I have a personal question to ask you. Who is your God? I think that this could be one of the most important questions there is. Our portrayal of who He is has an incredible amount of influence on who we are and how we live and think. Is your God always good or does He pour out His wrath and punish? Is His will on this earth for sickness to be healed or does He send illness to teach you a lesson? Well who is He? So many desire to know!
I have my own portrayal of who He is. If I didn’t, I might be guilty of being a robot. My life has been filled with masks and when one of the many was on, I would agree with just about anything anyone said so that they would like me and there would be no conflict. It got to the point of not really knowing what I thought for myself. Glad that’s over. Who He is to me continues to change and mold as I walk with Him and learn more of His characteristics. One of the best places to look, is in the gospels. Jesus said He can only do what the Father does (see John 5:19). This means that He actually lived out the will of the Father. Good place to start.
I guess what I am getting at is that I don’t want my lack of understanding or experiences to taint and disfigure His perfect form and neither should you. I think that it is so easy for us to explain away our own experiences. I have prayed for healing and then tried to explain away the reasoning behind why we didn’t see anything. When bad things have happened, I blamed Him. I think that so many of us have at some point in our lives, thrown blame on the God who is for us.
I have had bad things happen in my life. Lots of them. Though not nearly as many as so many that I have met around the world. I am not even going to try and have the audacity to tell you why bad things happen to others. But I have no problem telling you that most of the junk that I have walked through had to do with my own failings and sin. Another question that I have wrestled with for years now, is “Why did my mom die?” Well I definitely blamed Him for it for most of those years. Such an important realization that I came to recently is that it’s not His fault. It’s not His fault!
Todd White, one of my favorite “Men of God” has really brought some inspiration to the table for me. Coming out of teen challenge and a life of drugs, he chose to take the gospel literally and started praying for healing. He prayed for close to 800 people before he saw anyone healed. Now when he doesn’t see healing when praying for someone, he is surprised. What is his response to not seeing? He says, “Maybe I need some more faith”. He doesn’t pin it on anyone but himself and not in a condemning way, but in the reality that there is always more for us. Peter carried the presence of God so well that his shadow brought healing. Paul touched clothing that when brought to those in need, cast out demons. Many deliverance ministries these days have step by step ways to cast out demons and are constrained by legal rights. Paul did it without even being there. This is where my paradigm is starting to shift to. I no longer want to explain things away, but know that there is a deeper place to go and that I can always continue learning how to better steward His Presence.
I was in Kenya in May. One of our weeks there was spent door to door evangelizing. On the morning of the third day, the pastor told us that we were going to go and visit their oldest member, Mama Agnes. She’s in her 80’s and walks almost an hour to get to church. As we neared her home, she met us on the road. She said she was looking for fire wood, but I smelled something fishy. It turned out that three days previous, she had had a vision of us coming to her at the very spot where she was waiting for us. So we followed her to her home and were formally introduced to four generations of her family. Before we left, we prayed for her. She had a tumor on her stomach and was blind in one eye. I was quite literally expecting this tumor to either disappear or fall off and her eye to be restored. Nothing happened that we saw. I asked her if she would like us to pray some more. She waved it away and told us how joyful she was for us to be there. I gave it to the Lord and we said our goodbyes.
The pastor wanted to visit another family close and asked Mama Agnes’ daughter to show us the way. As we started walking with her, I received a word of knowledge about pain in her chest. I told the pastor, he inquired, she confirmed. I got excited and wanted to pray for her right there, but was advised to wait until we were at the house. As we walked up, there was an older man sitting next to the gate. The pastor went to shake his hand and he “ignored” it. Turned out that this man could only see shapes. The people we came to visit weren’t home and so we went into their house anyways and prayed for these two. Both were healed and the man that just had his sight restored, had leg pain that had tormented him for a year healed as well. On the walk home we also saw a man’s knee reconstructed by the power of God. Why did some get healed but not others?
Two days ago, in Morogoro, Tanzania my brother Ryan and I went out for a little treasure hunt. We worshipped and prayed and then let God lead. We walked down a random trail and found a Muslim man that wanted to show us around. We told him that we were Christians and he started preaching to us about Islam. Then he said, “Jesu powerful?” with a questioning look. We both rushed to say “Yes”. This is when the strangest thing happened. He took us to a woman with a bad knee to pray for her. She had been in a car accident and could barely walk. I honestly couldn’t believe that he wanted us to pray for her.
For months, my only experience with asking to pray for Muslims had been an awkward no. Now we had one leading us to another to do just that. We prayed and didn’t see a difference. She said thank you and we said our goodbyes. It was now time to say goodbye to our buddy Nasoro. I asked him if there was anything that he needed prayer for. He pointed towards his knee. So Ryan and I got down on our knees, laid hands in his and prayed. I was pretty stunned when a piece of knee that wasn’t there previously appeared and pushed my hand out of the way in the process. I looked at him and he was laughing and unsure. I felt a couple more things pop into place and then we said amen. I asked him to move it around and when that found no pain, he started jumping on it. He then tried to pay us for his healing. We told him it was the power of Jesus that he had been asking about and that it was free. He literally ran off with a big grin and actually came back again to show us how well his knee worked.
Later in the day, we prayed for a blind woman, convinced she was going to open her eyes and see. We saw no change. Why in Kenya did we see a man’s sight restored and a woman’s pain taken away and yet with another we saw nothing? Why a couple days ago in Tanzania did we see nothing with one knee and then power and love with another right afterwards. Why after that miracle when our faith was high did we see nothing with a blind woman? I don’t have all the answers and I am not going to pretend to. The people that didn’t receive healing visibly on the spot were still very blessed.
All being said, I choose to see a God that healed a blind man rather than one that did not heal Mama Agnes. I choose to see a God that healed a lost Muslim rather than one that didn’t heal a blind woman. I choose to see a God that has healed two blind men with my hands rather than one that left the others that I have prayed for blind. Who do you choose to see Him as? What God do you serve?
