Your Time Will Come

Have you been a believer for a long time? Do you read the wonderful promises of fruitfulness in the Bible? Are you fulfilled and satisfied, or is your Christian life just a religious routine?

Maybe you have already broken out of the religious routine, but you can't see any fruit. You love God and you have a close friendship with Jesus.

You want to win disciples for Jesus. You want to lay hands on the sick and see miraculous healings. Maybe you love Jesus, but you haven't received a miracle healing yet, even though you desperately need healing.

You love God and your trust in God is real and strong, but your hoped-for miracles are not appearing. And you need these miracles because you are disabled by illness, because your relatives are not yet believers, because you must wrestle with financial problems.

In the Gospel of Luke, we find an elderly woman who served God with a faithful heart for decades. She had prayed for children since her marriage, but she never had a single baby. Yet she never became bitter.

Had God abandoned her? Not at all. God had a marvellous plan. She was to experience a miracle, but without the long years of disappointment, God could not bring about this miracle.

Her husband Zechariah was a priest serving in the temple when an angel of the Lord appeared and shared an amazing message.

But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. Lk 1:13 NIV

Elizabeth was to be the mother of John the Baptist, the great prophet who would announce the coming of God's Son.

Everywhere in this chaotic world there are faithful disciples of the Lord who are waiting for the second coming of Jesus. Some are well-known prophets, good pastors, or well-known evangelists, but there are also many unknown saints who are frustrated because their prayers seem to be unanswered.

Are you one of them? Take courage. God has not forgotten you. God has prepared a spiritual army that He will release in the great end-time revival. Hold on to your hope. Your time is coming.

I prayed for years and God healed my depression.
I prayed for years and God saved my parents on their deathbed.
I prayed for years and .... I am not disappointed.

“Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labour; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the LORD. Is 54:1 NIV

Expect the Unexpected from God

 When something strange and unprecedented happens, many Christians are sure that it cannot be from God, but in the Bible, God has repeatedly intervened in unprecedented ways.

Hosea was a prophet in the Old Testament.

When the LORD first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the LORD and worshipping other gods.” Hos 1:2 NLT

Jonah was another prophet. He was swallowed by a huge fish and still escaped alive three days later.

Who did Jesus choose as his first apostles? Fishermen, a corrupt tax collector, a thief. Only Matthew was perhaps theologically trained, and he was the renegade sinner who extorted money for the Romans.

God's Son became an itinerant preacher who was never ordained by men. Nor was he accompanied by respected people.

After this, Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him,
and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Lk 8:1–2 NIV

Who was chosen by God to be the first witness of his Son's resurrection? It was actually a witness, Mary Magdalene, ‘from whom he had cast out seven demons.’

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. Jn 20:18 NIV

But the apostles did not believe.

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons.

She went and told those who had been with him and who were mourning and weeping.

When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it. Mk 16:9–11 NIV

In the Bible, God chose witnesses who were not taken seriously by most believers. The Jewish prophets were often only honoured by the Jews after their death.

In the Welsh revival of 1904, God intervened dramatically.

‘The mules in the mines had to be retrained because the miners no longer used profanity in their orders. The man-made denominational barriers broke down completely as believers and pastors worshipped their majestic Lord together.’

https://sermons.faithlife.com/sermons/36242-welsh-revival-1904 

Not everything that happened in this revival is celebrated by many Christians today.

A few years ago I heard a guest preacher from Wales. She told me about an almost forgotten preacher. She was only 15 years old when she became an anointed preacher. She preached on the street and all sorts of people wanted to hear her, including respectable politicians and despised prostitutes.

When you hear amazing or outrageous stories, please don't be critical. You think you are standing up for biblical truth, but you may be criticising the works of God.

This is the era of the unexpected! This is the era where God will do things that are SO unusual because He wants to reveal His majesty, His glory and His power. We have only just begun to see a ‘drop in the bucket’ of what God will do in this new age.

God is going to demonstrate His power, His glory, His splendour in ways we have never seen before, but it REQUIRES eyes to see and ears to hear.... Lana Vawser. Australia November 2021

The Holy Spirit is your Guide

 When Mary became pregnant, her fiancé Joseph was shocked because he was not the father. An angel of the Lord visited him in a dream and explained God's plans to him.

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). Mt 1:23 NIV

The Father was actually God Himself! We are familiar with this now, but imagine how staggering this was for Joseph! But Joseph believed God.

How often does God Himself intervene in this world, but devout Bible-believing Christians assume it must be from below? Conservative unbelief is a major obstacle for God in our generation, just as it was in the New Testament when the Pharisees questioned everything.

How can we distinguish between what comes from God and what does not? Bible knowledge is important, but the Pharisees in the New Testament were the world champions in Bible knowledge.

In the New Testament, lepers, corrupt officials and prostitutes recognised Jesus as the Son of God, but most Bible experts misinterpreted everything.

The Word of God is our standard in everything, but how we understand God's Word can often be miles away from God's wisdom.

