I remember a friend of mine, Nancy, telling me the story of a visiting preacher at the Harare Conference Centre. Nancy invited a non-believer to accompany her. When the visiting preacher stood on the stage and called for people to stand and worship God, the non-believing man flatly refused saying he would never do that. He remained seated. Nancy told me she saw an unseen hand began to pull her friend out of the chair and although he resisted by clinging onto the arms of the chair he ended up flat on his face on the floor.
One might ask, “Where is the Holy Spirit today?” Most meetings or services seem to be run by man. We may as well be sitting in a company boardroom. Flesh has exalted itself and taken over. We seem to have constricted and restricted the working of the Holy Spirit in the church. We are grieving Him! How can we expect the Holy Spirit to show up for our agenda?
We expect that He will manifest for our 9am to 10am hour of “praise and worship,” stay for our sermon and linger a bit longer for our own brand of ministry. It is all about “our things” and nothing of His will. And we wonder why much of the church is dead; why church is without the living reality of Jesus Christ. There is no life without Christ.
The reality is that Christ came to bring a dead heart to life. Before Christ we were dead. Spiritually dead! The Lord Jesus Christ by the mighty Spirit of God inhabits a heart given to Him and His life begins to flow from that heart. When the ministry and authority of God is upon a person or persons and their hearts are alive to Christ then you will see life in those meetings, fellowships and teachings.
“The Spirit of God’s own Son, sent into our hearts to do each moment a work as divine as the work of the Son in redeeming us, to displace our life and replace it by the life of Christ in power, to make the Son of God divinely and consciously present with us always – this was what the Father had promised as the distinctive blessing of the New Testament. The fellowship of God as the Three-One was now to be within us; the Spirit revealing the Son in us, and through Him the Father.”
Post published in: Faith