Interview With the Osbornes, Part II, Charles


In my last post, I published a brief obituary for Rev. Charles Osborne, rector of Light of Christ Anglican church in Marietta, GA. I got their contact info through Kathie Walters, an evangelist/speaker. In my last post, Myra Osborne told her own story.

My first contact with Charles was an email in which he described a séance that he initiated just for fun. His brother joined him in that venture. Unfortunately, shortly after I interviewed the Osbornes by phone (and after I had digitally saved and transferred the interview) my hard drive fried, and that email was annihilated. What I gathered from the transcript of the interview is that Charles developed a psychic capability, while his brother became haunted in a terrifying way. Neither of them nor their parents were Christians at the time. Later in life, both received the grace of Christ into their lives.

Myra has a gift of being taken “into the Spirit,” a meditative state in which spiritual realities become manifest. She claims that in such a state she saw Vera Osborne, Charles’ mother leave her body at death. She had been on life support until the family could gather. Myra told me, “We all went in the room, and we were standing there, and Charles and his brother were at each side of their mother and praying quietly, and I saw all these angels come in the room. In the Spirit, I’m talking in the Spirit… and, I saw her sit up out of her body, and she said, ‘I love you children, bye-bye.’ And the angels went off.” The angels were light beings, so there is no physical description for this event.

Turning back to the séance, Charles described the terror that his brother went though.
 
It did scare him, and afterward he had some very frightening experiences. Like one night, we were sharing a room, and he had heard footsteps coming down the stairs. He assumed it was one of the pet dogs, and he walked over to the door, and there was a scratching at the door, and then he heard a harsh voice call him by name. It said, ‘Rick, come out here.’ And it just terrified him. He just waited to make sure nothing broke in. He was so terrified he woke me up. And then another time, he lifted up off the bed in the air, you know, and when he was released and crashed back on the bed, he woke me up. He had some terrifying experiences like that, but he never actively practiced anything occult. [JKS: Levitating off the bed is common in demonic attacks and in alien abductions. Here's another instance.]

"I was absolutely terrified of the dark. I would break out into a cold sweat. Nightmares of evil entities grabbing me. Those really increased after that séance experience. So it was like things being switched over from light and love, which is what I learned as a New Age person, and things becoming darker and darker."

After Charles became a Christian, he remained skeptical of something called The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. However, as he read the Bible he felt that it was something important that he should begin to seek for himself. He definitely wanted the manifestation of speaking in tongues.

"I’d been trying to speak in tongues. And when I would try to speak words, all I would feel is just a heaviness, so it felt heavy and oppressive, and I believe that was the demonic bondages that were on me. And so I decided to go to a tent meeting. I came up with three signs I wanted the Lord to do, so I said to my brother, 'I’m going to the tent meeting tonight to receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and if I come home not speaking in tongues tonight, you can take it off your list because I am so starved for God I can’t understand how the Lord could not give this to me.'”

The three signs were, he wanted the minister to call him out of the crowd, he wanted to fall in the Spirit, and he wanted the manifestation of tongues.

"So I go to the tent meeting, and whatever they do, I do. If they jumped, I jumped. If they raised their hands, I figured they were the experts, and they had the Spirit on them, not me. I had been very active in the Lutheran Church at that time. I had been active for a year, ever since I had met the Lord. So the person ministering began to move prophetically in the gifts of the Spirit, and the people began to congregate up in front of the podium, and I thought I’d better get up there because a miracle might happen, and I might miss it. So I got up and worked my way through the crowd in case someone was healed or something, and I wanted to be close enough to see it.

"And this guy ministering suddenly turns to me and says, 'You, brother right there, come here. I see a lot of revelation around you.' So I got up and stood in front of him and two ushers standing behind me, and I think to myself, well that’s sign number one, but this guy thinks I’m one of them. They think I’m going to faint, and I’m a Lutheran. And I thought how funny it would seem to them if they could picture me in a choir robe on Sunday and the liturgy going on and just the contrast between that setting and normal church almost seemed comical. Then I had the thought, I’ve really got to focus here because this is sign number one, so it really seems like God’s doing something.

"I stopped and I silently prayed, 'Please Jesus, fill me with your Spirit so I can love you above every other love.' When I prayed that, this guy reaches out his hand and touches me, and when he did, a bolt of energy shot through me like a bolt of electricity. And I felt it pass through my head down to my feet. The strength went out of me. It continued to run through my body, and I collapsed into the hands of the ushers, and I heard this torrent of tongues, and I realized that it was me speaking. They laid me in the sawdust, and I couldn’t stop this torrent of heavenly language that was pouring through me. And this energy kept running through me for about a half hour. It took about a half hour or so before I could come around enough to crawl out of the sawdust and get over to the front seat and pull myself up off the floor. So that as my Baptism in the Holy Spirit.

"I connected with a friend who had been witnessing to me about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and he put me in touch with an interdenominational prayer group that was meeting during the week. And so that’s when I began to go there and learn about deliverance and began to get bondages broken off my life."

I asked Charles if he had been in an intense deliverance service. O yes, said he. Since the days of the séance he had been in the grip of a paralyzing fear. He would break out in a sweat just walking from his car to the porch.

"When I shared about the fear, one of the leaders of the group said, 'Well, that’s really a demon, so let’s pray.' He prayed and rebuked it, and suddenly I felt this pressure that seemed to rise up within me and pass out of my mouth like a big sigh or something, and when it lifted, that driving, paralyzing fear was gone. Before, I could hardly breathe in a dark room without a light on somewhere. So it took that pressure off. It wasn’t that I never felt afraid in life, but that paralyzing compulsion was gone."

Charles had more to share on the topic of deliverance.

"In 1980 I went to southwest Georgia to visit for a week with a friend, and he was fond of doing deliverance ministry, so we were teaching about deliverance, and he had a charismatic congregation, and people began to experience deliverance each night through the deliverance sessions. Some nights there’d be people laying all over the floor going through deliverance.

"One day a young couple came to see us. They had been trying to have a child and were unable to conceive. They were at their wits end because every now and then the wife would have some kind of emotional breakdown. She would jump up and lose it and begin to shriek and run out of the house in a state of frenzy and would run into trees and into briar patches. And they both loved the Lord and had experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Doctors weren’t able to help. So, they wondered if deliverance prayer might be able to help. We prayed over her, and nothing was happening, so we asked her to just lay down on the platform and just relax on the carpet while we prayed about it, and my friend said, 'Well, perhaps her husband ought to pray.' So the husband stepped over and began to command any demonic presence to manifest and come out. And this girl opened her eyes and her eyes were suddenly glazed and set, and this husky voice began to speak out of her and said, 'You can’t cast me out. I’ve been in here for a long time, and she belongs to me.'

"We commanded it to come out, and it left with a terrifying shriek. Then another personality began to manifest and begin to call us ugly names and threatened to kill us. Said, 'If you cast me out, I’ll kill you.' It tried to claw us, so we had to restrain her hands temporarily. So that left. Another one began to shriek at the previous demon and said, 'You…(some ugly word)… I opened the door for you, and now you’ve run off and left me.' And then this demon began to cry out and shriek, 'Satan, Satan, come and help me. They’re going to drive me out.' And so we began to cut that off and speak the truth over her, and in short order she was delivered from several successive demonic forces. She came to her right mind, never had another episode, went off to Bible School, and began to pastor churches. That’s been quite a few years, but the last I heard, they were happy and in ministry."

Don’t miss Part III. There are more fascinating stories to come. You can sign up for email alerts by going to my profile and leaving your email under "Contact."

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