If it is God’s heart to heal his people then why does God not heal all those for whom we pray? That is a very legitimate question and a question that we must grapple with if we hold the position that God still heals. Although we may not be able to answer that question fully or with absolute certainty, scripture does give us some specific insights.

First of all, God may not heal if we do not ask. “You do not have, because you do not ask God” (Ja.4:2). I’m amazed at how many people turn down prayers for healing. It is not unusual to run into people who have been taught that God no longer heals supernaturally. Some have additionally been taught that any “so-called healing” is a fraud or from the devil. These individuals have no faith for healing at all or are afraid they will be deceived in some way. When sick, they will go to doctor after doctor but never approach the Great Physician.

Secondly, we know that faith is involved. Matthew tells us that when Jesus returned to Nazareth after beginning his public ministry “he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith” (Mt.13:58). The question arises, “Does healing depend on the sick person’s faith or the faith of the one who is praying?” Biblically, it seems to depend on the situation.

In Nazareth the problem certainly did not reside in the faith of Jesus. Therefore, there were not many miracles because the people there did not believe. At other times, Jesus healed people who had no faith at all because they didn’t know who Jesus was until after they were healed. In John 5, we have the account of the lame man lying by the pool of Bethesda. Jesus asked the man if we wanted to be healed and the man explained that when the waters were stirred in the pool, he had no one to help in get in. From the text, it seems that he did not know about Jesus or did not know that the man in front of him was Jesus. His faith was in the pool not the healing power of Jesus. Yet, Jesus healed him. We can even say that God does not heal because of our righteousness because after healing the man, Jesus warned him to stop sinning or something worse might happen to him.

In James 5, the church is told to call the elders when illness occurs so that they might anoint the sick with oil and pray over them for healing. He then says, “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well” (Ja.5:15). In that case, the faith of the elders (the ones offering the prayer) seems to be the key. And yet in many accounts of healing in the gospels, people were healed because of the faith they displayed.

It seems to me that if a person should have faith because they were brought up in a faith environment or because God has done previous miracles in his or her life, then some faith is a condition for healing. Others who don’t know the Lord or who have had little opportunity to grow in their faith may be healed as an opportunity to create faith or to bring them to Christ. The fact that faith does play a part in healing then begs another question. “How much faith is enough faith and on what should my faith be based?”

Let me begin by saying that I do not believe perfect or absolute faith is required. Remember the man who confessed, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief” (Mk.9:24)! Jesus healed his son even in the face of imperfect belief. It appears from scripture that in most cases, the faith required was the faith it took to come to Jesus and ask. I can’t imagine that all the people that flocked to Jesus in the gospels and received healing were all righteous people showing up with amazing faith. But they did have enough faith to come and to ask.

I also believe that faith progresses for healing. My faith begins with some belief that Jesus exists and that he has power to heal. I then need to progress to a belief that Jesus not only can heal but also will heal because he is good. My faith ultimately is in the goodness of God which I then believe will be expressed through healing. I cannot always be certain that God will heal me but I can be certain that he is willing to heal me when hindrances to healing have been removed. More about those hindrances in my Wednesday blog.

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them.             Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God. When all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. (Acts 3:1-10)

This account of Peter and John healing a man at the temple gait contains a principal that we need to remember as we minister to the world around us. There are things that we can do for people in our own strength that will satisfy their apparent need but there are things we can do in the power of the Spirit that will go far beyond what they can imagine.

This is the story of a man whose vision for life was to accept his disability as inevitable and then to live with his limitations by getting bits and pieces of what the world could offer him. His view of life was that the best he could hope for was enough money to buy food and drink for a day.   He had someone, on whom he was dependent, carry him to the temple gate each day because he believed that his best hope for charity was from those who were going up to worship God. His view of that was correct but his view of what God could or would do for him was limited to the flesh. His hope was simply that God would touch a heart to share a little money for the day. Perhaps, he saw his hope that God would provide his daily bread every day for the rest of his life as faith pleasing to God and, perhaps, it was.   The problem wasn’t the faith it was the vision.

That is true for many of us. We have been taught that God will only work through natural means to meet our needs or to advance the kingdom. So we pray for doctors to do their best. We pray for a good job to meet the needs of our families. We pray for rain when the skies are already full of clouds. There is nothing wrong with these prayers except that we are asking God to guarantee what would likely happen in the natural even without his intervention. Sometimes our view of the miraculous is only one shade different from the natural. I don’t deny that God often works in the natural but I also believe he wants us to have a greater vision than that.

When Abraham and Sarah were told that they would give birth to a son in their late years they eventually defaulted to pursuing God’s promise in the natural. Growing impatient with God’s timetable, Abraham fathered a child with Hagar, a servant of Sarah’s who was a younger woman. When Ishmael was born, Abraham wanted to call God’s promise good but God rejected Ishmael because he was not the child of promise. In other words, the birth of Ishmael was not beyond the scope of what could happen in the natural. Older men had fathered children before. But what about a woman long past menopause? That would require a miracle and so in God’s timing Abraham fathered a son through Sarah. That was Isaac, the supernatural child of promise.

