As I am reading a biography about the greatest healing evangelist of the healing revival of the 1950’s, I am challenged to reject two popular positions that Christians hold today. The first, and by far the most common, is for us to think that the days of the Bible were unique and special and that we aren’t to expect the things we read about to happen today in our daily lives and ministries. The second position, which is common in some Charismatic circles is that we will see the Bible days revisited one day (at some point in the future) and even that the miracles in the Book of Acts will be exceeded before Christ returns. Both of these positions effectively leave us either romanticizing about the past, or dreaming about the future all the while leaving us expecting very little today.
Then I read about the move of God in the 1940’s and 50’s. The miracles and their frequency was on the same level as what we read in the Gospels and Acts in many meetings. There were meetings in which “all were healed” as was often the case in Jesus’ own ministry on the earth. The healing revival from the middle of the last century serves to destroy the position that views the ministry of Jesus and His Apostles as unique and unrepeatable. It also challenges those that relegate the majority of those miracles to a future end-time move of God.
I read these biographies and am called to account. Why not me? Or if such an individual anointing (as it rested on certain individuals in the Revival) is not advisable due to the almost unimaginable responsibility and demand that such an anointing places on a single person, why not us?
That is my vision. I agree with those who make the point that a corporate anointing (i.e. an anointing placed upon a group/ministry/church rather than on an individual) serves to safeguard against many of the problems that an individual having the anointing alone would face.
That being said, why can’t our little ministry team contend for and expect to grow in the anointing until we too see “everyone healed”? Individual healing evangelists in the 40’s and 50’s saw this happen in a number of different meetings.
Some will dismiss what I am saying by making the ever-so-common appeal to God’s Sovereignty – i.e. that was a special time, where God did a special thing. As spiritual as that sounds, it really seems to be a cop-out for many people to explain away their own current lack of power and unbelief.
With the Scriptures as our standard, and the healing revival (or other incredible moves of God) as our modern-day application, we must believe that God wants to do through us now what He has illustrated is what He always does when we are willing to believe Him – to really, truly believe that He is unchanging, no respecter of persons and that His Kingdom is ever increasing, ever being manifested, and that it is this very same Kingdom reality that we are called to demonstrate to a lost and dying world.
Comments
Post a Comment