In 2003 I received an invitation to attend some revival meetings that were being held at Pastor Daniel Marins’s Four Square church in São Paulo, Brazil. [Note: These were part of a Global Awakening conference. Daniel Marin was the president of the Four Square denomination in the state of São Paulo, so about twelve hundred pastors and their spouses were present.]
I confess that when I arrived at the church, I was annoyed. I found it all very strange—people were worshiping God in a frantic way, shaking and swaying. Some were lying on the floor and rolling from side to side. I saw all of that and thought to myself, Do they really need all that to talk to God, or to feel His presence? You see, I was the pastor of a charismatic Baptist Church and we believed in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and in tongues, but still, the things I saw at the meetings were too much for my understanding.
Suddenly, as I was judging all that I saw, my leg started to shake without anyone touching me. I did not understand anything about that kind of revival and I wanted my leg to stop doing that, but I could not stop it. I had some people from my church along whom I had brought to the meetings, and I thought, What are my people going to think if they see my leg shaking like that? In an attempt to stop my leg from shaking, I held it with my hand really tightly. But instead of stopping the leg, it got worse because then my hand also started to shake. I looked over my shoulder to see if my people were seeing this, and then my arm and shoulder started to shake. Before I could understand what was going on, I felt myself on the ground with my whole body shaking, impacted by a wonderful presence of God. I stayed there on the floor for hours, having a visitation from God.
After the meeting was over, I managed to get up with some help. I got to my car but could not drive home because my legs were still shaking so badly, so I asked a member of my church to drive my car and take me home. I heard that there would be some training at the church the next morning, so I went back for it. At that point, I didn’t care anymore about what people thought—I knew it was God, and I wanted more.
When I got to the training, though, I remember thinking, Why do they teach about healing? There’s nothing to teach! God heals whomever He wants to heal. We just pray, and if it is His will, He will heal. There’s nothing for me to learn here. I could not have been more wrong! I learned more about healing in that one morning than in all my years of training to become a pastor.
On the third night of the conference, Randy taught on impartation. Afterward, he began to pray for the presence of God to touch people. I remember him saying, “All the people who are shaking, feeling electricity, heat, energy or some manifestation of God’s presence, please come forward and stretch your hands forward with palms up, as if you’re going to receive a gift, because the Father will give you gifts this evening.”
Many people went to the front, including me. I was shaking intensely. Randy came up and asked me if I had rubbed some kind of oil on my hands. I told him that I had not, but once he mentioned it, I could also see that the palms of my hands were covered with a large amount of oil, so much that it was dripping to the floor. I told him that I hadn’t put anything on my hands and that such a thing had never happened to me before.
Randy looked at me and said, “The miracle anointing is upon this pastor!” When he said this he breathed on me, and the anointing fell on me so hard that I flew backward about ten feet. I knocked a bunch of people to the ground with me as I touched them with my anointed hands, and I got stuck on the floor for a couple of hours, shaking and impacted by the power of God being released on my life.
Again that night I could not drive my car, so a friend drove me home. When I got there, all I could do for the next three days was cry. I cried for three days and three nights straight. There came a time when I had no more tears, but I could not stop crying because of the presence of God. During these three days and nights I ate nothing. My wife tried to convince me to eat some food, but I could not eat or drink at all; I could only cry. She asked me why I was crying so much, and I told her it was because of God’s presence. I realized later that during that time God was healing me of a wound that I had deep down in my soul. The first miracle the Lord did in my life was in my heart. He was getting me ready for something big, but I had no idea of how big it would be.
After the third day of crying, I got up very hungry in the afternoon and went to a bakery near my house. On the way there, I got a word of knowledge for healing. I knew it was a word of knowledge because I had learned about it during the training that Randy had given us. When I arrived at the bakery, I stayed connected with the Holy Spirit to find out whom the word of knowledge was for. When I went to the cashier to pay for my pastries, I felt that the word was for a lady standing in the line. I walked up to her and asked if by chance she had a pain in her right shoulder.
