As I was worshipping the Lord in my room in the early hours, the Lord reminded me of a particularly intensive encounter I had had with him a year earlier while listening to Martin Smith’s “Great is thy Faithfulness”.

While listening to this song, in the middle of a Swiss traffic jam, I had a total emotional meltdown and the Lord said ‘I am giving you an anointing of faithfulness that you will need and which you will also be able to release to others’. Since that day, I had experienced a new freedom and security and my wife and I were able to minister with authority to people’s whose lives were affected by unfaithfulness.

Now in Ogembo at five in the morning the song came up again in my i-tunes playlist and I felt a similar stirring of my emotions, which I can only express as the npassion and the compassion of the Lord for the hurting and for those who think they are incapable of making different choices.

So that morning in the sessions, we came to a time of ministry where I told that story and said that I believed the Spirit of Faithfulness was going fall on any who wanted it for their marriage of their relationship to God. As I declared this, some people began to vibrate and to shake. One man began to strongly manifest in a crude, sexual manner. One person whose mother had been involved in disreputable activities, fell over in his chair. He remained in a deep healing encounter with the Lord for 30 minutes at least.

Another lady fell to the floor and began to get delivered. At some point I rebuked the Spirit of Condemnation and she later reported that this left her and led to her complete deliverance.

Condemnation vs grace

It is interesting how the enemy keeps people in bondage not just through their sin, but also through condemnation. When we accept condemnation, we accept the identity and no longer expect to overcome. But when the voice of condemnation is silenced, then we can receive the grace and the assurance of forgiveness, which enables us to live from our new identity and bear the fruit of the Spirit.

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. (Galatians 5:22 ESV)

In the afternoon Joseph Tea preached on the life of Joseph with the title “Making Jesus King and not just Saviour”. He brought to life the story of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph’s choices – an apt subject in this AIDs ridden community, where in the words of the youth leader “Everyone is having affairs”.

I am convinced that lasting transformation is only possible when there is a foundation of grace, and the unconditional love of God, which is expressed in healing combined with the proclamation of clear and biblical ethics. It seems to me that with all the enthusiasm for the supernatural, some people downplay the importance of the simple dos and don’ts that Jesus took time to teach in the Sermon on the Mount or elsewhere and which occupied much of Paul’s writings.