A young man has been totally healed from his allergies since our sumer GKCM camp in Pakistan. The power of God has also been working powerfully through his ministry since then due to the transferable anointing.
Studying the Bible is relatively straightforward these days – if you can come online and read this post you can go to biblegateway.org or a similar site and use the powerful search functions there to research a theme. Take for example the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts. Isa and I looked into this a couple of years ago. We looked for all occurrences of Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles – printed them out in context and then studied the episodes. I won’t spare you the effort by telling you what we found – but I will tell you that this study that we did for ourselves is a firm biblical foundation for our practices in the area of laying hands on people and praying for the anointing and power of the Holy Spirit to come upon them.
One of the big questio
ns people ask about charismatic meetings and manifestations is whether they really have a lasting impact in people’s lives. Sceptics suggest that it is all just emotion and suggestion and therefore somehow less valid. Well firstly, I think emotions are a wonderful thing – especially the positive ones. There is nothing less Christ-like than a stiff, argumentative or dogmatic person who is not able to express or experience the joy, the laughter or the tears of heaven. God created emotions and emotional experiences are wonderful.
Secondly when the Holy Spirit touches people’s lives it has a spiritual, physical and emotional impact which leads to a lasting change in at least one of those areas. Of course, because we are all free, we are free to turn our backs and deny Christ even a matter of hours after sharing with deep fellowship with him – like Peter did. And we would never dream of judging Jesus for his ministry at the Last Supper because of the behaviour of his followers in the days afterwards. So we should not judge the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit based on what people do with it. This is a very subtle and challenging area which takes maturity and discernment to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. By the fruits you shall know them, but you have to remember to ask whose fruits you are judging.
In other words, if you are going to judge my ministry, you can do that by judging my fruits – that is the fruits of the spirit in my personal life. My fruit is not what happens through my ministry – that is God’s fruit. My fruit is the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfull, gentleness and self-control that I am called to exhibit. What happens through my ministry is God’s fruit or the fruit of the Spirit in other’s lives.
Once this is clearly understood, I can then boast in the Lord – about what he has done and give him all the glory. It may relate to someone I know or have ministered to, that is why I can share the testimony, but I don’t take any credit for that – it is the Lord’s doing. I don’t do it to mask or cover up any character deficiencies that I may still be working on, but I testify as an eyewitness that the things the Bible talks about still happen today when we believe and act as we have been called to do. We have been called to be witnesses. We have been called to go into all the world, we have been called to love our neigbour as ourselves etc…
As a teacher of the Bible, my job is to talk to you for long enough to tear down your wrong beliefs and build up true beliefs in order to help you to get access to the truth that is there in the Bible, but I cannot impart hunger or desperation. In the Murree Church Camp in the mountains of Pakistan where I taught in June, there was a desperate young man. He was suffering from severe allergies and was longing for a breakthrough in his life. He asked me to pray for his allergies at every opportunity. We did that. He asked earnestly for prayer for the power of the Holy Spirit. I prayed for impartation. He asked that we intercede for him etc. He asked me for my preaching notes so he could pass on the message if that was okay with me. We copied my chaotic Word.doc files onto his USB stick. During the camp his allergy was not healed but …
We spoke on the phone yesterday morning – 8 weeks after the camp and he reported words to this effect: “Since the camp so many fall down because of the power of God when I minister. I have never seen God touch people like this through my ministry. It is wonderful! I used to preach so many different messages. Now I just preach the Love of God and then I say “Come Love of God, Come! The Holy Spirit touches them. And yes, all my allergy is now completely healed.” He and his wife are pictured in the photo.