She looked at me wide-eyed and asked, “How do you know that?”
I told her. “I’m a Christian, and sometimes Jesus tells me things He wants to heal for people.” She then told me she was in terrible pain in her right shoulder. She could not lift it at all due to the pain. I told her that when God gives a word of knowledge, He wants to heal, and I asked if I could pray for her. She said sure, so I placed my hands on her shoulder.
Startled, the lady said, “Oh, do you mean now? Here at the bakery? Don’t I have to come to church or something?”
“Yes, now,” I told her. “God can heal you right here at the bakery. You don’t have to go to church. I will pray for you with my voice down low and my eyes open; no one will even notice that I’m praying for you.”
Then she replied, “Okay then.”
I placed my hands on her shoulder and prayed under my breath, saying, “Holy Spirit, come; in the name of Jesus, shoulder, be healed.” I finished this short prayer, which I had learned from Randy’s teaching, and asked her if she felt any better.
She tried to move her arm, and to her surprise—and to my surprise, as well—she was totally healed! She could now lift her arm and touch her hair, something she could not have done at all before. She marveled and glorified God for her healing, and I instructed her to look for a church near her home to attend. I told her to tell everyone about what God had done for her. She said she would and thanked me, crying.
From that day onward, the Lord continued to use me in several places. Wherever I went, He gave me words of knowledge and I would pray for people who would get healed. It happened at the butcher’s, at the supermarket and in many other places.
On the next Sunday after my visitation and impartation from Randy, I started to preach as I always did, but there was something different about me. God’s presence was evident in my life. At a certain time during worship, I quickly shared my recent experience and invited people to come forward to receive prayer for healing. I had about five hundred people in my church, and most of them came to the front. I came down from the pulpit to minister to people with the laying on of hands. When I raised my hands to pray for them, they began to fall under the power of God, filled with the Holy Spirit. Some were shaking, some were laughing and some were being baptized in the Holy Ghost.
Even though I didn’t get to pray for them directly, a large number of people who were sick were healed instantly. One woman had an illness in her stomach, a terrible infection that doctors could not heal. She spent a week sick at home and fifteen days in the hospital, but it amounted to nothing. She came up for prayer that morning, and the anointing was so strong that she fell on the floor, and then people saw a three-inch-long maggot crawl out of her nose. She was instantly and completely healed. She was not a Christian and had been involved with witch doctors, but that morning she got her healing and gave her life to the Lord.
Soon after that, I began to receive invitations to preach in several regions in Brazil. I went to all the places where the Lord led me, and in all the meetings God healed a large number of people. In July 2011, I was in a large meeting with Randy Clark again here in Brazil. Randy’s spiritual son, Ed Rocha, prayed for me. I fell to the ground, and I felt terrible and wonderful crunches in my belly. Ed got down on his knees beside me, took off his watch and placed it on my wrist, saying, “A new season is being opened up by the Lord in your ministry. A new time will arrive and it has already begun. You will be invited to minister all over South America, and the level of your anointing will increase.”
At that point I had not yet left Brazil to minister. Sure enough, not long after that night I got invitations to preach in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. It has been a year since Ed gave me that word, and since then, I have been to all the countries in South America to preach about the power of God to heal. I have ministered to literally thousands of people who have been touched by the healing power of Jesus. I have prayed and seen over eighty blind people recover their vision, over seventy deaf people receive their hearing, over thirty dumb start to speak and over sixty lame walk. Many other signs are manifested during my meetings. Gold teeth, pins, screws and metal rods in people’s bodies have turned into bone or disappeared, and many people have recovered the ability to move a limb that they could not move before due to the metal. You can watch hundreds of such video testimonies on YouTube under my name, Marcelo Casagrande. I thank the Lord and glorify His name for the life of Randy Clark, whom God used to forever change my life and ministry.