In the story of Peter and John, the man asked for a contribution to the poor. What he got was far beyond his vision of what God would do for him. Instead of a pocket change, he received a new set of legs. Peter and John’s vision of what God was willing to do set the stage for a miracle that brought praise to God because only God could have done what the crowds witnessed with their own eyes. Too many of us serve God in our own strength and ask him to simply bless what we do. That’s not bad but there is something much better. That something is to ask God to do through us what only he can do – something that is impossible for us to do in our own strength and in our own talents.

Even the world can do amazing things in its own strength – remember the Tower of Babel. Even atheists and worshippers of false Gods can build great buildings, feed the poor, fund research, and entertain us in amazing ways. Certainly followers of Christ should provide great architecture, feed the poor, and fund research but at the same time we should ask for more and ask God to do things through us that no man can do. That is what separates Jesus from every other name. That is what identifies Jesus as the only name under heaven by which men can be saved. Our view is that silver and gold given to good causes is a good thing but God is willing to go far beyond that when our vision goes far beyond that.

Today, lets ask God to not only empower men to do the possible with excellence but let’s ask him to do the impossible so that men will give him praise and the name of Jesus will be exalted.  Today’s word – Expect miracles.

I continue to marvel at the people Jesus pursued.  The twelve would have gone completely unnoticed in the “Who’s Who” of Israel.  Their names would have evaporated from history within a generation or two even in their own tribe and family.  They were ordinary or even less than ordinary fishermen.  How many times had Peter gone fishing without catching anything until Jesus told him where to throw the nets? Others had been tax collectors or political zealots who were known to be assassins from time to time.  In Luke 19 we have another moment when Jesus pursues the unknown and even the hated.

This is a familiar story but still reminds us of something important. Luke recalls that as Jesus entered Jericho, crowds began to gather to see the miracle worker from Galilee. In the midst of that crowd was man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.  The text states that because he was a short man he climbed a tree so that he could get a glimpse of this controversial Rabbi who had come to his town.

We also need to remind ourselves that tax collectors worked for Rome and since Zaccheaus was wealthy, he had made his money by extorting taxes from his own people.  He was not paid a salary but lived off whatever revenue he took in above the amount that was owed to Rome. He was seen as a collaborator with the enemy and a willing part of the Roman machine that oppressed Israel. We’re told that as Jesus walked through the city, he reached the spot where the diminutive tax collector was sitting in the tree and stopped just for this enemy of Israel.  Remarkably, Jesus called him by name and told him that they would have supper together that evening.

The text says, “All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”  One of the astonishing things about Jesus was that he pursued and apparently preferred the hated, the down-and-outs, the impoverished, and the slandered over the rich and the religious. Not only that but he did not care that his reputation as a holy man took a lot of hits because of the company he kept. Remarkably, the time has come in America where our reputations will take hits because we choose to keep company with Jesus.  I also have to ask myself the question, “How could a perfect, sinless man be so comfortable in the company of prostitutes, tax collectors, drunkards, and the like?

How often have we heard sermons about a Holy God’s inability to tolerate sin?  How often have we been convinced that God despises sin and turns away from those whose lives are stained with the stuff of sin?  And yet Jesus sought out the very people whose lives totally missed the mark and tended to turn away from the religious instead.  In Jesus we see a God who is drawn to the rejected, who loves the unlovable, who truly does befriend the friendless, and who chooses the low-achievers for his team.  Jesus never left a person where he found him but he found them and loved them before they became great people none-the-less.

I still find that we, as God’s people, struggle with the notion that God doesn’t love us all that much or that God can’t use us for significant things because of our terrible pasts, our struggling presents, or our doubtful futures.  And yet we are the very ones Christ pursued.  We are the ones he went home with.  We are the ones he took from unremarkable careers or hated positions and made them leaders in the kingdom of God.  We are the ones he welcomed as they followed him from place to place – a former prostitute with a highly demonic past and nameless disciples who left jobs or, perhaps, were unemployed and had nothing better to do. And yet those and others like them were sent out to preach, heal, and deliver as representatives of the King of Kings.

God wants to do great things through us and yet we feel so unworthy and so incapable. When the Holy Spirit whispers to us about our destiny or opens doors for significant ministry roles how often do we turn those spiritual opportunities down because we don’t have the experience, the spiritual pedigree, or a faith that moves mountains.  Who among the twelve, or the seventy, or the crowds that followed Jesus from town to town had any of that to begin with?

My point is this.  As we follow Jesus through the gospels, we find him pursuing, loving, and spending time with ordinary people who often had huge issues. We find him hanging around former fishermen who seem very slow on the spiritual uptake. We find him hanging out with broken people who are desperately trying to figure out life – divorced people, selfish people, sick people, greedy people, working stiffs, and beggars.  He wasn’t offended.  He didn’t turn away. On the contrary, he embraced those people and made them his friends and even his confidants.  The truth is that Jesus not only loves you but he also likes you.

I think of us as old furniture full of nicks and scrapes and sweat rings where uncle Charlie always put his ice tea glass.  Jesus, as an artisan and restorer of fine furniture, is not annoyed by the nicks or scratches because each one tells a story.  If it’s broken, he will fix it but he loves to bring the pieces back to life, to give them beauty again, and to make then useful without erasing the very things that mark their history.  No craftsman wants to hang around the new, shiny pieces straight from the factory.  They are boring. They have no “character,” no “story,” so to speak.

