YES BUT NO

YES BUT NO

                Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.  Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous an can accomplish much. “James 5:14-16

                We regularly pray for each other at church and in the community and the work place and we see God’s hand touch many people wherever prayer is offered in obedience to God. This weekend we had a special prayer and healing service into which we invited the community. It came at the end of our 40 day fast and so it was a wonderful celebration of God’s power and His grace.

                Pastor shared with me after the service that he had prayed in his office before the service saying, “What should I do Lord. What do You want to do? I have nothing. The people are all here. Expectations are high, but unless you show up we have nothing.”

                But from the moment He walked on stage, God took over. The well planned service, the music, the sermon and the regular routine went by the wayside and we went directly into prayer as people started coming forward to be prayed for and soon the altar was filled with people and elders and women of God praying for the needs of our community and for those who had come for prayer.

                I talked to one of the elders later who had come to the service with a bad leg. He had injured it on the job and over the past few days it had gotten so painful that he had to have help to get in and out of bed. He had limped into the service and yet when he was prayed for, His leg was instantly healed and he went on to pray for many other people during the service.

                But not everyone was healed and I was left with the same questions that have plagued me ever since the six year long ordeal with my Dad that ended in his death. My did was a man of faith who had himself prayed for many people and had seen them healed by the Lord, but our fervent prayers for Him over a few years had done nothing to heal the cancer that eventually took his life.

                I thought about how sporadic healing is (If we are truly honest about it) and I wonder why God doesn’t do more to prove His love and His power on a more consistent basis. I do, of course have theories. The church itself has fallen away from the intensity of faith that we see exhibited in the early church, or especially in the life of Jesus. Also, in reading about the experience at Azusa Street in the early 1900s we see there a visitation of God when for 3 ½ years everyone that entered that house of worship    (And people came from all over the world to be healed) was healed. If they had missing limbs or eyes or ears or teeth or terrible injuries or terminal illness or whatever, they were instantly healed.

                There was a glory cloud that filled the room where they met and it fluctuated with the presence or absence of William Seymour, and with the amount of worship that went on and when Seymour had the people sing in the Spirit, the glory cloud would increase so that everyone who stood in it breathing in this cloud could breathe more easily and they felt like they were breathing in the presence of heaven. It was like an otherworldly cloud because it did not respond to say a fan such as would normally blow smoke around.

                And the Shekinah fire in the sky above the roof of the church that caused neighbors to call the fire department it too fluctuated with the amount of worship going on inside. It was all so tangible… so real… and the young people who were the leaders of this move of God, (Mostly teenagers) were very bold and confident in their prayers, having no doubt whatsoever that the people they prayed for  would be healed no matter what their infirmity was.

                My conclusion is twofold when it comes to healing:

1.       God answers prayer just to let us know that He is still in the business of answering prayer, but it is sporadic because in this day and age we are generally more earthly minded than heavenly minded. The young people at Azusa were all out 100% heavenly minded, but not religious like we picture piety. They simply believed God and answered His call. They “dropped their nets” so to speak and followed after Him.

                Nevertheless when the 3 ½ years were over, God sovereignly left just as He had sovereignly come and though they lived out the rest of their lives in the glow of those wonderful memories, there was apparently nothing they could do to reactivate the sovereign visitation of God.

2.       So my conclusion is that God still answers prayer, but there are times when He sovereignly appears and He takes over and there is a great deal of difference between God’s sovereign acts and those that we carry out by faith. God visits us at turning points. He met with Abraham, to initiate the covenant under the priesthood of Melchizedek that would eventually become the priesthood of Jesus. He met with Moses to initiate the covenant of law and ordinances that would point forward to the true priesthood of Jesus. He attended Jesus throughout His ministry, reconciling the world to Himself. He sovereignly blessed the disciples and apostles to initiate the birth of the church. He has throughout the centuries met with groups of praying people with a visitation that was out of the ordinary. He sovereignly appeared in the Welch Revival and in the Advent movement to bring back the awareness of His return at a time when because of higher criticism the church was falling away from the faith. He came sovereignly upon the people at Azusa Street to initiate the return of Pentecost to a lifeless church.

                But the Word speaks of a latter rain in which the sovereign presence of God will combine so that the early rain and the latter rain will come together for the final harvest. And while we continue to pray for one another as directed by the Lord and as we seek our hearts and pray for the kind of purity and faith that God can respond to, we are yet going to see one final sovereign act of God… a visitation by which the final harvest of the world will be brought in.

                My theory (And it is not an empty theory, but a biblical one)is that this sovereign visitation cannot come during times of ease since we have become too confident in the things of this world and we have lost the deep hunger that alone can cause God to respond. So God is going to take all earthly support away from us in the days and years ahead and He will bring us to our knees in fear and trembling and we will cry out to Him, so that we pray will like our pastor did before the healing service this weekend, saying: Lord, we have nothing. If You don’t show up we will perish.

                One thing I know and that is that the final harvest will come in times of trouble and it will come upon us as a sovereign act of God and we will then have our final 3 ½ years of glory as God uses us sovereignly to bring in all who are destined to be saved for as it says in the book of Acts:

                “And day by day continuing with one mind in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people, AND THE LORD WAS ADDING TO THEIR NUMBER DAY BY DAY THOSE WHO WERE BEING SAVED.”

                So let us continue to pray for each other, but let us also pray for that sovereign visitation of the Lord that will bring in the final harvest.

                “Be patient, therefore brethren until the coming of the Lord. Behold the farmer waits for the precious produce of the soil, being patient about it until it gets the early and the late rains. Jas 7:7

                So yes, it was a wonderful time with many answered prayers, but no, it was not a sovereign visitation of the Lord and so we must continue to pray for that which God longs to pour out upon us.