Current Revival?
If you haven’t head there is a healing revival going on in Florida and people are flooding there, it’s being headed up by Televangelist Todd Bentley, if you google search you’ll find all sorts on it, in particular the ‘Fresh Fire Ministries’ website which includes Desktop Wallpapers for the Florida Revivals plus a live stream.
Apparently the revival has been going on for almost 50 days and so far at least 12 have been raised from the dead…
So why blog on this?
Recently I’ve been reading a lot about healing in particular from books by Pete Greig and Philip Yancey, both written about prayer, but including a lot on the topic of unanswered prayer. Greigs book ‘God on mute’ focuses largely around the unanswered prayer him and his wife face for her severe epilepsy.
Now I completely believe in the healing power of God, I believe that he does heal today, however this kind of thing makes me uncomfortable…if people have been raised from the dead I cannot argue with that, nor if people have been healed of physical sicknesses…in particular when mainstream TV in America is reporting on this too, however I do question it, no where in the bible do mass healings seem to take place, in fact, there isn’t a huge amount of healing in the bible, there is far more suffering than healing.
I also wonder what kind of Christians this revival is producing, to me it seems to run the risk that Christian’s who’s faith is purely based on the experience of God are going to be the result, however unless we disciple these people properly and teach them about unanswered prayer too and the difficulties of life they’re going to come to the first hurdle and give up…Jesus didn’t teach his disciples to have a fluffy life but to have a difficult one, he taught them about unanswered prayer, he told them that they’d be persecuted and even killed for their faith. I wonder how much of this is being told to the new converts in Florida?
The fact remains that more often than not we find our prayers of healing unanswered, I don’t think it’s because of our lack of faith, or because of sin in our lives but just that sometimes God is beyond our understanding, if every prayer we asked was answered God would be a vending machine, if God never drew away from us our faith would be based on a feeling and a faith based on a feeling is only good as long as the feeling stays.
I don’t have any reason to believe that God isn’t working in Florida, although if I’m perfectly honest the whole thing makes me very very uncomfortable and I’ll be interested to see the long term effects…I just wish people would report of not being healed there as well as those being healed reporting…I also hear (from someone who was telling me about it) that people are being healed just by watching it on the God Channel, and yes I’m sure God can work through TV but I do feel very uneasy about the whole thing.
Comments would be good readers…
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its obvious isn’t… if God is gonna send revival (present day) then of course its going to in America, where else could he possibly choose? it’s the centre of the world! It would also be obvious to assume it would have to be in a church with a ‘big/household’ name preacher (always) and must be with a church with links to God T.V, i mean, God obviously knows how to do his ‘Publicity’ well.
Maybe God is doing something (though i refrain from getting past ‘maybe’), but why do we have to package it up in a box and stick it on telly!?! would it just spread like wildfire on its own accord… (maybe we could get a company like macdonalds to sponsor it to help with the ongoing costs of managing the event and paying staff wages) “this revival is brought to you courtesy of macdonalds, the greatest way to eat rubbish without thinking about it etc etc”)
..still tho, if as i’ve seen on GOD tv people are falling on the floor then that must surely authenticate it…huh?
sorry but im either having a bad day or just getting fed up of all this.
yehyeh its wrong to be cynical etc etc etc. sorry
btw, i’m not sure i would agree with you on ‘theres not that much healing in the bible’, Jesus had compassion on many and healed them, and at the end of John (or one of the gospels) it says that thing about …
“Jesus also did many other things, and I suppose that if every one of them were written down the world couldn’t contain the books that would be written”
and i reckon unless that was a great use of hyperbole, there would have been a lot of healings in there.
(but i agree with the main point of what you were saying, and im probably just being pedantic)
Firstly I do suspect that there were almost certainly a lot of healings that didn’t get written down, however at the same time I think it’s incorrect to think that the key focus of Jesus’ ministry was healing, take the paralysed man for example, Jesus wasn’t focused on healing him but forgiving his sins.
At the same time I think it is very easy to be cynical, especially when we don’t experience it on a personal level. In the bible we read of Paul in Acts seeing the statue to ‘an unknown god’ and using that to convert the people there so there’s no reason why we can’t use whatever mediums there are in place to spread God’s word, ie television and for those people in acts to have been converted by what Paul said using the statue illustration we have to assume that God worked through that.
I think the bottom line is that healing is not what saves us, our healing might be something that brings us closer to God but healing itself doesn’t produce a sustainable faith, teaching and discipleship does.
It’s important for us to look for God in things without being too cynical but at the same time trying to work out for ourselves ‘is this God working in this?’
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Mark Tiddy
In his spare time Mark plays several instruments and enjoys song writing.
Read more about Mark here
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