Don’t avoid the Master and don’t hide the scratches and the dings of life.  He is quite comfortable with those and will gently make them into something beautiful. Enjoy the day.  Be real with Jesus and remember – he really does like to hang out with you…just the way you are.  Be blessed.

“We were born to live in the realm of the supernatural – the realm of healings, prophetic utterances, angelic encounters, and the gifts of the Spirit.  It should be the most natural thing for a Christian to live a supernatural lifestyle.  If you feel dissatisfied with your Christian walk, it may be because you are missing this all-important element. Jesus didn’t only invite Peter to walk on the water (see Matt. 14-22-33).  By inviting him to risk walking on the water, Jesus was inviting Peter into the realm He lived in all the time – the realm of the supernatural.  And He welcomes us to live there as well. Jesus is looking at you just as He looked at Peter and He is saying, ‘Come.’  He is inviting you to live a supernatural lifestyle.  Can you hear him calling?” (Banning Liebscher, Walking in the Supernatural, p.237).

Why do you think God wrote the biographies of so many men and women in scripture who had supernatural encounters with God, angels, the demonic, etc.?  Think about it. The great majority of those who were walking in fellowship with God experienced dreams and visions, miraculous provision, miraculous deliverance from armies, fire, lions, and enemies of every sort.  They experienced divine favor, divine encounters, prophetic words, unnatural boldness, supernatural strength, and angelic encounters.  Just scan the Old and New Testaments and you will find these things in nearly every life that was attuned to God from Genesis to Revelation.

Children read those things and imagine themselves taking on Goliath, routing armies, healing blind men, blowing trumpets while the walls of a great city crumble, walking on water, and stilling the mouths of lions.  It is not until we encounter adults that we discover that God put all those stories in scripture to show us what he would never do through us or for us but only to show us a multitude of exceptions to the rule rather than the rule.  It seems that God put all those accounts of supernatural encounters in scripture to show us what we could never experience by faith rather than to show us the kinds of things that faith could draw from heaven in our own lives. It seems that God had men pen thousands of scriptures telling us how he used to interact with his people rather than telling how he wants to interact with us today.

I served in churches for 25 years that taught that God did all those things once upon a time, but doesn’t do them anymore.  I’ve never met a person who had simply read the Bible, including the New Testament, who came to the conclusion that God used to do all that cool stuff but stopped doing it 2000 years ago.  They simply assumed that since God did all that cool stuff throughout the pages of the Bible he must still do those things.  We have to be taught that God doesn’t move in the supernatural because we would never conclude that from the natural reading of scripture.

However, I learned that God doesn’t move in the miraculous in our day so well that when I saw the supernatural works of God I didn’t recognize them. If I did see something out of the ordinary I discounted it or found a naturalistic explanation for it. If you think about that borders on blasphemy of the Spirit that Jesus spoke of when the Pharisees witnessed an undeniable miracle but then attributed the miracle to the work of Satan.

When we declare that God used to move in mighty and powerful ways on the earth on behalf of his people but that he no longer does so, the whole story begins to sound like a myth or a fairly tale – once upon a time a great and powerful king used to.  No wonder people doubt the inspiration of scripture. However, those who grow up seeing and experiencing the supernatural moves of God have no problem believing biblical accounts.  Satan has little fear of a God who no longer acts on behalf of his people through miracles and certainly has no fear of a church that only functions in the natural rather than living in the supernatural.  “Christ” comes from the Greek word that means the “anointed one of God.”  Jesus said that the Spirit of the sovereign Lord was upon him because he had anointed him to preach good news.  To be anointed means to carry the Spirit of God and the supernatural power of God as well.  Someone once pointed out that Satan released a spirit of anti-Christ not a spirit of anti-Jesus.  He released a spirit of anti-anointing in a sense.  Not anointing, no power; no power, no danger to the supernatural forces of darkness.

However, if you have the Holy Spirit living in you, you are anointed to live and move in the supernatural just as Christ did.  You are invited to walk on water, still the storms, heal the sick and send demons fleeing. I am convinced that God gave us all the accounts of supernatural encounters in scripture because that is to be the rule for those who follow God, not the exception.  To seek after a supernatural lifestyle is not a pursuit of sensationalism but rather the pursuit of the normal Christian life.  It is high time that the church got after it.  Be blessed today and ask Jesus to work in you and through you in supernatural ways.  It is where he wants you to live.

Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. (Mark  10:18)

Most of us have heard the expression that God is good – all the time. A friend of mine says it this way.  “God is good and he’s in a good mood.”  Statements like that have developed because people, including many believers, aren’t sure that it’s true. People wonder if God is good only part of the time and only with his favorites. Or they may think that maybe he’s good (moral/righteous) but he still seems to be angry all the time. The question of God’s inherent goodness is vital.

Everything in our faith stands on the truth of what Jesus said.  God is good. It is only when we believe that God is good all the time that we can have faith in his promises.  It is only then that we can develop an unconditional trust in him. Anything less leaves us on shaky ground and yet my experience tells me that many believers, in their hearts,  are still uncertain of that goodness.

Satan’s great strategy in the garden was to undermine Adam and Eve’s confidence in the goodness of God. In his dialogue with Eve, Satan implied that God might not be so good.  He suggested that there were many good things that Adam and Eve deserved that God was withholding from their lives.  He suggested that the warning about death related to eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a ruse to keep them from becoming gods themselves. He suggested that God was a liar and a manipulator who was keeping them from the best things in life. The only evil in the Garden that day was Satan.  But Satan always calls evil good and good evil and so he accused the creator of being much less than a good and loving God.

