“And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?” Judges 6:13
As I was standing in front of a small congregation of people, watching them pour up to the altar to get prayed over for healing, I was struck by the look on their faces of not only a hope that was pouring out from the depths of their souls, but the bright expectations of a childlike trust in God that they would be healed and delivered out of the afflictions that had plagued them for who knows how long. The hope was like a bright light that had suddenly pierced into the darkness of their lives, and their expectations were like a newly found energy that gives birth to a burst of inspiration that God has visited them. And there I was standing in front of them, clueless, scared to death and wondering, “Oh God, what do I do now?”
The church is in Africa, but my lack of faith was still rooted in America. I don’t do miracles. I just preach the Gospel. I don’t know how to call up the supernatural, or snap my fingers and bring forth miraculous healings. I don’t have any stupid self-help book to rely on like, “The 5 Points to Supernatural Healings”. It’s just me – just me, God, and these desperately needy people. But God healed them anyway – the sick, the lame, the deaf, and the desolate. All of them … in spite of me.
It happens all the time over there. But why do we not see this kind of power exhibited over here in America? Where are the miracles that our forefathers saw a couple of generations ago? Where did God go?
Well, the truth is that there really are miracles here — we just don’t see them in our modern sophisticated churches. In my little town alone, I have seen a lady with 4th Stage Cancer healed, a little girl with AIDS healed, a man with Leukemia immediately cured, and many more. I just had breakfast with a man who popped out of a coma just minutes before they were going to pull the plug on him. He was considered medically dead, but God is not constrained by even the threshold of Death. He is only constrained by the lack of serious prayer.
Where is this miraculous manifestation of the power of God in our churches today? Why don’t we see this anymore? Something is missing. There is a disconnect between what we read in the Scriptures and what we see in church.
The answer, as usual, came out of the clear, blue sky. Literally.
If God were to pour out His mighty power and bring forth a multitude of unfettered healings on our churches in America today, He would be setting His seal of approval on an apostate church, and by doing so, would be holding them back from the place of broken-hearted repentance that is so desperately needed to restore them to revival. He loves us more than that.
Use whatever reasons you may. Run on with your myriad of worn-out excuses to dismiss this absence of His power, wax as eloquent as you want with your banal churchy platitudes, but the challenge from Gideon remains unanswered by this generation.
Our prayer meetings for revival are scarce at best — non-existent at worst. And when we do pray, we pray like little girls as we “think” our prayers in our little anemic “quiet time”. We hold hands and submit polite requests in low soothing voices, as if we are afraid to wake anyone up. We are no longer the warriors that called forth the battle that forged our once on-fire churches in the fires of revival. We have become weaklings and have lost our calling as warriors. We just aren’t desperate enough to stand up and fight.
Only when we realize how far we have fallen, and take on Gideon’s refusal to submit to “church as usual”, will we ever be able to rise out of our homogenous mediocrity to take up the arms of spiritual war and reclaim the harvest fields that we have allowed the enemy to take from us.
Prayer moves God, but it takes great prayer to see great moves of God. Only when we have determined in our hearts to rock the Throne of God for a great and mighty move will we see Him rise off His Throne and answer.
There is a price to pay for anything from God. When we are finally willing to pay that price, we will have an answer for Gideon.
Dude, I just loved the testimonies you put up here, so I published them at healingherald.org…. God is alive and well all over the world, doing miracles, signs and wonders and transforming people from the inside out… thanks for posting this. http://healingherald.org/2010/03/god-healed-them-anyway-in-spite-of-me/
Yeah, you should come and experience it live if you haven’t already seen this. It changes your life forever.
Thanks for the testimonies. I want to say that in the past 6 years I have seen repeatedly things I only dreamed of before here in America especially. Including on the streets, at churches, hospitals, old people’s homes. Twice this year I was at a church where close to everyone was healed, and once at a church where I believe it is safe to say that every single person was healed. Amazing things happening on a daily basis, through normal Christians, cancers dissapearing, backs straightening, man released from constant pain and other problems. I know of several people being raised from the dead, including a good friend. Sometimes I am amazed though at how little people talk about what God has done for them. The Bible is clear that we should declare all Gods wonders and not hide what he has done. One place it says that if I were to try to declare His works, it would be too much to speak of. There is really so much that God does that we never hear about, and I’m amazed that so long I saw so little of these things before. I guess we’ll be hearing Gods works proclaimed in heaven forever, and we will never run out of stuff to talk about.
I sure hope that what you’ve been seeing spreads across America. Like you say, there are isolated miracles with ordinary Christians, but they are sparse indeed here in the Bible Belt. I believe there must be an inverse relationship between religion and miracles.
Not so in Africa. Miracles are expected and freely given — from instantaneous healings of all kinds, to heavy anointings, to being slain in the Spirit.
But what is most exciting about Africa is not the miracles, but the repentance. Miracles are great, but they won’t convert a human soul – it is the Word of God that does that. Revivals are not built upon miracles, but upon Holy Ghost conviction.
I wrote this article to allow a peek at the difference between what we were and what we have become so that, hopefully, it will bring us to the point that is really important – broken-hearted repentance.
But, one step at a time …
I’m looking for healings of things, like Alzheimer’s and developmental disabilities and autism. We’ve been going to healing conferences for the past year and one of the questions that came up at the last one was, “Why do you avoid the people in wheelchairs?”
For God, there is no hard or easy. But I think we see it that way. In two years, I’ve been told, around 700,000 adults with autism will leave the school system and try to find work and living situations as adults. The system is already overloaded.
Kansas City–the home of IHOP–has a 5-year waiting list for adults with disabilities, those ALREADY qualified but not receiving any money. These are the people we need to heal in Jesus’ name!
My son is waiting for the power of God to manifest in his body . . .
Back to Gideon. If we are the strong Christians that we aspire to be, the might men of valor that you say, then where, oh where, is the supernatural outpouring of the Holy Spirit like our fathers have seen? I believe the answer lies in the same Book in Chapter 2 when God sent the angel to Bochim. For me, it always comes back to repentance. The problem is that the Church as we know it has no idea of what to repent of.
Not only do I see a picture of the Church of Laodicea, but also of the answer from God to the Church of Ephesus. Yeah, we got all these works and stuff, but we’ve lost our first love for lost souls. In other words, our focus is on ourselves, but the message of the Cross is to focus on others, others, others. But we’ve forgotten that message in our enthusiastic pursuit of church, religion, theology, and personal blessings. We’re blind to the realities of God’s vision and all we can see is ourselves.
It may be argued that I am wrong, but I see something terrible coming to the Church to bring her to her knees in repentance. Only then can the Spirit be free to move as in times past. Judgment is a manifestation of the true mercy of God.
(Sigh) I wish it was the other way around.