The Deity is IN

This morning I was thinking about testimony. Do you have it? Can you say God has done something amazing for you? If not, are you sure you’re doing things right?

A lot of people will say, “I have a great wife and great kids,” or, “I have a wonderful job,” and they consider that a testimony. I think they’re right. But is that the kind of testimony the Bible talks about? Is a Buddhist going to hear that and yell, “WOW! I have to have THAT! Let me get out of these crazy robes and grow some hair!” Probably not.

Jesus, the Apostles, and Elijah raised people from the dead. THAT is a testimony. If you can say you raised someone from the dead, or someone raised you, you have a pretty good story. If God has parted the Red Sea for you, again, good story. “Things are going pretty good” doesn’t really compare.

We have been warned not to follow signs. On the other hand, Jesus said signs would follow US. Remember Paul, shaking the viper off into the fire. Remember the angel busting Peter out of prison. Stuff like that is supposed to happen around us. If it’s not, we should consider it a warning that we’re off course.

I’m thinking about this because of the neat things God has done for me. He healed me of two kidney stones, instantly, while I was at church. I felt one of them move while I was praying; I didn’t even have to wait. He healed me of a burn on Saturday, over the course of a few minutes. The last time I started to get a cold-like illness, I prayed, and it went away in a couple of hours. I got an instant healing back in the Eighties. My sister is still alive and in remission, a year an a half after being diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer.

These things may not be as grand in scale as the parting of the Red Sea, but when God does the impossible or the exceedingly improbable, on demand, it’s a miracle. What difference does it make if a miracle is small or subtle? You better believe it doesn’t bother me! Would you want to lie around in pain for a week, waiting for a kidney stone to pass? I sure wouldn’t. I’ve been there. I wouldn’t want to spend a week battling the flu, either. I hate being sick. I’m still excited over my healed finger. I keep looking at it. My dad asked to see it, too. He actually said he was impressed. Maybe God did it for him, not me.

Last week a friend of mine said something indicating she was glad God was helping her to get through an illness. It’s always good to praise God. I’m not knocking her. But Hare Krishnas get through illnesses. Satan worshipers get through illnesses. It’s not impressive. What’s impressive is having an illness taken away from you. I told her the power of her prayers would keep increasing throughout her life.

Today I thought about my church. Suddenly I realized our pastors don’t testify. They’ll say God helped them to get grant money, or God sent a lot of people to the altar to get salvation. But you never hear any of them tell about miraculous things God has done through them or around them. That’s very odd, in a charismatic church. The only example I can think of is a pastor’s son, whose heart stopped beating when he had meningitis. He came back to life, and he’s still alive. But that was something like thirty years ago.

It’s not unusual for guest speakers to give good testimonies. But the actual pastors…not so much.

Maybe this is why we rely so much on gimmicks and worldly strategies. We give away popcorn and hot dogs. We gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving, and yesterday we gave away miniature Christmas trees. We show movies in the sanctuary. And when it comes to giving, we put people on stage and have them goad the people to give, sometimes for several long minutes. Other churches put offering boxes by the back doors and count on God to move people; I wish we did that.

Once we had a really awful testimony. A church employee gave the church $500 during one of our Steve Munsey “Seven Blessings” drives. Later she received unexpected money. In the amount of $480. The church leadership was so happy, they put this in a video to be shown during the Sunday giving pitch (which we actually refer to as “the pitch”).

I think you can see why found this disturbing. We teach that God will give people a thirtyfold or hundredfold return, but she got a 96% return, which is less than onefold, without interest. If Steve Munsey is right (and he’s not), God actually charged her 4% to hold her money.

What if people went up there and showed people withered limbs that had suddenly started to work? What if they could say God had miraculously healed injuries and diseases, in ways physics can’t explain? Wouldn’t that bring people to church? If we had that kind of power flowing, wouldn’t we focus on it to the exclusion of everything else?

The thing that worries me is that our pastors may not have any idea what that kind of power looks like. Maybe they just don’t experience the power of God. Maybe they’re not walking by faith, guided by the Spirit. If not, how are they supposed to do anything but fail?

I may be a total idiot, but I do walk by faith, and I know other people who do. It works. It’s not a joke. And it’s not hard. It’s certainly easier than not walking by faith, which leads to failure, curses, and frustration. You have to learn to accept God’s surprising plans instead of your own obvious ones, but that’s very pleasant, once you get used to it. If ordinary churchgoers can do it, why can’t pastors?

So I feel like I know what “blind guides” means. If you haven’t found the door, you can’t tell other people where it is. And if you preach living by faith, but you don’t do it, how can your teaching be taken seriously or have the effect it should? I’m afraid these well-intentioned, hard-working people are walking in circles. Like another group of people known for walking in circles. In the desert.

People won’t insist on a miracle-filled church because they don’t think it can happen. They think they’re setting themselves and others up for disappointment. They believe they may be asking too much of God, which is a little insane, if you think about it. But it’s not too much to ask. It’s what Jesus said he wanted to give us. It’s right here, right now.

We expect miraculous things to happen inside the church, but many churches don’t permit it, so instead we have the divine equivalent of ectopic pregnancies. Miracles happen in the “wrong” places, to the “wrong” people. If you gag Jesus in the sanctuary, he’ll speak in the parking lot.

It seems like the only miracles we promise people, over and over, until no one wants to hear about it, are financial miracles. God WILL give you that thirtyfold-plus return. He WILL. He PROMISED. He ASKED US TO TEST HIM. How come no one talks like that about healing? How come no one talks like that about getting marriages fixed or finding God’s true direction in life? Why don’t we swear God will deliver people from addiction? If we promised people healing, deliverance, and other helps the way we promise them money, maybe we’d see more miracles, and maybe we wouldn’t have to beg for tithes.

The funny thing is, people don’t get the financial miracles preachers promise them. It just does not happen. Here and there, some people get unexpected success, but that would happen even in a crowd of unbelievers. How can we keep promising this nonsense when we know it doesn’t work? Sure, God will be generous to generous people, at the right times, in the right amounts, IF they give according to the Holy Spirit’s real-time direction. But that’s not what churches teach, and they talk way too much about money as a way to satisfy the flesh.

Churches teach that God will give people prosperity for tithing and giving irresponsible, extravagant offerings, but they talk very little about giving to the poor and to each other, which is what Jesus talked about. Why is this? I suspect it’s because churches see the poor as their competition. If a guy who bags groceries for a living gives a hundred bucks to charity, the church isn’t going to get any big offerings from him for a while.

The other day I told my dad he was going to see weird things happen around me for as long as he knew me. It’s just a fact. This is what life is like when you listen to the Spirit. It’s not ego. It’s not self-confidence. It’s the opposite. It’s confidence in God, and it’s based partly on experience and partly on supernatural faith which comes into me independently of my own thoughts and character.

Anyway, God is still up there, and more importantly, he’s still down here. He isn’t retired. He’s not dead. He hasn’t quit exerting power in the earth. Listen to him and get to know him, and he’ll start doing stuff around you and through you, and your world-shaking testimony won’t be, “Things are going pretty good.”