As soon as Eve entertained the possibility that God wasn’t so good after all, she took and ate.  Her doubts about the goodness of God created distrust in the goodness of his commandments because she had begun to distrust his character.  Once we take the step of doubting God’s goodness then everything unravels.  If we can’t trust God to be good all the time then we can’t trust his commandments to be good for us all the time. When we arrive at that perspective, we will feel compelled to pick and choose the commandments of God that we estimate will be in our best interest while leaving the others alone.  We will have to serve God with reservations and maintain control over the most critical parts of our lives because we won’t be confident that he will always act in our best interest.

I’ve discovered through the years that Eve’s distorted view of God seems to be indelibly imprinted on our fallen nature so that even believers often filter out the goodness of God written on every page of the Bible and camp on those moments when his righteousness and the persistent rebellion of men forced him to release judgment on a man or a nation.  That post-sin filter from the Garden casts God as a perfectionistic, authoritarian Father who gives gifts grudgingly and only to those who have recently earned his approval. He is seen as a Father who gladly sends hardship or even illness to teach us a lesson so that we might do better next time.  He is often seen as a father who delights in “taking off his belt” and dealing out his “righteous” judgments.

When that view overshadows the true revelation of God’s goodness, our trust can only be sporadic, our expectation for answered prayers will vary with our perceived personal “spirituality and goodness,” and we will often view every hardship and loss in life as something God has “done to us.”  Obviously, our walk with the Lord and growth in the Spirit will not flourish in such a mental environment.  These misperceptions of God are the very strongholds (see 2 Cor.10:4-5) that keep us from healing, freedom, and moving powerfully in the gifts of the Spirit.

Those things are predicated on trusting that God is always for us; believing his truth about who we are and what Christ has done for us; confronting the enemy with the confidence that Jesus is who he says he is and that he will back us up with his own power and authority. To receive those gifts from God, we must at least begin to remove fleshly filters that deletes all evidence of his goodness and begin to see the goodness of God through the revelation of the Spirit.

If God is good by nature, then he can only do good things.  He can only treat us in good ways.  He can only send us good gifts and he can only want good things for us.  If he is good by nature then he never lies, never breaks promises, never manipulates, and never discards us.  If he is good, then he opposes evil and delights in helping us overcome the enemy in our own lives. If he is good he always meets our needs and always does what is best for us – even when we can’t see it in the beginning.

Is God good?  Jesus said he is. Is Jesus good?  If you said yes then remember that Jesus is the exact representation of the Father (see Heb.1:3). Once I commit by faith to the proposition that God is good all the time, then my eyes will begin to see his goodness in everything.  I will not blame him for the consequences of my own bad decisions or the bad decisions of Adam.  I will not blame him for the works of Satan and I will not have to stand on my head to explain why a good God would seemingly do such bad things – because he doesn’t.

If you honestly struggle with the goodness of God in your life then take Jesus as his word.  Choose to believe that God is good and always wants what is best for you. Then ask the Holy Spirit to begin to enable you to see his goodness in everything and to discern where God is interjecting his grace and goodness even in tragic circumstances created by sin not by God.   Look for his goodness.  Confess his goodness. Confirm his goodness. Celebrate his goodness.  It will change your life and open the doors to your healing, freedom and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in your life. Be blessed by his goodness today.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!     As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned! (Gal. 1:6-9).

Occasionally in his New Testament letters, the apostle Paul went “completely Billy Jack” on certain groups who were trying to influence the church. If you aren’t a baby boomer who watched a lot of movies in the 60’s you may have to do some research on that expression.  In his letter to the church at Galatia, Paul runs quickly through a curt greeting and then assaults a group who had come to Galatia soon after Paul had departed.  This was a group who had come to present a “different gospel” from the one Paul had presented.  It was, in fact, so different that Paul judged it to be no gospel at all and declared a curse over those who had brought the teaching.  The curse was for them to be eternally damned. He was so serious about it that he spoke the curse twice.

What in the world would get Paul stirred up so much that if he had been present I’m certain he would have gotten physical with these “teachers?”   In a nutshell, Paul preached a gospel of grace through which salvation comes by faith not by the stringent keeping of laws and rituals through which a man earns his salvation.  Those who came after Paul were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah but that keeping the Law of Moses faithfully was still a condition of salvation.  Their formula would have been “Jesus + good works + faithful obedience to the Law of Moses = salvation.  Pauls’ formula simply read “Jesus + faith = salvation.”  To add more to the gospel condemns man to a slavery under law.  That’s why Paul felt so strongly about it.  As a former Pharisee he knew how spiritually debilitating living under a religious system could be.

For those of us who have never lived under the Law, that might not seem like such a big deal.  After all, aren’t we as Christians supposed to do good works and keep the commandments of Christ anyway?  Yes, but we do those things as a response to the grace of God that gifted salvation to us rather than as a means to earn our salvation. The difference is worlds apart.

