Devotions

If you think you’re too ordinary to be used of God, listen closely. God is not going to do his final work through big-name evangelists or pastors. They alone won’t be able to handle the great moving of the Holy Spirit! The fact is that God is going to need every person who loves him, young and old, to carry out this work. These will be Christians who have been weaned from bread alone. Let me explain.

God said through Moses, “Man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3, NKJV).

Bread stands for all natural, material things necessary for this life: food, shelter, clothes, labor, wages, etc. Bread represents livelihood, those things we need that are not evil in themselves. Many Christians, however, live only for the things of this life. They live on bread alone.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). First, though, he said we were to pray, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done” (Matthew 6:10). We are to focus first on God’s interests and pray for his will to be done. What have you been thinking about more than anything else these past six months? What has consumed most of your time and prayers? Has it been mostly bread issues, personal needs?

If you focus only on bread, then you have no life. You are living in a wilderness just as the children of Israel did. They rose daily and began crying for bread and their personal needs every day for forty years.

Beloved, that is boredom, drudgery! God never intended for his children to live like that. Instead, he told Israel through Moses, “You should be living by every word that proceeds out of my mouth. Yes, I told you I would give you bread, but don’t stop there. Move on. I have told you there is a land flowing with milk and honey, with rivers, trees, forests, green pastures; and I want that place for you.”

God is raising up a people who are focused on his will for this midnight hour. They are tired of living in a wilderness of mere survival. All they want is to know and do God’s will. Every member must be ready and prepared in heart because God is poised to release his great, final outpouring.

Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service but the same Lord...to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4-7, ESV). There are nine gifts of the Spirit, but lately I’ve been zeroing in on two of them: miracles and healing.

A miracle is an instantaneous work of God. One of the Greek definitions is literally “that the man of God may be established.” A sign, a wonder, happens. Jesus performed stupendous miracles so amazing that two thousand years later we stop in wonder as we read about them. The disciples also performed miracles; as the Holy Spirit allowed, the gift of miracles served to advance the gospel through them and grow the young church. Even today we see miracles performed by a holy God who works mightily in the affairs of men and women. No doubt about it, all kinds of miracles take place around the world in response to people’s obedience to God’s word.

Healing, on the other hand, implies process. One of the many Greek words for “healing” is therapeuo, meaning “therapy,” “cure” or “medicine.” It therefore isn’t religious rhetoric to say, “Okay, I’ve just been prayed for; I’m healed in Jesus’s name” even if you are still manifesting symptoms. You did receive healing, but it may take weeks, months or years. I’ve experienced this. I’ve known of flat-out miracles of divine healing with before-and-after X rays to prove them. However, there are other times when God has had me cooperate with him in the healing process. That usually engages the body, mind and spirit.

Is it healing when you begin to change your diet, get more sleep and shed unhealthy habits? Is taking advantage of remarkable medical advancements to combat disease part of the healing process? Is it healing when you spend concentrated time and effort with God to adjust your attitude, mend a relationship, restore balance in your life? Yes! Who are we to limit God’s methods? The key element is that when we pray, we work in partnership with him.

We have God’s promise that he does all things for our good. He hears the cry of each heart and will use miracles, healing and every good gift to accomplish his will in our lives.

I once attended a seminar where one speaker was a pastor who had lived through horrific trials while serving the church. Looking around the room at the faces of the ministers and leaders listening to him, you could see his story was impacting them. Everyone was listening closely because how could you not? This man had known some tremendous suffering. We learned an Arabic expression for someone like this during our time of missionary service in the Middle East; it’s “Dammu ti’iil” or “His blood is heavy.” People say it about someone who has walked through great hardship and, as a result, whose opinions matter.

When we say ‘orthodoxy,’ we simply mean right beliefs. The word ‘doxa’ in the original Greek, however, originally meant a simple opinion. It was suffering that made the opinion matter. Because the apostles suffered greatly for what they knew to be true, their orthodoxy had great weight.

However, I don’t want people to assume that any kind of hardship gives our opinions greater significance. The suffering of Jonah in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament is different. Jonah was suffering for his sin when he deliberately ran in the opposite direction from God’s command. Paul’s suffering was for obeying God’s command to spread the gospel to the Gentile world.

