By Kelly Shaw
Kelly is a member of the SVM2 international facilitation team and lives among the unreached.
How can we expect God to move if deep in our hearts we don’t believe that He can? Most of us would say that we have faith and that we believe God can move.
But how many of us read through the gospels and as we hear the stories of healing and deliverance simply dismiss them as works that Jesus did, but not for us today?
I want to challenge the status quo. To do this, I would like to tell you a story of an actual event. A message bearer took the gospel to a people who didn’t have the Scriptures in their language.
As the message bearer was translating the Scriptures, he consulted with one of the people to get the best words for the translation. One day he was translating a passage where Jesus healed someone. The local person he was consulting with was sick.
And as he heard the gospel, he asked the message bearer if these words were true and if Jesus could really heal people. The message bearer didn’t believe in healing himself, but didn’t want to tell that to this person who had never heard the gospel before.
Faith arose in this young message bearer that God would have to do this or risk the person not coming to know Christ. After some discussion, the message bearer prayed for the local person to be healed. While it didn’t happen that minute, hour, or day, it did happen a few days later.
That local person received Christ into his heart and influenced many in is community to do the same. As a result a church was planted around this man’s healing.
The time has come to challenge all of our preconceptions about the Scriptures. Whether they come from post-modernism, ultra-conservatism, or anything in between, we need to read the Scriptures with fresh eyes full of faith and expectation at what the God of the universe wants to do in us and through us.
In John 14:12-14, Jesus explains that if we have faith in Him we will do what He has done and He promises to do even greater things through us. But this takes having faith. In verse 11, Jesus says that we must believe that He is in the Father or at least believe in the miracles that He has done.
In other words, Jesus is saying that He really is God because He and the Father are intimately connected and if we don’t believe what He is saying then at least believe in the miracles that testify of His incredible power. God’s power is still the same today as it was then. Will we believe?
If you want to see your faith increased and signs and wonders that would testify to the lost of the reality of Christ, pray the following prayer with me:
Jesus, I believe that you are not only Lord and Saviour of my life, but also God of the universe who has unimaginable power, love, and grace to reach a dying world. Father, I ask that you would help my unbelief.
As Author and Perfector of our faith, I ask that You Holy Spirit would come perfect that faith within me and increase it to a deeper measure. I ask you Jesus to fulfill Your promise that we would see greater miracles than what is in Scripture, not for our benefit, but so that the nations would see Your power and believe in Your name.
Jesus, glorify Yourself through our generation that we might be a generation full of faith and power. In Christ’s name we pray, AMEN.