Under any system of religious law we are left to earn our salvation on the basis of faithfulness and good works as defined by the religion.  The problem is that you never really know where you stand.  Somehow I lost my catalogue that tells he how many salvation points are required to get into heaven, how much each good work is worth and how much is subtracted from my total score on the basis of sins and bad attitudes. I also have no way of assessing how much faith is enough faith, how much love is enough love, or how much godly sorrow is required before it counts.  Do Wednesday nights count more than Sunday mornings and do I get bonus points if I drove to church on slick roads? I’m also left to wonder if there are penalties and interest that accrue if sins go unrepented for significant periods of time.

In short, a person can never be sure of his or her salvation if we must earn it or merit it somehow. Islam is a great illustration.  Because it is a religion of works and judgment, a Muslim can never know with certainty whether he will be given access to paradise or not – unless he or she dies in defense of Islam.  Suicide bombers then have the only real assurance of salvation but even then entry is not guaranteed but only highly probable.  But the uncertainty is enough to drive many to blow themselves up along with the infidels in order to get a good shot at salvation.

Whenever Satan wants to derail faithful believers in the kingdom of heaven, he simply introduces an element of legalism into the faith.  He introduces a different gospel.  Ask any pastor who does much counseling in his congregation and he will tell you how many believers stumble through life under the weight of guilt from past sins. He will tell you how many still operate under the unspoken assumption that God’s love is conditional and based on their own goodness or religious performance.  They carry a profound sense of unworthiness that steals their faith in the promises of God.  They don’t feel worthy to ask God for big things and if they do they have no real expectation of having their prayers answered because they are too insignificant or sinful for God to say yes to them.

Multitudes of Christians live with the assumption that continued salvation and the promises of God all depend on them – their goodness, their perfection, and their performance. That is a form of legalism that cripples the church.  Notice how that kind of religious system affected the Pharisees.  If you assume that people earn their way to heaven and you know that not everyone gets in, then you must make assumptions about percentages.  Does the 50^th percentile get a passing grade or must you be in the 70^th or 90^th percentile? If only so many get in, then you are not only invested in doing better but you must also be invested in others doing worse.  The result is that you must tout your own righteousness while pointing out every other person’s failings.  In fact, you might even be invested in helping them fail. Jesus often confronted the Pharisees about their self-righteousness, their willingness to throw stones at others, and their willingness to pile religious demands on the multitudes while not lifting a finger to help them meet those demands. Rules and ritual become the test of faith because only those can be measured.

As believers, we don’t have to have a well-developed religious system like the Pharisees to fall prey to legalism.  Satan will simply point out a few attitudes or weaknesses or past sins that he will highlight as the very things that make us unworthy and unacceptable to our Father.  He gets us to focus on our self and our sin rather than the all-encompassing sacrifice of Jesus so that we feel the pressure to be perfect, to deny our own sin, or to blame others for our shortcomings because we are participating in some kind of vague score keeping.  If we don’t blame others we still always feel unqualified to share our faith, walk in the power of the Spirit, lead in our churches, or ask God to do great things using us.

As I have said before, God isn’t hung up on our imperfections, we are and Satan delights in whispering a gospel to us different from the one we first received.  We were saved by grace and continue by grace.  We serve, we make mistakes, we get up, we dust ourselves off and keep going by grace.  God’s mercies are new every morning and so we are able to put yesterday’s mistakes under the blood of Christ every evening and rise the next morning fresh in the Lord.  We are able to rise ready to serve him and love him in better ways today than we did yesterday – not in order to be saved but because we are saved.

Paul said that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free – freedom to live each day new in the Lord and freedom to know that perfection is not a requirement for salvation.  The faith that we have is enough for today and God will give us more for tomorrow.  Our part?  Refuse to accept a different gospel from the enemy or people who don’t know any better because a different gospel is no gospel at all.  Feel free to be imperfect today in Jesus and love him all the more because you can.  Be blessed in Him.

“In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an evil spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice,       “Ha! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” “Be quiet!” Jesus said sternly. “Come out of him!” Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him. All the people were amazed and said to each other, “What is this teaching? With authority and power he gives orders to evil spirits and they come out!” (Luke 4:34-36).

This account of Jesus ministering deliverance to a person has several common elements with many other “deliverance” accounts in the gospels. First of all, we notice that demons often attend church with those they are oppressing. Most demonic oppression does not entirely control a person but rather influences them. These individuals will function normally most of the time and in most areas of their lives.  They will go to work, go home, play with their kids, have friends, and go to church. However, there will be a small but significant part of their life over which they feel little to no control.

This demonic influence will manifest as moments of rage that are always blamed on other people, hidden pornography addictions, persistent and powerful feelings of rejection, jealousy, bitterness, envy or self-loathing.  They may be experienced as fear, anxiety, or bouts of depression and illness.  Most demonic affliction does not look like the Gadarene demoniac who lived among the tombs, cutting himself and crying out. Most demonic manifestations mimic emotional brokenness and illness that occurs in the natural realm and so we seek treatment from the natural realm. Since there is a spiritual force fueling these issues in a person’s life, therapies offered by the world will not solve the issue.  At best a person may learn to manage his rage, his anxiety, his depression or his addictions but will never feel totally free of them.

Many of us who are afflicted by demons have experienced that affliction so long that we think every human being must be dealing with the same issues and so we try out best to manage our feelings and dark thoughts and believe it is just our lot in life to do so. Our secret hope is that those thoughts and feelings we try so hard to repress will never get out of hand.  However, the enemy wears us down and sets us up and those thoughts and feeling so get out of hand usually with very hurtful consequences.

