Opposition is Profit

Okay, so I went to all-church prayer last night. I guess our church seats 1200. I would say seventy people were there. It’s funny, but whenever you show up during the week, when something needs to be done, you see the same people over and over. Over ten thousand people consider Trinity their church. Every weekend, about 3500 attend. But when the church has a need, members of a much smaller group usually fill it. We struggle as we decide how much of ourselves to give to God, and until you reach a certain point, you tend to be a spectator.

I was a couple of minutes late because I couldn’t get on the road until almost 7:30. By the time I got there, an associate pastor was up at the front, getting things going. Music was playing. Not the hard-hitting, loud stuff they play on the weekends. Worship music. The place was very dark.

He had us kneel in various parts of the church and pray individually. I find I can kneel and pray for about two minutes. After that, I can kneel or pray; not both. So I got into a chair after a bit.

After that, we went up front and got papers with transcribed prayer requests printed on them. They listed the first names of the people who had made the requests. I write a request or two on my donation envelope every week. I wondered what my requests had looked like, to the people who prayed over them.

I went down the list of people and problems as quickly as I could, trying to get to everyone giving anyone less than a good effort. There were praise reports at the bottom. People got healed and so on.

A few names and problems stuck in my mind. S. was in rehab in North Miami Beach; he even listed the room. M. had a lump in her breast. C. needed help with her mental health. These people had serious problems man could not fix. Prayer was their only hope. My obligation to them was a big deal. Who knows if they had anything else going for them? Maybe that week, I was it.

I realized I had fallen into selfishness lately. I had become involved in my own trivial problems and interests, and one of the costs was prayer time for other people. When you help other people in God’s name, inevitably, you help yourself. God’s power is like electricity; it works best when it has a completed circuit to flow through. It shouldn’t just accumulate in you like charge on a capacitor plate. It should pass through you into someone else. And like electricity passing through an object, it will cause you to radiate warmth and light. This seems to be true of all God’s blessings. In my church, we are taught, “I am blessed to be a blessing.” Money, power, talent…these things benefit you most when you put them to work for others.

I had been letting that slip. Praying for these unknown people brought it back to me, so even if I did them no good at all, I was much better off for showing up. I had something valuable to take home with me.

Sometimes when I go to church, I feel God’s power and presence very powerfully, like a thick but invisible fog, and I feel his power inside me, rising up and outward from inside me. I didn’t get there by the end of the prayer list, but I did try.

After that, the pastor had us go through the church, praying in the spirit, touching the chairs. The hope was that something would linger and touch the people who sat in them this weekend.

When I got back in my seat, the power was flowing. Finally. I thought I had prayed my way through, but then I wondered…how many people had touched this chair since I left it? Cloths taken from Paul’s body drove demons out of people. Who was to say the touch of some anointed person had not affected me as I sat in the chair?

Faith started to burgeon inside me. I felt wonderful. My worries were gone. Before going to the meeting, I had felt that I was walking in faith, and I suppose that was true, but it had been getting somewhat mechanical. At the meeting, I remembered: God is really here. Ultimately, problems are illusions. The worldly approach to life is full of anxiety and frustration. Remembering all this, I knew I was back on track.

This morning I went to my weekly prayer group. A couple of the guys talked about things they needed to work on, and I realized I was in the same boat. I need to get back to the long, serious prayer and study sessions I used to put in every morning. I need to relax and remember that every situation that seems to be a defeat or a disaster is actually going to work out for my good; God is ordering my steps. I need to do some more fasting, to get rid of some lingering problems in my attitude and behavior. In other words, to rid myself of the influence of some familiar hostile entities that lead me into trouble and postpone good things God wants to do for me.

One of my friends, Dave, started talking about demonic manifestations at church. I hadn’t seen much of this. He said he had seen a good deal of it. He sits in the back, and that’s where these things tend to happen. He talked about a fourteen-year-old girl who rolled on the ground and made growling noises during a service. Then there were two young men who showed up complaining that they heard voices. They said people at other churches had told them they were crazy. The pastor prayed with them for hours, and they had two weeks of deliverance. Not sure what’s happening now, but at least they know where to turn.

When I work as an armorbearer, I tend to stand at the rear of the church. They like to keep some of us up front, but you can’t watch the crowd from up there. Now that I’ve heard Dave’s stories, I think I’m right to stay farther back. I don’t want to be watching the choir when someone is having a manifestation. Those people belong in church. They disturb services, but they can’t get help anywhere else.

I got some great feedback on the pizza effort. I didn’t realize it was affecting people much, but one of the guys said it’s making a big impact on the way people see the cafe. One of the guys came in and learned how to make pizza a couple of weeks back, and he said he had fed off my passion for the job. Another guy said he wanted to learn. It would be great to get a team put together so I won’t always be in the kitchen.

I listened to Perry Stone on the way home. He talked about a revival in which he told people to bring objects in so he could pray over them, to influence the unsaved. One lady brought a six-pack of beer. After her husband drank it, he ended up in church, and he accepted Christ. Another woman brought her husband’s cigarettes, and when he smoked them later, the taste was so bad, he had to go see the preacher who had prayed over them.

I think about things like that when I make pizza. It’s wrong to turn an object into a relic which people idolize, but God does work through objects. Jesus healed a blind man with mud.

Every week, what do I do? I anoint my hands with olive oil–Biblical symbol of the Holy Spirit’s power–and make leavened dough, which is the Biblical symbol of flesh leavened with sin. Then people buy it and eat it. Does anything go from God to me to the dough to the customers? I wonder.

A while back, a young woman came into the kitchen to thank me for making the pizza. Her face glowed. She seemed to shine like the sun. It was very odd. I realized the sensation I got from her presence was like the sensation of the presence of God; it had the same feel. I wondered what it meant. She kept thanking me, as if I had paid off her bills or saved her house from foreclosure. It was just pizza. Or was it?

When I see her now, she’s still a very nice young lady, but that glow isn’t there.

I know the Holy Spirit is in me. I have plenty of worldliness left in me, but at times I feel the Spirit drop on me like a cloudburst, for no clear reason. Can its power go from me into other people? Why not? It has happened for plenty of other Christians.

When the leader of my prayer group tried my Sicilian, he pointed at it and said, “This pizza is ANOINTED.” I think he just meant it was really good, but maybe there was more to it than that.

Maybe we benefit from being around other Christians, not just because they provide good examples, but because the Holy Spirit works in their vicinities and through their physical bodies.

Christianity is supernatural. Primarily, not collaterally. We forget that. Churches discourage the supernatural. That’s remarkable. We teach about a man who walked on water and a world ruled by a rebellious cherub. We teach about a savior who had conversations with demons. He turned water into wine. He raised the dead, including a man who had begun to rot. But somehow, we’re supposed to shun the supernatural and work things out through hard work and learning.

I don’t get it. Does the Bible say Satan can’t use the supernatural any more? If not, why should we stop using it? Does that make sense?

What good is the form of godliness, if you don’t have the power? The power isn’t a good work ethic or good study habits or strong willpower. It’s the Holy Spirit, working through us. That other stuff is on a par with salvation by works.

A Christian who thinks he can make himself holy and righteous without the Holy Spirit is like a tree that thinks it can turn itself into a chair.

I’m not sure what’s going on. I have inklings and hunches. I’m sure I’m headed in the right direction, and that I’ll get where I’m going. It’s not my location that counts. It’s my course.