Awakened by the Spirit
God answered W.F. Bryant’s prayer for a sweet spirit and “signs following” with a 2:00 a.m. wakeup call.
From the time of his salvation at the age of fourteen, Bryant had recognized the spiritual danger of anger and malice that too often filled his young heart. He hungered for God to do a work in his life.
Bryant home as it appeared in 1896.
Almost twenty years later in 1896, William Martin, Milton McNabb, Joe Tipton and William Hamby preached the doctrine of sanctification in a revival at the Shearer Schoolhouse near Bryant’s home. Brother Bryant carefully observed the results of the revival, and he was particularly amazed when those claiming sanctification went to people they had wronged and made right their relationships. He began to seek God for the same kind of experience in his own life. After much struggle, dying to his “selfish nature” and forsaking everything, Bryant was able to testify of his own sanctification. His personal experience did not come in a church house or a prayer closet, but while riding his horse near his mountain home in Camp Creek, North Carolina. He later testified that many also received the Holy Ghost that year.
Persecution quickly followed for those who testified that they were sanctified and filled with the Spirit. They experienced excommunication from their churches, gunfire into their homes, and the dismantling and burning of their place of worship. For Bryant, it was vital that the persecuted flock respond to the violence with love. “We lay on our faces and cried to God to keep us sweet and let us do nothing to grieve the Holy Ghost . . . [and] we asked for the signs to follow us more and more.”
Not long after praying this prayer, the Spirit awoke Brother Bryant at 2:00 a.m., and he agonized in prayer the remainder of the night. Finding himself unable to eat the next morning, Bryant was interrupted by a knock at his door from a man who did not know the Lord. This man’s brother lay sick with typhoid fever and urgently needed prayer. Bryant quickly traveled the four miles to the sick man’s home, where he heard a remarkable confession of both desperation and faith. “Mr. Bryant, I have been begging Mother to send for you ever since two o’clock this morning. I am a sinner, and I don’t want to die in my sins and go to hell. I told her if I could get you, the Lord would heal me.”
Brother Bryant and the others gathered there began to pray. Bryant later testified, “The Holy Ghost fell upon me. We rebuked the fever in the name of Jesus Christ and laid our hands upon him and anointed him with oil. This poor man sprang up in the bed screaming at the top of his voice, saying ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, God has healed me and saved my soul.’”
For W. F. Bryant this miracle of salvation and healing was a God-given sign to their persecutors. Instead of responding to the persecution with malice, the sanctified and Spirit-filled believers offered hope and the power of God to the world around them.
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This article was written by Church of God Historian David G. Roebuck, Ph.D., who is director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Lee University. This “Church of God Chronicles” was first published in the February 2000 Church of God Evangel.