The second thing we notice in this account that is common to other accounts of deliverance is that demonic spirits know exactly who Jesus is and recognize his authority over them. They often cry out in despair and fear and ask if he is going to destroy them or send them to the Abyss (See Luke 8:31).  I’ve always found it interesting that Jesus didn’t destroy them or send them to the pit of hell but cast them out of a person with the possibility that they would simply go and afflict others.  The primary point however is that demons were subject to the authority of Christ even before the cross.  How much more are they subject now after he has been given all authority in heaven and on earth?  I also know that demons become very uncomfortable in the presence of God. Those who are demonized and make it to church will often feel agitated or fearful in worship or as people pray over them.  They are not feeling their own agitation, fear or even hate but they are experiencing what the demons are feeling.  Unfortunately, there are times and places where the presence of God is hardly evident in church services so that demons will be quite comfortable in those places.  We also know that Satan loves to steal the word of God from a heart before it can take root and so the demonic is often present in church services doing just that. How often are we distracted during worship or a sermon or have random thoughts of envy or lust or judgment toward someone we notice in the crowd or on the platform?  The enemy is stealing the word.

Finally we notice that it requires power and authority to cast out the enemy.  Power is defined as the force with which one can impose his will on another.  When Michael warred against Satan and his angels in the rebellion, Satan and those who had joined him were cast down to the earth.  That demonstrated that the power of heaven is superior to that of hell.  Jesus walked the earth with power and authority over the demonic, disease, and even death.  He had power because the power of heaven backed up his commands. Jesus said that the Father had put more than twelve legions of angels at his disposal (See Mt.26:53). Authority is not power but is what directs power.  When an artillery officer gives the command to fire, his words don’t have the ability to destroy the target but his word’s have authority to direct and release the power that can destroy the enemy. Jesus carried the authority of heaven with him and his commands directed the power of heaven.  It takes both to cast out the enemy, heal the sick. or raise the dead.

In Luke 9:1, we are told that Jesus gave that same power and authority to the twelve. They immediately went out to preach the gospel and as they went they healed and cast out demons. In Luke 10, Jesus sent out seventy-two others with the same power and authority.  The effects were stunning. “The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!”  My guess is that the first time they healed or cast out a demon they were just as surprised as the crowds were who witnessed it.  We struggle to believe the same thing.  We have no doubts that Jesus can heal or deliver or that heaven is more powerful than hell.  What we struggle to believe is that Jesus has delegated his authority to us and that our commands will actually direct the power of heaven into a certain situation. But Jesus promised that those who believed in him would do even greater things than he did when he walked the earth.

We’re told by the writer of Hebrews, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb.1:3).  Jesus is the exact representation of the Father.  In other words, Jesus re-presents the Father. He does exactly what the Father does in exactly the same ways the Father does it.  We are the body of Christ and his ambassadors on the earth.  We are called to re-present Jesus just as Jesus represents the Father – not just in actions but also in character. Character comes through the Spirit but action comes by faith.  In the context of healing and deliverance, faith believes that Jesus will honor our prayers and commands in his name and back them up with the power of heaven because we act in his authority.  The demons know his authority over them. We are the ones who sometimes doubt it.

If the enemy cannot blind us to the authority of Christ working through his church today, his fallback position is to convince us that only a few select people in the church can command demons.  Then we all wait around hoping one of those guys shows up.  Every believer is an ambassador of Christ and walks in his authority. I believe Jesus sent out the seventy-two so that we would know his authority was not going to be given to just a select circle of men but to all who follow him.  My hope is that we will all walk in that authority today believing that when we pray or command with the authority of Christ, heaven will train its gun on the target we have selected.  Be blessed.

Some of the best rebukes or reminders I receive come from books.  Sometimes the rebukes are just easier to receive because no one sees you wince and there is no alter call – just a lingering conviction that you have begun to forget the most important things.  Its easy to be busy doing good things but not the most important things. The most critical thing in good relationships is communication.  Our relationship with God is no different. The people I know who spend the most time in intimate prayer are also the ones who hear God most clearly and who are anointed with the most power.  Have you noticed that most of the great intercessors you know are probably women?  I think it is because women are more relational by nature than men,  Thy know the value of communication.  It’s harder for men.  When it comes to Christian men, God probably feels like a frustrated wife wanting her husband to talk to her rather than working on projects or watching football. Men love to work for God but it’s harder for them to spend extended time in prayer with him.  Jesus was a man but he spent hours in prayer on many occasions.  It made all the difference for him and it can make all the difference for us.

In speaking about Jesus and the “money changers” in the temple, Jim Cymbala writes, “The first century money-changers were in the temple, but they didn’t have the spirit of the temple. They may have played a legitimate role in assisting people to worship, but they were out of sync with the whole purpose of the Lord’s house. ‘The atmosphere of my Father’s house,’ Jesus seemed to say, ‘is to be prayer.  The aroma around my Father must be that of people opening their hearts in worship and supplication.  This is not just to make a buck.  This is a house for calling on the Lord.’… The feature that is supposed to distinguish Christian churches, Christian people, and Christian gatherings is the aroma of prayer. It doesn’t matter what your tradition of my tradition is.  The house is not ours anyway; it is the Father’s.  Does the Bible ever say anywhere…’My house shall be called a house of preaching? Does it ever say, ‘My house shall be called a house of music?’ Of course not. The Bible does say, ‘My house shall be called a house of pray for all nations.’  These things (preaching and music) are fine … but they must never override prayer as the defining mark of God’s dwelling. The honest truth is that I have seen God do more in people’s lives during ten minutes of real prayer than in ten of my sermons” (Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, p.71).