We cling tightly to certain proof texts that confirm our beliefs, but why are we always so sure that our beliefs are always 100% flawlessly correct?

No one is flawless in this life. Is your faith based on the teachings of the Reformers? We find considerable disagreement among the leaders of the Reformation.

Calvin claimed that the supernatural gifts of the Spirit in the New Testament were only for biblical times. Many Reformed Christians believed the gift of prophecy was not intended for later generations.

The leader of the Reformation in Scotland was John Knox. His doctrine of salvation was exactly like Calvin's, but he was recognised as a prophet, and so was Luther.

Many Reformed Christians in our time do not believe in miraculous healings. Martin Luther didn't believe in it at first either, but later he prayed for miraculous healings and God healed.

If we cling inflexibly to doctrines, we can often be wrong.

God sent his Son from heaven to die for our sins and open the way to eternal life.

But before his death on the cross, Jesus was Immanuel, God with us. The Bible experts of his time had spread many erroneous doctrines, but Jesus rejected their faulty theology.

Then Jesus promised that after his ascension, God would still be with us.

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. Jn 16:13 NIV

This refers to the inspiration of the writers of the New Testament but not only that. The same Holy Spirit inspires all believers in all generations. We all need the Holy Spirit to help us understand what God is saying to us in prayer and in our reading of the Bible.

The Holy Spirit helped the Reformers and later theologians, but they, like us, were not flawless. Each of us needs the personal guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you don’t need anyone to teach you. Instead, his anointing teaches you about all things and is true and is not a lie; just as it has taught you, remain in him. 1 Jn 2:27 CSB

So should we ignore all Bible teachers and reject all theology? No. We must be teachable, but each of us must be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, just like Joseph, who experienced a visitation by God's angel in a dream and he obeyed.

God of Impossible Miracles

 Are you at the end of your tether? Is your situation impossible?

When I was 20, I was a student on holiday in Europe. Shortly before my flight back to Australia, I was alone in Rome. Everything was an adventure. I went for a walk and revisited this fascinating old world.

It was afternoon and I reached into my bag. Empty!

Where was my passport? Where was my flight ticket? Where was my vaccination certificate?

I was known to the Australian embassy. I made a phone call. They might be able to help with the passport, but the ticket and the vaccination certificate were problems.

I had to get home somehow, but how and when?

I thought about what I had done so far. I desperately walked back the same way. I visited a café and a shop, and finally I came to a currency exchange office and went to the same cashier who had served me in the morning.

‘Can you help me please? I've lost my passport today.’

She gave me everything back, passport, ticket and vaccination certificate.

God sustains and provides for us, even when we are totally stupid.

But even in much worse situations, God can do the impossible.

I know a woman who was snatched from certain death.

A large car came hurtling from her right side and she faced certain death, but instead of being crushed along with her car, the woman felt a terrible heat and drove on unharmed.

The other car did not crash against her, but drove through her, like in a fantasy film.  

‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’ Jer 33:3 NKJV

For with God nothing will be impossible.” Lk 1:37 NKJV

Expecting the Impossible

 In the Western world, we are scientifically orientated. We have been brainwashed for generations to believe in the material world more than in the supernatural realm, where God reigns invisibly.

In this respect, humanistic theology is often almost indistinguishable from atheism. Many Reformed Christians and many conservative free churches are also strongly influenced by it.

If you talk about miracles, you are not taken seriously by atheists, humanists and theologians.

Many conservative Christians also want to believe in miracles in the Bible, and also in heaven and hell, but all that belongs only to the past and we will then wait until we die to experience something of the other world.

We have been taught to expect only what is supposed to be possible, but Jesus taught a completely different view and also proved it with miracles.

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.” Mk 10:27 NIV

Jesus commissioned his first disciples to reach out to all nations with the Gospel mission.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Mt 28:18–19 NIV

Why was Europe known as Christian in the past? Because missionaries brought whole peoples, whole regions and whole nations to Jesus.

This also happened in the Old Testament, when God made the Hebrews into a believing nation through Moses and then Joshua. Unfortunately, mass conversion is often followed by decay in subsequent generations, but Israel was still a nation that belonged to the true God.

A preacher in Asia proclaimed the bold idea that we should disciple whole nations, not just convert individuals.

A devoted woman was in the congregation, and she believed the impossible. She was a street vendor selling ice cream. She prayed that her ice cream would be especially good and delicious.
Then she prayed that she would win her city for Jesus.

One day, a rich man came and bought an ice cream. He was delighted and asked the woman why her ice cream could be so good. She explained that she was a Christian and prayed that her ice cream would be excellent.

The rich man was intrigued and wanted to know more. He then converted to Jesus.

It turned out that this man was the governor of the town. He decided to teach the police and all the officials in the city the message of Jesus.

All the officials also had to learn to apply biblical principles in their work.

We must learn to expect much more from God.

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.” Mk 10:27 NIV