How Jesus Rocked our World at a Healing Conference: Part 1

You may remember from this post that back in mid-January, I had to cancel nearly all of my tutoring appointments because of how poorly my body was doing.  It could have been quite discouraging.  But thankfully, Jesus had been leading Corrie and me into a renewed fervor for seeking more of his presence and healing power.

And he was answering our pursuit!

At that time, I learned of an upcoming healing conference happening at Bethel Church in Redding.  By upcoming, I mean in a week and a half.  Keep in mind, this was during a time when we had a 4 year old, a three month old baby, a fast-approaching deadline by which we had to move out of our apartment with no place to actually move to yet, poor health for me, and Corrie's regular job at the church.  

With all of these things on our plate, it was not the ideal time for us to take a trip.  But this conviction to pursue healing and more of Jesus' kingdom reaches deep into our hearts.  So I told Corrie about the conference and she, being the amazing wife and passionate pursuer of Jesus that she is, was totally on-board.  And though it wasn't convenient or easy to take the trip right then, we had the "peace that surpasses understanding."  The peace that feels nonsensical to our natural mind, which wants to fix all the storms in our lives. The peace that focuses on Jesus, the source of calm in those storms.

So we drove all morning on Wednesday, checked in to our hotel exhausted, and mustered our energy to head down the street to the conference.  Corrie and I were excited and nervous this whole time.  We had no idea what to expect.  All we knew was that Jesus was urging us to come here, and that it would be different than what we were used to.

Where We've Come From

Corrie and I have for a long time now been hungry for more of Jesus.  Not that he has ever deprived us of himself, but we have felt him telling us, "There is more to my heart and my kingdom than you've seen so far.  Come after me.  Come and see."  Much of that hunger has actually been fueled by this sickness and our desire for total healing.

And that hunger has led us to his Word where we see the Holy Spirit working in power in the lives of the church.  The sick get healed.  The trapped get freed.  Lives are changed and forever different because Jesus has come.  That's what we want for ourselves.  A real tangible difference made by a real encounter with Jesus.

Our church experience for most of our lives was filled with wonderful believers, who loved and were incredibly loved by Jesus.  With wonderful and powerful teaching about Jesus and salvation.  With many very good things.  But the ways of the Holy Spirit and His kingdom are still relatively new to us. 

What all that adds up to is this: We've been getting more and more comfortable with the uncomfortable things that we usually associate with the Holy Spirit and "charismatic" Christianity.  At least in theory we were comfortable with them.  Things like falling down when getting prayed for, demons manifesting in people and needing to get kicked out, speaking in tongues, prophesying, maybe even laughing and dancing…and MAAYYYYBE even shaking under the power of God.

Even as I write this, part of me feels uncomfortable with those things.  And yet, I can't say "no" to them just because they're uncomfortable or messy.  Because, what if?  What if Jesus is in them and I miss that part of him because it rubs me the wrong way?  Or it threatens my dignity?  Or it's messy?

Jesus abandoned all of his dignity for the sake of winning me back.  So who am I to hold on to mine?

What if I let my own reasoning and clinging to propriety rob me of fully knowing a God who is not proper or safe at all, but good and loving nonetheless?  Not to mention powerful.

These were some of our thoughts leading up to this conference.  They're all easy enough to espouse when you're a week-and-a-half and a four-hour-car-drive away.  But it's a whole different story when you're in the auditorium with your wife and two little daughters, wondering, "Jesus.  What are you going to do?  And please let it be you.  And, oh yeah, please heal me also."

The First Night

We got to the auditorium eager for Jesus and healing while also watchful and a bit guarded…just in case.  There was a fantastic time of worship, during which Rebecca blessed our hearts by standing and singing and raising her hands and giving herself wholeheartedly to Jesus.

You could tell that Darcy would have, but, in her words, "I'm just a baby."

Pretty shortly into the service, after the worship, we started seeing "things."  The man leading the service that night, Randy Clark, asked people who needed healing to stand.  He asked others nearby to gather around to lay hands on and pray for them while he also prayed from the front.

All around the auditorium we started hearing people making many, for lack of a better word, uncomfortable noises.  Some yelled.  Some started laughing.  Some cried out in what you could almost call a scream.  

All over the auditorium people were lying on the floor, some even shaking in various ways.  

An Interjection

I want to throw in a couple thoughts here that I'll share in more detail in the later posts about this conference.  These different reactions that we were witnessing, the yelling and falling and shaking can be and were unsettling.  Our mind wants to come up with all the explanations for why this isn't okay, why it isn't God, why it must be at best the people making it up or, at worst, Satan.

You see someone lying on the floor shaking and you think, "Jesus doesn't do this.  Demons do."  But then you talk to that same person and they tell you that during their time on the floor, they were seeing Jesus look into their eyes.  They were feeling him touch their body with waves of heat and electricity flowing from his hands, healing them.