It’s true.  The Biblical record is that Pentecost was launched by a prayer meeting. Jesus walked on water after a night alone speaking to the Father. When his disciples failed at casting out a demon, Jesus told them that prayer and fasting were necessary to cast out that kind of spirit.  Paul calls on us to pray without ceasing. When Paul tried to preach without ceasing a young man fell out of an upper story window and had to be brought back to life by prayer. Peter received a vision that opened up the gospel to the Gentiles when he was on a roof praying. When believers gathered to pray in Acts 4, the place where they were meeting was shaken, they were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word boldly.

Biblically, prayer moves heaven not great sermons or wonderful worship unless the worship is lifted up as prayer. All of those are essential to the life of the church put to be anointed with life changing power; they must be bathed in prayer.  Very few churches truly have prayer meetings any more.  We have conferences, worship nights, sports ministries, support groups, and even community service events but rarely do we gather to pray fervently. Perhaps, that is the primary reason we lack power in the American church and even in our individual lives.  “My house shall be called a house of prayer!”  How amazing would it be if every believer could say that about their own home as well as their church. Just a reminder from pastor Cymbala, but a very important one. May we ramp up our prayer life today and be blessed.

At our church we are kicking off the winter round of Free Indeed which is the core of our Freedom Ministries.  It is an eight-week study of the transforming power of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, who we are as followers of Jesus, and spiritual weapons that bring healing and freedom from the oppression of the enemy.  It’s followed by an experiential weekend of healing and deliverance.  We typically have sixty to eighty participants each time we offer Free Indeed. The curriculum used in Free Indeed was the core material from which Born to Be Free was written.

One of our key texts in the study is from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church.

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Cor.10:3-6)

As we start off a new year I would like to spend several blog entries exploring this important passage.  Paul begins with a statement that simply assumes that Christians live in a state of war. Of course, this echoes his letter to the Ephesians in which he says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of darkness against which we must take a stand.  In that text he suggests that we need to put on the armor of God every day because we exist in a state of war.

I’ve often mentioned the fact that Adam turned over the dominion God had given him to Satan but with the coming of the second Adam, the Messiah, the kingdom of God was re-established on the earth with a mandate to take back everything that had been stolen by the enemy.   The blood of Christ cancelled any legal claim that the enemy had on the earth so the only thing left was to forcibly evict him from the property.  When Jesus launched his own invasion of the earth, war broke out. We push back the lines of darkness primarily by rescuing captives and establishing the kingdom of God in their hearts.

Of course, Satan does not simply sit and watch his kingdom dissolve. He fights back.  The gates of hell will not prevail against Christ and his church but the enemy doesn’t go away quietly.  In this war, Satan engages every believer on an individual basis in an attempt to kill, steal and destroy.  Some days we hardly sense any interference from the enemy while on other days we experience a full-scale assault against us, our family, and the culture in which we live.  Make no mistake, you have parachuted into enemy territory and he is not only giving up ground grudgingly but is often trying to retake ground he has lost – even in your life.

To ignore the fact that, as a believer, you are at war is perilous.  At the beginning of World War II, certain European nations believed that they had made peace or were in a neutral position with Germany. They simply woke up one day to hear the roar of Nazi tanks in the city streets and the click of hobnail boots on their sidewalks. In there desire to avoid war they ignored the realities around them and rather than mobilize for war they simply woke up as prisoners of the Third Reich.

Paul, then, wants us all to know that we exist in a state if war and should live as soldiers who train, prepare, arm themselves, and take ground or defend ground as it is needed.  The most important things he says, however, is that the weapons of this world are ineffective against spiritual forces.  Jesus has made divine weapons available to us and those weapons are empowered by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

The church, in recent years, has too often tried to accomplish Christ’s mission on the earth with worldly weapons. The core of the mission is stated in Luke 4 which is quoted from Isaiah 61.  The mission is to preach good news, heal broken hearts, and set captives free. Many churches have accepted the mission but have armed themselves poorly to accomplish it.

First of all, it requires the anointing of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news” (Isa.61:1). A huge chunk of the church has maintained a very limited view of the Holy Spirit and of his anointing on God’s people. In fact, much of the church has adopted a view that desires the Holy Spirit to act in the context of the ordinary rather than the extraordinary or the miraculous.  Instead of going to war with assault rifles and tanks, the church goes to war with BB guns.

In addition, in a effort to fulfill Christ’s mission of healing broken hearts and setting people free from bondage, the church has run to the self-help section of the bookstore and brought into the church weapons of the world – psychology, twelve-step programs, and counselors trained in secular schools.  Each of these offers a level of help and because there is some improvement the church has assumed that “some improvement” is God’s best. In many cases we have simply tried to anoint the weapons of the world with a prayer and some bible verses but that hardly does it.

Divine weapons require working from an entirely different paradigm and require very different strategies. The New Testament does not paint a picture of people coming to Christ and achieving “some improvement.”  What we see is rebirth, radical transformation, and new creations. That goes way beyond “some improvement.”  Divine weapons can take you there. Weapons of the world can only take you part of the way.

