One day in 1990 I was walking home and I took a shortcut through our church grounds passing the church hall. I think it was a Sunday after Sunday school. As I was passing I heard an acquaintance - talking to some people asking them who was going to join them to pray to receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. I think he mentioned that they would do it that coming Thursday. When I heard the term Baptism in the Holy Spirit it struck me that I had never even heard of such a thing in my entire life. I had never heard such a term. I immediately became angry at my church because I wondered how it could be that you can go to Sunday school for 16 years of your life - do well in all the tests - and then there could still be something about Christianity that you didn't know. I had not heard that term mentioned even once - not ever. I walked home thinking about this still feeling very upset. When I got to my room I switched on an old radio I had of my grandfather who had passed away. I had been busy cleaning it. I caught the last bit of a program. It was a lady talking about what she called “The knowledge of God”. She linked it to a Jewish word “yada”. Me still being very upset and angry at my church prayed and said “God please give me this yada thing this woman is talking about.” That was my total prayer. I was kneeling against my bed as that was my favourite position for reading stuff or thinking. I took the Bible and opened it randomly in the Old Testament - it opened by Moses and the Israelites. As soon as I started reading I felt an amazing feeling of love. It was very strong. Love towards Moses and the Israelites I was busy reading about and in fact to all people. It was really amazing. And besides feeling intense love I could also understand God’s heart and His thinking and reasoning. It was amazing because all of a sudden I could see God’s intense desire to have a relationship with people. Also that He had wanted a personal relationship with the people of Israel - they never understood that part though and just stuck to the rules and ultimately a religion. I saw that God eagerly wanted all people to be saved but that He had to stick to the rules He had created. He could not save a person unless they asked Him to. He could not override a person's free choice in this regard. His own rules didn't allow it. God really really didn't want anybody to be lost. He could however only save people by a special loophole He created and only if they asked Him to. If anybody even remotely asked Him to save them He would immediately do it. I also saw that God really looked for excuses to have mercy on people and how if we prayed for somebody and asked God to have mercy on the person how that then enabled Him to ignore and set aside the accusations of the devil who was always trying to destroy people by first trying to get them to do evil things that will get them into trouble and then demanding from God to apply the rules on any wrong thing they may have done. If nobody interceded for somebody and the person him or herself did not ask for help or mercy a point could be reached where the constant demand for justice could no longer be ignored. To God this would then be a very regrettable situation. I saw that God really loved people no matter who they were or how they appeared. This impacted me profoundly because it showed me I can accept all people and ignore their outward appearance. This really impressed me a lot because I could see God really loved and were concerned about people much more than they expected. I tried to convey that to people at the time but I found it impossible to get people to understand it. It also changed me in the sense that I stopped blaming people for their bad behaviour. I saw that there were many external and internal factors contributing to who a person became. I also became aware of how the devil tries to destroy people by hurting them and by piling up stuff on a vulnerable person, through friends, through values of “society”, through unkind or seemingly harmless jokes, through judgementality at just the right time in order to try to drive people to collapse and even suicide if possible. Most of all I saw that God was really really good. A really amazing person with an amazing heart. I didn't need to use formal prayers or anything like that to approach Him. I could just talk to Him like a normal person. Some of the things I realised about God’s heart was really intimate and I sometimes felt amazed that God would share such things, things that you would feel God would not want to reveal. In that time I started to read my Bible a lot - for hours and hours. My parents were even worried. In church where I always used to struggle to stay awake, now I was riveted. Wide awake. Absorbing every word the preacher said. This continued for years afterwards. I was also very aware of preachers that were full of the Holy Spirit. You could see God’s love on their faces. I remember during that time, one night, walking home after church or a youth meeting saying to myself: “I don't believe the Bible is true. I know it is true.” Towards the end of the experience after having read a lot of the Bible especially Revelations and the Gospels it became clear to me that many people would lose their faith towards the end or they would be deceived into weird stuff. I remember I started to worry a lot that it could happen to me and that after experiencing God, that was so amazing, that I could actually miss Him at the end of my life. I worried about this intensely and I prayed to God for hours and hours to please never let this happen. This was not part of the experience but it was my reaction to it because it was so real to me. I was young and there weren't a lot of people who I thought could have related so I just kept things to myself. This feeling of love and God’s presence continued for quite a while. I didn't keep track but it may have gone on for 3 to 6 months. At the end the feeling started to slowly draw away. For a while I could get it back if I prayed for like 40 minutes or so. Later it went away completely and I have never been able to get it back again or anything similar to it. It is now 30 years after the fact. The changes it created in my heart stretches even till now even though I have forgotten some of the details. This event certainly also helped me to keep my faith and to focus on trying to follow Jesus. Lastly - one thing that is really interesting to me. When I asked God for knowledge of Him (yada actually seems to imply very intimate knowledge like a husband and wife although I didn't know that at the time) I didn't do it as a planned thing. I had no idea what I was even asking for and the concept itself was new to me. I was just upset. But then looking back at the end result of the whole experience, I received exactly, like in precisely, what I asked for even though I didn't understand what I asked for, extremely intimate knowledge. What God shared was so intimate it was in a way scary in terms of how anyone who shows you their heart is an awesome responsibility not to hurt the person. It was a completely once off experience and the knowledge that I obtained did not come by studying the Bible or anything else. It came while reading the Bible but not only through reading the Bible and also not through the information I was reading. I read the same passages some years later without a similar effect. Anyhow that is how I came to realize that God really exists and that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the God of Israel and the Bible is the one who created everything. ChatGPT-4 on what yada means: In Biblical Hebrew, the word "yada" (יָדַע) is a verb that means "to know." It can be used in various contexts, such as knowing someone, having knowledge of something, or being intimately familiar with someone. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), "yada" is used to describe the relationship between Adam and Eve, as well as the relationship between God and humanity. For example, in Genesis 4:1, the verse reads: "Now the man knew (yada) his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain." In this context, "yada" refers to an intimate, personal knowledge that Adam had of Eve. In other contexts, "yada" may refer to knowing or understanding someone or something on a deep level. It's important to consider the context in which the word is used to understand its specific meaning.
