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 Still Heals. Do You Need Healing?

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell how the Son of God lived on this earth for 33 years. 

• In his last three years on earth, Jesus preached and taught the people of Israel. 

  • One of the most prominent features of His teaching was the way He consistently performed miraculous healings.

And you know that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. Acts 10:38 (NLT) 

• This is how the Apostle Peter summarised the healing ministry of Jesus. 

  • He makes no distinction between exorcisms and healing physical sickness. 

    • Jesus saw demon possession, deafness, blindness and physical sickness as manifestations of evil.

When John the Baptist was in prison, he was tempted to despair of his faith. He sent his disciples to Jesus, seeking reassurance.

 

And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 

• the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. Mt 11:4-5

Clearly Jesus also saw Healing as a central feature of His ministry.

• When Jesus appointed His Apostles, the first thing He did was to give them authority to heal.

 

And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. Mt 10:1 (ESV) 

 

If we look at church history and examine the practices of many churches in the Western World, we see only some churches emphasise healings and miracles.

• Many other churches consider this unbalanced, and yet they read the same Bible that shows Jesus was a healing evangelist. 

• For Jesus and the early church, healing the sick was an essential part of the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

Where did the Western church go wrong? 

Why have we strayed from the ways of Jesus so clearly presented in the New Testament?

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the Europe, most people were poor and illiterate. 

• Faith in the Word of God was replaced with faith in religious traditions including prayers to saints and bathing with holy water. Healing and miracles became associated with very unbiblical practices.

When Luther and Calvin restored the Bible as the only source of spiritual authority, they rejected the papacy. They also condemned faith in miracles obtained by prayers to saints or touching sacred objects. This was idolatry.

• However they made the mistake of rejecting all healing miracles. 

  Calvin taught that the miraculous ministry of Jesus and the Apostles were not a model to imitate.  

  • He taught they did miracles to prove that Jesus was the Son of God and to confirm the truth of the Gospel of salvation. 

    Once the church and the gospel were established, they considered miracles were no longer necessary but were counterfeit miracles associated with Roman Catholic idolatry. 

Once the miraculous element was banished from much of Western Christianity, faith in scientific materialism was blended with biblical belief. 

• Faith in human reason began to supplement and then replace faith in the Word of God.

This is why many Christians in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand find it difficult to receive divine healing or to exercise faith for miracles. 

Our whole culture has been corrupted by systematic unbelief in God’s supernatural power.

• Faith is a personal matter but it is also corporate. Faith is contagious but unbelief is also contagious. 

Conservative Protestant tradition and academic theology  have made unbelief respectable in in Europe and North America.

• The result has been a catastrophic decline of faith amongst professing Christians and the abandonment of Christianity by the majority of Europeans.

But God has not changed and the Bible has not changed.

God loves you. 

He knows you are broken and wounded in many ways. We all are. 

• We all have emotional issues that cause us pain and prevent us from being all we could be. 

• We all get sick from time to time and many of us have bodily functions that don’t operate as they should.

God wants to heal you, to change your life, to set you free of the painful limitations that stop you fulfilling your potential.