Living life in the Spirit………
So
listen, I grew up Catholic and when I transferred to a Christian high school
things begin to change for me. I learned a lot about the differences with
Religion vs. Faith, and went on to accept that God wanted a personal
relationship with me. So when I was fifteen years old, I began my personal and
intimate relationship with God. Sounds funny right? The God who created the
universe, who created you and me wants to have a personal relationship with
you. Yet, it’s true and you can see this all throughout scripture. Anyway that
is not what I’m here to talk about. What I want to talk about is this person
called the Holy Spirit. I am not going to go into doctrine, and the theology in
this blog I’m simply going to tell you some personal experiences I have had
with the Holy Spirit. Whether you chose to believe any of it is up to you, but
it doesn’t negate the fact that it actually happened. Kind of like the wind,
you can chose not to believe in it because you can’t see it, but you can see
the effects of the wind when it blows by the way the trees bend and sway.
Essentially you can feel the effects right?
I’m not going to go into great detail on the 4 encounters I have had in
my life with the demonic occurrences. The main reason being I don’t think the
attention is needed, but more importantly to keep the focus on the main subject: the Holy Spirit. Now I’m not sure why the demonic occurrences happened to me,
people I who have heard the stories in detail say that God has a huge calling on
my life and Satan/the enemy is mad and is doing whatever he can to derail me
from that calling. For some of you reading this, the very subject matter stirs
up disbelief and fear, which is exactly what Satan would want for you to
believe, that he doesn’t exist. Just
makes his job that much easier, so I’m praying you give this blog some real
thought as you read on.
On the
other hand maybe some of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about
and may have had experiences yourself with this kind of thing. The reason I
even bring it up at all is to say this, if the demonic and the experiences are
real, then what about the other side of things. Scripture says that when a
person accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and for the salvation of their
sins, the Holy Spirit comes and rests inside of them. We see this clearly when
Jesus was baptized in the four gospels. Your body then is the temple of the
Holy Spirit.
Maybe
you grew up in a church where the Holy Spirit was talked about and was a nice
idea but you never really knew what it all meant or the fact the Holy Spirit is
an actual being. What about the book of Acts in the bible, do you still believe
these kinds of things still happen with Christians today? Praying in tongues,
physical healing, prophesying? And if it isn’t going on and/or you don’t believe
it, do you ever wonder why? I know for me personally, I was tired of living a
so-called “good Christian life” but not ever seeing the power of God work
through me to reach others. I became comfortable operating in my own power and
doing my ministry and left the Holy Spirit out of the picture. The more I learned the more frustrated
I got. Then when I went to training camp for this world race, things began to
change in an all too real way for me. For the first time in my 13-year
relationship with God, I began to see the Holy Spirit move and work in ways I
had never seen or imagined before.
I will blog more on how all of this came about, and more
stories of how the Holy Spirit has worked in my life in some crazy ways since
being on the field. For now, I just want to share two stories from last month
with you.
first is to tell you about the picture below, a Pilipino boy named Ton-Ton.
This night, I was attending a birthday party for a boy named Michael. Everyone was dancing and having fun, but I wasn’t able to join in due
to the fact I was in severe pain with kidney stones. So when Ton-Ton came over
and grabbed me by the hand to join the dancing, I explained to him my kidney hurt.
Now he doesn’t speak English, but he was able to understand I was in pain, so my teammate, Liz said you should pray for him. He began to pray over me
for three minutes in his native language, which is Tagalog. He laid his hands
on my kidney and when he had finished praying the pain was gone. Some might say
it’s just a coincidence, but I assure you it’s not. God used this boy to bring
physical healing to my body. Ton Ton’s faith was so great in that moment that he
didn’t hesitate to pray and ask God to heal me. God, in fact, answered his prayer immediately and this is just one way
the Holy Spirit worked in my life through someone else in the Philippines.
second story goes like this, my friend Robby who is a squad leader for the
N-Squad is what we might call a “spirit filled and spirit led” Christian.
Meaning, he truly walks in the power of the Holy Spirit and you can see evidence in his life by the way he lives it. One night, he grabbed me and
talked to me for over 3 hours about how him and many others can see this
anointing God has placed on my life. When we wrapped up our conversation, he
prayed over me for maybe twenty minutes and prayed God would continue to reveal
new things for me and show me how to better walk in the power of the Holy
Spirit. So as we walked back to our room, he said, “you know what, you should pray
for me.” I asked, “what would you
like me to pray for”, he said, “Just ask God, that is how this works”. I prayed and when I had finished he
asked me if I prayed in the spirit, or in other words do I pray in tongues. I explained that I had a few times in the past but wasn’t sure what to think about it all.
He then simply explained that praying in tongues or “in the spirit” is
basically when you personally have no more words to say and you just let the
Holy Spirit intercede for you as you talk to God. This brought new clarity for
me because like most of you reading this, praying in tongues freaked me the
heck out.
quiet for like a minute or so then it just happened. I was praying but it wasn’t
in English, it was this other language and as I was praying I received some
information I felt God wanted me to relay to Robby. I then prayed in English so
he could understand me and more importantly hear what God wanted him to know. When I had finished telling him, he looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “you are a prophet Mike.” There is no way you could of known some of the things
you just prayed for and said to me because I never told you. He then went on to
tell me how when I prayed in the spirit that he felt this overwhelming presence
of God, that when my words ceased the Holy Spirit took over. Hearing him
genuinely describe his experience as I prayed confirmed to me that the things I
once thought were “weird” or Christians “taking their faith too far” now had a
lot of validity because I am now experiencing these things first hand.
write to you guys more on my experience so far on this trip dealing with the workings
and the person of the Holy Spirit but I wanted to write and share these with
you. I pray you will push past the unbelief and the skepticism and allow God to
reveal to you something new because it’s only when you do this will you ever
experience the true power of the Holy Spirit and His work in your life.