In my next blog we will begin to discuss the concept of strongholds and how divine weapons bring down the enemy even when he has maintained a strong position in the past.  Be blessed and remember that He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world!

This past year, John MacArthur, a well-respected preacher in southern California, published a book entitled “Strange Fire” which essentially denies the validity of the charismatic movement and the current expression of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit. It has stirred some controversy among churches in America and has invited division among “cessationist” churches and churches that believe in the continuing ministry of the Holy Spirit through the manifestation of all the spiritual gifts.

I continue to be amazed that people would push back against healing gifts, prophetic gifts, deliverance, and other miraculous manifestations of the Holy Spirit in God’s church.  It’s one thing to say that there are abuses of these gifts and their expressions. I would agree with that.  There were abuses in the first century church.  It is another thing to deny their existence all together and to consider any expression of those gifts to be deception.

In his gospel, Matthew recounts a moment when Jesus cast out a number of demons from two demon-possessed men in the region of the Gadarenes.  These men were so demonized that they lived among the tombs and were essentially uncontrollable.  The demons, knowing that they were about to be dislodged from their “homes” begged Jesus to let them enter into a herd of pigs that was feeding nearby.  Jesus did so and the entire herd ran into the sea and drowned. We are told in Mark 5, where Mark emphasizes only one of the two men, that when the inhabitants of the nearby town went out to see what was going on they found the man (probably both) clothed and in his right mind.

You would have thought that there would have been a great celebration and that revival would have broken out in the presence of Jesus, the great healer and deliverer of his people.  However, just the opposite occurred.  All the people begged Jesus to leave their region immediately. Of course, its possible that they were upset about the pigs and someone’s lost investment in these “unclean” animals, but I think they were responding to a supernatural moment outside of their experience that essentially scared them.

That’s not unusual and even people of faith can be frightened when God intrudes into the ordinary business of life.  In most biblical accounts, every time an angel showed up his first words had to be, “Don’t be afraid.” When God descended on Sinai the response of most of the Hebrew people was great fear.  When Jesus called up a great catch of fish for Peter and his partners, Peter was afraid. When Jesus silenced the storm on Galilee, his apostles were stunned and I think felt that same sense of panic that all men feel when they first encounter the supernatural.

I believe that is a large part of the “push back” against the miraculous move of the Spirit in the 21^st Century.   Men hunger for the supernatural but when it shows up they often panic. What draws men to “haunted houses” or fuels “reality shows” about the paranormal?  Graham Cooke points out that a hunger for the supernatural is part of our DNA which was attached to us when we were made in the image of God. Although the DNA has been fragmented by sin, we still hunger after the spiritual and something that takes us beyond the natural. It a way, that hunger points us home to heaven.

It seems that we hunger for the miraculous or the “supernatural” while fearing it at the same time.  When demons are cast out, some believers invite those who do such things to leave their church right away.  The biblical record is that whenever God showed up in unusual ways, people “freaked.”  That feeling might be evidence of a true encounter with the living God rather than something to be avoided.

That’s not to say that anything goes.  We are to test the spirits and to test prophecies and even the miraculous gifts of the Spirit are to be exercised in an orderly way.  But what is orderly to God may not be orderly to the religious among us who want no surprises in their interaction with God. The response of the Pharisees was first to deny that miracles happened and that those who thought they had seen something had been tricked or deceived.  When they could not deny that a miracle had occurred they simply declared that it was the work of Satan because Jesus or his disciples had not worked in a prescribed manner that fit their theology.  Religion wants to control life and even control God with rules and boundaries that leave no room for the miraculous intrusion of God into life or a church service.

Again, the biblical record shows us that the nature of God is to intrude into the natural order of things in unprecedented and unexpected ways.  “Let’s just march around Jericho seven times and blow trumpets.  Let’s turn the Nile to blood. Let’s have the leper go dip in the Jordan River seven times. Let’s feed five thousand men plus women and children with a few loaves and fish.  Let’s walk on water. Let’s call this guy out who has been dead for four days.” God chose to intervene in amazing ways in the life of his people with moments that were unanticipated, made no earthly sense, and that scared many of the people who witnessed the invasion of earth by the powers of heaven.  Why would he not continue to do so today?

If a hunger for the supernatural is part of our DNA, then when we block the miraculous ministry of the Spirit in our churches, we force God’s people to satisfy that hunger in other places. I’m not saying that we should seek miracles for the sake of miracles but that we should invite the Father, the Son and the Spirit to show up and intrude in the natural order of our lives and church services in any way they choose. At times, it will be unusual and should be unusual because that is how God has always operated.  For those who have never experienced God in those ways, it might even be a little scary.  Seeing demons manifest for the first time and seeing them driven out for the first time can be eye opening. But God is eye opening.

My hope is that in 2014, we will see the miraculous move of God more and more in our lives and churches, but unlike the Gadarenes, we will not beg Jesus to leave but rather to stay. If we want more of God then we will have to invite God in as he is, not as we want him to be.  And…if there is not “eyebrow raising” going on, then Jesus is probably not present because wherever he went, he surprised people and on occasion, even frightened them a little. Be blessed this year and invite Jesus to do the unexpected in your life and even in your church!