Or you hear someone nearly scream and think, "Why would Jesus terrify someone so much to the point of screaming?"  But then that same person says that they were screaming in pain because God's power was so heavily cleaning them out.  One person even had a vision that Jesus was sticking a flaming sword into his stomach.  And the strange thing is that these people aren't traumatized or damaged.  They're beaming, peaceful, joyful, made new even.

And though these things sound so weird, I am reminded that the Bible is FULL of God doing weird things to people that may have been extremely unsettling.  But the fruit of them was none other than Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  And Jesus said, "You know a tree, whether it's good or bad, by its fruit."

Our Initial Reaction

But that night, watching all of this for the first time, we were not sure what to think.  I was standing to receive prayer, but nothing like that was happening to me.  I wasn't feeling anything in my body like heat or electricity or healing…nothing.  No physical signs that God was actually doing anything. 

We naturally started to wonder, "What's going on?  Is this stuff real?  Are these people crazy?  Are they just stirring themselves into an experience but not really connecting with Jesus?"

By the end of the night, there were people literally all over the auditorium having supposed encounters with God.  But Corrie and I just weren't quite sure.  We got back to our hotel room not knowing whether we should stay and go back again the next day.  It was all just so uncomfortable. 

But you know, that evening turned out to be a fantastic opportunity for both of us to hear Jesus.  Not to go by our feelings or natural thinking, but to set those aside to listen to His voice and to see what HE would have to say.  And in the midst of both of our wrestlings, we each heard him tell us, "Stay. Don't leave.  If you leave you'll be leaving out of fear and judgment, and you'll be missing what I have for you while you are here.  Don't give up.  Not yet."

So, together, we decided to stay.  At that point, we didn't know if what we had seen was really Jesus.  But we DID know that Jesus, the real Jesus, was with us and wanted us to stick with him.

Intrigued?  Read the second installment here...

To read the other parts of our Healing Conference series:
Part Two
Darcy's Interlude
Part Three (coming soon...)

In Marriage as it is in Heaven

Apparently, I'm slightly behind the times because Corrie already wrote a fantastic post on this verse a couple years ago.  But I've recently discovered that the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6 has one of the most foundational verses for healing in the whole Bible. Jesus, praying to his Dad says,

"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

Jesus came, bringing the kingdom of God with him, invading the kingdom of darkness that had been reigning in the earth since the fall.  And here he tells us what that means exactly:  God's will happening on earth in a way that represents the way things are in heaven.

Jesus is telling us to pray--to fight--for God's will in heaven to happen on the earth.  So we have this commission then to go out and change the world until it looks like heaven.  And that's what Jesus modeled for us by healing the sick, raising the dead, preaching the gospel, rescuing the poor, loving enemies and friends alike, saving people from sin.

So when I see someone on the street with a cast on their foot, I can know that there will be no casts or broken feet in heaven.  I get to fight to change that right now.  I get to lay hands on the sick and see them recover, like Jesus promised.  Or when I have a friend with a stiff neck, I know there are no stiff necks in heaven.  So I can pray and see the neck healed.  That's what the Bible says.

But here's what's really exciting:  this goes far beyond just healing our bodies.  This extends into every area of our lives, including marriage.

Corrie and I just went to a fantastic marriage workshop/Holy Spirit surgery session, so marriage is fresh on both of our minds right now.  And our question is this:

What are we believing God for in our marriage?

One of the more common sentiments about marriage in our culture is, "Marriage is hard work."  And that's it.  It's often said with this look of weariness and relief-that-I've-actually-made-it-this-far.  It's a look that should be more fitting for a soldier having just returned home from war.  I know I've been there.  But Jesus is offering me this hope:  God is excited--eager--to give us more than that.  He loves me and my marriage.

I agree that marriage is hard work.  But I don't want to let the fact of the struggle steal my faith for the blessing and passion.  It can be easy to lower our hopes and goals for our marriages over time as disappointment, hurt, and difficulty creep in.  We start to think, "Well this is just how marriage is.  Maybe God is using it to refine me, to make me more holy.  Passion was good at the beginning, but it's not needed anymore."

Corrie and I love each other so much, but we have gone through some difficult seasons.  We've gone through seasons of feeling like just business partners, of not really liking each other, of causing more frustration or sadness than joy.  Especially during the last couple of years as God has been uprooting unhealthy and hurtful things from us.  For me, selfishness, et al!!!

Anyway...moving on...It has been easy at times to think, "Well, this is just us.  This is the kind of marriage that we get: hard with some sprinklings of awesome. "

What's up with THAT?!  That's not God's plan for us at all.  Proverbs 5 says that there is a place, in the kingdom, where I can REJOICE in my wife, where her love is intoxicating to me.  That sounds more like, "Awesome with some sprinklings of hard." 

