The Secret to Fruitfulness
The Sabbath year is
over, I’ve shared with you how it ended, but I’ve got some stories still to
tell, some lessons I haven’t decanted yet, that I have yet to share.
Last year Xander and I spent
some time at New Wine conference. Robbie Dawkins was speaking. He’s big, loud, larger than
life, American, and so charismatic it hurts. In a good way. Probably. He was
speaking on healing, because that’s his thing, and I was so inspired. Inspired
because here is a man who is living out the early Acts/early Army stuff today. He
gave me a picture of what it can look like to live with that same daredevil
faith and supernatural power that has inspired me for as long as I can
remember. He made it real for me. And then he got everyone activating it.
Now, I have always
believed that God heals. Theoretically. I believe Jesus did it in the Bible,
and that the same power is available for us. I’ve heard stories of people being
healed, not just back when, but now, around the world. I’ve even seen it
happen. But I’ve really struggled to get my head around the fact that God could
work through me to heal someone. That's the hard thing to get our heads around about the Incarnation, isn't it? God isn't just remote and mysterious, but here and now, and what is possible for Jesus is possible for me.
At the end of
Robbie Dawkin’s session, he got everyone to stand up who wanted prayer for
healing. Then he got everyone to stand up who’d never healed anyone before. So,
with trepidation I stood up. I’ve heard someone teach before that with healing,
as with everything else, it’s wise to start small and build your way up, so you
should work on praying for ear ache before healing cancer. I was silently
praying God had given me someone with a mild head cold.
But no. The lady
stood next to me had every conceivable thing wrong with her. I can’t even
remember it all. Problems with her back, shoulders, neck, legs, feet,
bladder. The whole shebang. So, I prayed, laid hands, gritted my teeth, waited
for disappointment. And. God. Healed. All of it! All of it. I was blown away,
and more than a little surprised. I shouldn’t have been. This is God, it’s not
me, I can’t heal anyone, but why wouldn’t he?
That started the
healing ball rolling for me. Then we noticed as we were preaching through all
the Scripture references to Sabbath, that Sabbath
and healing are intimately related, so we thought we should probably give
it some airtime. We taught all the times where Jesus heals someone on the
Sabbath, then gets in trouble for it.
The thing about
healing is, and the Pharisees never quite got this, it is never work. We don't try harder, or squeeeze out good results. The
hardest thing we have to do to see someone get healed is to put ourselves out
there. And that can be hard. But we don’t do the healing. We offer. We pray. We
trust. And then we wait for God to show up. We create opportunities to see God
move in power. It’s a microcosm of what God does through Sabbath – he teaches
us that the real work, the real fruit happens as we create space and allow God
to move. We get out of the way, stop trying to make it all happen, and wait for
him to show up and do the things he loves to do.
This last year,
while we’ve been ‘doing nothing’ has seen more fruitfulness than the previous 3
years put together that we've been here.
This last year, I
had already seen more healing than in all my life previously. As we were
preaching about Jesus healing, we started equipping our people to pray for
healing for each other. It’s happening. It’s exciting.
Then out of the
blue, an angel appeared from one of the other churches, with the know-how, the
energy and the skills to pull together Healing on the Streets (affectionately
known as HOTS). At the end of June (during our week of 24/7 prayer), we
launched a team of people who go out onto Banbury High Street every other week
to pray for healing for people. There’s a team of around 25 people, from 6
different churches. Our newest Christians and our oldest stalwarts are all
getting involved. As we pray, our faith is increasing to believe for more.
We’ve seen some
amazing healings and some beautiful encounters with God. We’ve seen people
coming in during the week for more prayer, people joining us for Sunday
worship, people coming back to relationship with Jesus, people finding freedom.
The beautiful thing
is that this is not for the spiritual superstars, or the person at the front,
the televangelist. You don’t have to achieve some great measure of faith or
experience. It is God doing the work.
The secret to
fruitfulness is not healing itself. The secret is that we can’t do it. We have
nothing to offer. Only God can do that. If only we could remember that far more
of the time. The best we have to offer is to make ourselves fully, freely
available for God to move in and through us.
These are exciting
days.
Comments
Post a Comment