I went on my first ministry trip with Bill Johnson to Austin a couple of weekends ago. And I have to say this school is genius. Sending students out with the pastors is of so much benefit, they get a good team of people willing to pay to go with them, and we get to see that we are capable of doing the things we’ve been learning about, which in turn, is enough to change our lives from there on out. Genius.
Bill spoke at two different venues and we got practice giving out words of knowledge and praying for the sick. The second church was packed out every meeting, and I feel like I know something got deposited in Texas that’s going to keep growing. It might not be something you can feel or see or even sense, but I do think it is an actual substance that was added to what was already there. And I think God can release more wherever he wants, but I also think there is something important about recognizing that as the Body of Christ, we carry something that we can deposit as we go, and that sometimes that could be the only way the thing is given.
We can imagine God’s given us satchel or a backpack, and then, off we go. If a person never looked inside, they wouldn’t know they what they had to offer as they encountered people along the way. Lets say you meet someone along the road who is hungry, if you didn’t know there was food in your pack, you wouldn’t open it up and give it away. Or if someone was wandering lost along the road, if you knew you had a map, you could give directions. Or a woman catches your eye and you know you have something she needs, you can reach into that bag, pull out the diamond necklace and place it around her neck. If the backpack is yours, then of course, you also have access to its contents. If you were hungry, lost, or in need, you and those around you have the resources available to take action for your benefit. It’s all yours even if you never opened the bag to look inside, and you’re carrying it with you regardless of whether or not you ever use it. In the same way that you’d be physically depositing something with each person if you knew you had it to offer, I think we can spiritually deposit something as we go and give of what we’ve been given. After you leave the necklace with the woman, she posses something she could not have had unless it was given to her. After you pray for someone, it is possible that they can posses something of hope, joy, love, God, that they did not have before you gave it to them. It’s easy to see a physical transference, but sometimes more difficult to imagine this happening as we pray for people and action is taking place in an arena we can’t see; but I think it’s the same principle.
We had to do a report on a historical revival last month, and one of the characteristics of the revival we chose had to be that it displayed God’s power through, forgive the churchy language, “miracles, signs, and wonders.” I did my report about the Great Awakening, crediting people feeling the weighty presence of God as the signs and wonders portion. (There was evidence of a few healings in the Methodist movement under John Wesley, so, it counts!) While I was researching I noticed something about the spread of revival in this time that was really interesting to me. Though revival was busting out all over the western world, there was a pattern of connection that reminded me of what happened when revival broke out in Toronto. From what I understand about the process of renewal (the term used to describe the transformation that came when revival broke out) that happened at Bethel, we can trace it to the outpouring (again, a very cultural word) at the Vineyard Airport Church in Toronto.
Basically, John Wesley, leading the Methodist movement in England, had his major God experience in Moravian prayer meeting. The Moravians had been praying for what they called a baptism of love, and when God showed up for them, it started a prayer meeting, where people were praying 24/7 for 100 years. Wesley was there with another guy named John Whitfield, who later traveled to the colonies and ministered with Jonathan Edwards, who was the main guy in the American Great Awakening. Now, this was not a healing revival, it was a lot about conviction, repentance, and realizing God was still around. I don’t feel like I know this strongly enough to argue it, but it does seem like there is a connection to the physical moves of people and what they can carry from one place to another in the spirit. As I read about Wesley and Whitfield’s experience at the Moravian chapel, I was reminded of the spread of the Toronto Blessing. The Moravian cry tied into God igniting a fire in Wesley’s heart and was a catalyst for Wesley and Whitfield’s movement. Whitfield tied them all together when he made his way to the colonies to preach with Edwards.
When God showed up in Toronto, the people who came brought something of him with them back to their homes all over the world. A person’s physical presence in that place equipped them with something of God they did not have before. You can trace the God moving as people went to this church and came back to their homes with something they didn’t have before. To say that revival spreads really lends to this idea that a certain something is moving from place to place to place. Bill and Beni Johnson had visited Toronto before the renewal came to Bethel and when I was in fifth grade my dad visited Toronto. I can’t look back and see an immediate impact of that trip, but many times I have wondered how much his physical presence at that place and what could have come back with him has to do with my openness to a supernatural spirit filled lifestyle, something I was never really exposed to and is easy to be offended by. It is interesting to think about how that ‘impartable something of God’ doesn’t just spread randomly. It works in accordance to the movement of the members of the body of Christ. As exciting and empowering as that is it increases our responsibility to look inside our backpacks, to know what we have to offer and to use it. Because even though God can do it however he wants, what he wants just might be for us to use what we’ve been given. And if that’s the case, we hold the responsibility of his kingdom.
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