Here's a quick way to tell the difference between those two different types of suffering. God’s grace received should produce grace in us for others. If it doesn’t, we probably  haven’t processed our sin appropriately with God. When we understand what God has done for us in Christ, we should be profoundly grateful and humbled, and that should overflow into the lives of those around us.

For example, God commanded Jonah to preach his message to the Ninevites. Jonah disobeyed, suffered in the belly of a fish, and then experienced grace when he was vomited up on the shore. None of this seemed to give him more compassion for the Ninevites. He was still bitter when God didn’t destroy them, despite the fact that God had graciously spared Jonah too.

On the other hand, Jesus spoke to Paul, and he immediately submitted himself to God’s will. He suffered beatings, persecution and ultimately death at the hands of the very people he was taking the gospel to, but this never dimmed his grace for them and determination to reach them with news about Christ. His letters to the church carry great weight because his suffering was a testament to the gospel’s importance. His sufferings also communicated clearly to those early disciples just how much he loved them.

May each one of us suffer for the right reasons. May our beliefs have heft to them because our dedication has cost us, and more importantly, him dearly. 

_{Mark Renfroe and his wife, Amy, have been involved in field missions work for 30 years. Mark served as the area director for Assemblies of God World Missions and currently serves as the chief missions officer for World Challenge.}

“Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble; you will prepare their heart; you will cause your ear to hear” (Psalm 10:17, NKJV).

In this verse, David outlines a simple three-step plan for knowing the Lord’s mind and will for your life.
1.     Petition him (pray)
2.     Prepare your heart to hear his voice
3.     He will cause you to know (the Holy Spirit will speak to you)

Very soon, God is going to pour out the greatest measure of his Spirit the world has ever seen. Holy Spirit conviction will come upon your neighbors, coworkers and unsaved family members. People everywhere are going to be hurting. They’ll turn from their dead churches and desperately look for someone who knows God.

God will use ordinary servants for his end-time work of people-to-people ministry. Are you preparing your heart right now for his work to be done, both in you and through you?

I urge you to pray earnestly and dive into God’s Word every day. There is revolutionary power in the preparation of your heart. It is through this preparation that you will find meaning and fulfillment in your life. Your feelings and temperament will change, and power will be released in you. When God sees you are ready, he will bring you many opportunities to do his work. You won’t even have to leave your house; God will bring the needs right to your door!

The mighty God we serve is preparing his people for his greatest work. “The Lord shall go forth like a mighty man; he shall stir up his zeal like a man of war. He shall cry out, yes, shout aloud; he shall prevail against his enemies” (Isaiah 42:13). Prepare your heart to meet him! Become a ready servant, equipped and prepared for his final outpouring, and his glory will come alive in you.

I believe the gospel should be accompanied by the power and demonstration of the Holy Ghost, working wonders and proving the gospel is true.

Paul boldly stated, “And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4, NKJV). The Greek here means “with proof.” Paul was saying, “I preach the gospel with proof. God and the Holy Spirit are backing me up with signs and wonders.” Hebrews says that God did confirm Paul’s message. “God also bearing witness both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to his own will” (Hebrews 2:4). 

The New Testament believers had one prayer: “That signs and wonders may be done through the name of your holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:30). These apostles went everywhere fully preaching the gospel. “Many wonders and signs were done through the apostles” (Acts 2:43). “And through the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were done among the people. …And believers were increasingly added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women” (Acts 5: 12,14).

Here is one of the most conclusive of all verses proving that a fully preached gospel must include the evidence: “They stayed there a long time, speaking boldly in the Lord, who was bearing witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands” (Acts 14:3). The apostles first ministered for a long time, preaching grace and repentance. God then allowed signs and wonders to be done by their hands.

God’s last-day believers will go “out and [preach] everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs” (Mark 16:20). That is what God envisions for us.

The miracles will be genuine, indisputable, undeniable, and yet they won’t be well known. Instead, they’ll come from the hands of ordinary, holy, separated people who know God and are intimate with Jesus.

This small, prepared army of faith will emerge from the secret closet of prayer with no other desire than to do the will of God and glorify him. They will be fearless and powerful in prayer. They will open entire nations for the gospel, and God will confirm his word through their actions.