I know to some of us that may sound impossible after __ years of marriage.  But the Bible says it's God's heart, his will, and Jesus told me to pray for that to manifest in my life.   I get to pursue it with all my being until it comes.  And I pursue it with the full force of heaven, the approval of my Dad, and the power of the Lion of Judah to move mountains. 

In my last post I mentioned that we don't want to let our experience of sickness overpower God's revealed will for healing.  So even if my healing doesn't come at a particular prayer time, we don't try to rationalize it, we keep pushing for more until it does. 

Well, Corrie and I are ready to apply this to our marriage too.  We're determined to not let the times of struggle steal what we know our love CAN be, and IS.  We know that Jesus has a vision for our love of each other that is more passionate, joyful, and fulfilling than we've experienced thus far.  And we've been letting God teach us how to love each other in a way that reflects his love for us and that creates such an intimate powerful connection between us that no power of hell can sever it.

So my prayer for us is, "Jesus, your kingdom come in our marriage.  In heaven there is no bitterness, no selfishness, no distance.  In heaven there is unlimited intimacy and oneness, giving, self-sacrifice, passion, and fire.  Thank you Jesus that the cross's redemption is so far-reaching, even into transforming our marriage."

Bodies don't have to be sick in the kingdom.  It's not what Jesus paid for.  Marriages don't have to be broken, full of pain, sources of strife in the kingdom.  They can instead reflect the oneness that Jesus has with us.  The passion that he has for us.  His passion is a fire that is constant forever.  And if we are called to be like him in our marriages, then I've got to think that passion for our spouses, true LIKING of our spouses, excitement about our spouses has got to be possible for the long haul as well. 

Yes it's hard work.  But it's hard work on the road to the wonderful blessing that marriage is meant to be.

Jesus, Healing, and Childlike Faith

 (I wrote this post a few weeks ago.  I plan to write another update soon.)

Jesus is good.

His love is close and real.

We've been experiencing that so much lately.  In fact, during these last few months, as my body has started to show more of its old symptoms (pain, swelling, fatigue) and even some new ones, our inner experience of Jesus and his reality has been so much greater than it's ever been before.

Yes, you read that correctly.  My body hasn't been feeling very well.  I've had a lot of days of pain and rest.  I've had to cancel my work appointments more often than I've been able to keep them .  I've even begun to see new damage in my joints (namely my ankles and toes).  It hasn't been easy for either of us.

But here's the beautiful thing.  We believe in healing at the hands of Jesus now more than we ever have.  We have to.  The more we spend time in the His presence, letting his Spirit speak to us, the more he shows us the full power of the salvation that he bought for us.

Unfortunately, we can sometimes let the disappointments, the tragedies in our lives shape the truth that we believe.  But in so doing, we cheapen the finished work of Jesus.  We strip him of his power, of his goodness, of his compassion.  And I understand why.  We don't mean to do it.  We just come up with explanations for why our experience doesn't match his promises.  "He hasn't healed me because he has a greater purpose behind this."  "I am still overcome by depression or anger or judgment because it's part of who I am.  Someday, we'll all be free."  It's very very natural.

But we are now called to be SUPERnatural.  And that sometimes means letting go of our explanations.  For we are to "lean not on our own understanding."  We are to instead "trust in the LORD" and his revealed will in his word "with all our hearts."  "For the righteous", we who live and stand confidently in God's favor thanks to Jesus, "shall live by our faith."

For us, with my health, that means that we choose to believe that Jesus WANTS to heal me.  It's easy for us to believe that he can.  Of course he CAN heal me.  He CAN do anything he wants.  That's not really faith.  It's avoiding faith. 

It stems from a mindset that says, "God is all-powerful and thus can heal me.  However, he might not.  In fact, it's more likely that he won't.  And since he won't, it must mean that he must not want to for some greater reason."

But faith that moves mountains looks at Jesus, since his is the "express image" of the Father, and trusts in his revealed will, his heart, his character.  Jesus never denied a single person healing.  When asked if he wanted to, if he willed it, he said, "I am WILLING!"  What's more, he promised that we who believe would lay hands on the sick and they would be healed! 

He didn't say only some would be healed.  Instead, he healed 100% of his attempts and then said, "Go do likewise."  "As the Father sent me so I send you."  "You will do greater works than these."

When the disciples tried to heal the epileptic boy while Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration, they failed.  Did that give grounds for a theology of defeat though?  No, because Jesus came and healed the boy.  Their experience showed nothing about Jesus' desire to see the boy well, about his will.

It's not the Bible that stops at "God CAN heal."  It's our reasoning.  Our experience has seen people get sick and not get healed.  So we start to put on our adult-tinted glasses and reason ourselves out of childlike faith in the outlandish promises of God.  But we can't let what we haven't seen malign the name of Jesus.

So if Jesus walked into the room right now, would he heal me?  Absolutely.  His compassion compels him.  It's irresistible.  It IS his will.  The Bible says.  So we fight for that.  We push into that.  We resist the urge to reason, and we let faith in God's truth shape our experience.