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

Popular Posts