesus’ name,” but the demon wasn’t moved it just kept saying the same thing, over and over. This threw me into a little bit of a faith crisis, because I thought that these things had to obey the name of Jesus Christ. After the man had come back to his right mind, I drove him home. He remembered nothing of the evening. A few weeks later he phoned me and asked me to pray for his failing business. I said I’d pray for the wisdom of God in the circumstances, and if he would come to the prayer meeting in the morning, I would come with him to his home and see what we could get to happen. After the prayer meeting, we drove out to his house. I sat together with him and his wife at the kitchen table sharing stories about the goodness of God, and everything seemed as normal until the phone rang and the wife walked out of the room. The moment she left the room the presence of God came down very heavy in the room and I said to the man, “Wow God is here!” Suddenly, the demon manifest again, threatening me, “I’m gonna kill you!” He begins aggressively to thrust the table at me, but God had been teaching me through the couple of months leading up to this new encounter with this demon that it wasn’t about a fight between me and the demon, or how loud I could shout, but it was about knowing who I was in Christ and the authority I had in Him. I had learnt that I was protected by Jesus, and I had all the authority I needed to tell that demon what to do. I said, “I bind you demon in Jesus' name, you can't touch me, you're not fighting me you are fighting Jesus, I command you to get down!” The man was again spinning on the floor with pain going all over his body. I recognized that pain could be a demon, and it was a great revelation! I commanded the demon to stop and for the man to come back up to his senses so I could talk to him and find out what he was seeing while this was going on, and he remembered that as a young boy he’d been beaten, bullied and called a wimp, and he remembers a day when something came into him that gave him strength. He then went on to say how he had got involved with martial arts, and he knew he had extra power in him, but it made him very aggressive and hard to live with.
He had suffered with arthritis in his knees and had lost a lot of his hearing and as I began to command the demons to come out of him, they began to speak back to me! What I realised as the morning was going on was that the Holy Spirit had set me up from the very beginning, to be there when this man first manifested at church, and see how hopeless I had been at the getting this demon out, compared with now when God was teaching me, and the anointing was on me to do the work of ministry that I was called to. The School of the Spirit, where the Holy Spirit is in control, and you are led divinely by Him is the greatest school to be trained in. The demons now said, “you don’t know where we live?” To which I replied, “the Holy Spirit will show me!” I said this in faith because I had no idea what was going to happen next. I kept pressing in with prayer and praying that the Holy Spirit would show me what to do next.
When I began to command the knees to be healed the demons shouted out, “it was the tractors, it was the tractors, he was hit by the tractors!” This man had worked with tractors and had had an accident or two over the years where he’d been bashed by the tractors, and I realise now that each one of these demons had taken advantage of legal right that the man had given them as he agreed with the accident to accept the pain and the arthritis. I believe God gave me this insight and now I was able to command these demons to stop their lying symptoms and come out. They contorted a bit and came out of his knees and his knees were healed, but as they did, they also said, “but we got his son!” Again, I didn’t know what to do with this information, as I wasn’t used to hearing demons speak out, and I didn’t know whether to believe them or not, but God was causing them to do this to teach me.
Then I went after the demons that were making him deaf and the demons screamed out, “it was the chainsaws, it was the loud chainsaws,” as their justification for being there. I commanded the lying symptoms to leave, and the spirit of deafness to leave, and the man’s ears opened, and he could hear. Praise God! Praise God! Praise God! It’s so good to be in the school of the spirit, God is so good!
There was a lot more went on, and it was very exciting and exhilarating, I’d been praying for several months without any understanding of what was happening, but God had been preparing me and training me for a deliverance and healing ministry on my way to becoming a church planter. I’d been reading my new Testament round and round each month and fasting and praying and God began to turn up and reward me for all that diligence in seeking Him. He is a rewarder of all those who diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11:6.
I now had new ears to listen to people’s conversations, to find out what legal rights they were giving their circumstances to be tormented by sicknesses, diseases or demons, and it was such a divine revelation that has enabled me to see so many people set free.
I was now able to see clearly how all the demons had been able to get into the man. The bullying at school, anger, rejection, chainsaws, accidents, trauma and shock are demonic doorways.” The demons had a legal claim on the man because he had agreed with his circumstances and not with the word of God. This man had been a Christian believer for many years, and he said to me afterwards, “how come these things had been able to live in me for so long while I was still a Christian?”
I realise now it was only the anointing that could destroy the yoke, and reveal these dark things hiding in him, and I had to have paid the price in prayer and fasting to have that anointing and the knowledge of the authority that I needed to do this ministry. So, after several hours, his son walks in. He walked across the room and kicked his Dad and called his Dad a wimp. This just confirmed that what the demons had said was true, but unfortunately due to circumstances right then I wasn’t able to minister the boy. Demons come down through the generations, this is what generational curses are. The demons in the adults tend to create the perfect environment to be able to demonise the children and bind them with the same demonic chains that their parents were bound with. Praise God that Jesus came to set the captives free! He’s called us all to be anointed and working in the ministry of casting out devils and healing the sick! How about you, you need to make that choice to pay the price and get that anointing so that you can be used mightily by God to do the work of setting the captives free".