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Yesterday, I went to a Church of Our Saviour (COOS) service where Deborah Reed was ministering. Deborah is the director of the Children’s Ministries in Bethel Church in Redding, California and also the founder of Kingdom Treasures International. Bethel Church is pastored by Bill Johnson. In the past 6 months or so, I’ve been coming across a lot of Bill Johnson’s stuff - through conferences and bookstores I’ve gone to and a recommendation from a cousin of mine. Before this time, I hadn’t heard about him. But these various encounters have made me quite interested to find out more about his ministry, which can be described as prophetic and very focused on the supernatural (healings, miracles, etc.) Check out this YouTube of Bill Johnson on the 700 club (part one, two, three) and also this creative leg-lengthening miracle that occurred during a Bill Johnson conference. I love how Bill encourages Christians into go to the streets to heal people - i.e. to pray and believe for healing for anyone they see that needs healing when they’re just going about their daily life. That’s pretty much exactly like how Jesus ministered healing, isn’t it! Jesus didn’t call people who wanted healing to come to his healing meeting. Rather, he went out into the streets and healed people. And Johnson’s ministry is all about expecting the heavenly miraculous to invade earth and expecting a supernatural form of Christianity.

Anyway, yesterday’s service was quite an eye opener. Deborah preached a little bit about children and how God can move through them. She recently held a Children’s Ministry conference at COOS and she also taught the children there how to pray for the sick. So after her preaching, she got a few dozens of children to come out to the front. The children were going to pray for the sick. Then she asked the children if God gave them any Words of Knowledge. This could come through the children feeling a pain in their own body - a way that God could speak to them regarding what He wants to heal. The children who felt God speaking through them this way spoke into the microphone regarding what sickness God wants to heal (e.g. back pains, pain in the right ankle, etc.) and then people who were sick in that area could come up to the front for the children to pray for them. People who felt the pain completely gone then started to testify and probably about 15-20 people testified of God’s healing power during that time.

It’s exciting and wonderful to see God working through these children. Some were probably as young as 5-6 years old. During the ministry time, as time wore on, some children started running and playing on stage. Deborah mentioned that we should realize that they’re still kids. They may pray and God may heal through them, but the next minute they could be slapping their friends!

Just like this situation, I do believe God dearly loves to work through children. It’s all about childlike faith and children have that. They haven’t had enough of life experience to learn how to be scared or shy or embarrassed if their prayers aren’t answered. They just believe and expect God to be true to His Word to heal when they pray for people. I think we adults have to unlearn so many things, get rid of so many negative thoughts and past experiences. We have to renew a lot of our mind and thinking - something that children don’t need to. Unlike adults, they’re not too smart for their own good. They don’t rationalize or reason out everything. If they did like most adults, it’d be hard to have faith. I think Kierkegaard and Luther are right in believing that in a sense faith is opposed to reason. Children don’t use their minds to reason that much. They just believe. And God responds to such childlike faith.

Below are more quotes by Welch, this time from his new book, “Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest“. I’ve been thinking a lot about worry the past few months. Two of my favorite messages by Pastor Prince are on living the let-go, worry-free life. What Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount in Matthew 6:25-34 regarding worry has always struck me because what he said is so challenging and hard to put into practice. I’ve also been thinking a lot especially of worry in relation to faith. I think worry is an expression of one’s lack of faith and not worrying expresses faith. After all, we worry because we don’t trust God has everything in control and that He’s loving and will provide for us in future. The challenge for us is to trust him in spite of what we’re facing. And I don’t think it’s just a trust of resignation that’s asked of us, but a trust of confidence.

[W]e know that worry and fear are more about us than about the things outside us. They reveal what is valuable to us, and what is valuable to us in turn reveals our kingdom allegiances. We also know that God is patient and compassionate with us, and he gives grace upon grace. Though alert to our divided allegiances, he persists in calling us away from fear and worry, persuades us of the beauty of the kingdom, and gives more than we can imagine. (p. 147)

There are times when fear says that something is just plain dangerous and I should be afraid. But my goal in listening to my fears is to learn how to decipher what else they are saying. When I pause and listen, I might find that fear says a lot and it speaks clearly. What it says can provide me with immensely helpful direction… Review some of your fears and ask: What do these fears say I trust in? What do my fears say I love? (p. 47–48)

There is one bit of data that worriers never factor into their false prophecies. It is this: We will receive grace in the future. (p. 140)

This explains one of the paradoxes of all kingdom life. On one hand, there is rest and peace: the King has come and we enjoy the benefits of the kingdom. But at the same time, we live knowing that we are in the enemy’s crosshairs. Satan is ready to engage us in battle. The two kingdoms are in conflict. With all this going on behind the scenes, don’t think you can simply say “no” to fear and worry, and that will be the end of them. (p. 119)

Quick. What is, by far, God’s most frequent command? (p. 59) [The answer is “Do not be afraid”]

Worriers are visionaries minus the optimism. (p. 50)

Worry puts the focus on me. (p. 53)

“Father, our country is in trouble. We pray for peace to come,” an 11-year-old boy prays. “Protect us, Father. Teach people to love one another and not to fight anymore.”

For the last two weeks, Sprenkle says, children in this small slum area have gathered to pray for their country. “The church’s pastor says the children started gathering on their own, so he let them in the church. The daily prayer meeting now attracts more than 200 children ranging in age from three to 17.”

Ever since the children started praying together, the pastor says there have been no deaths, houses burned or even violence in their section of this slum. Adults recite this fact in amazement. The children, however, don’t even mention it because it’s exactly what they expected to happen.

“Pastor told us that there is power in prayer. He said we can change the country through prayer,” 12-year-old Boniface explains. “So that is what we are doing, changing the country.”

(Taken from: Kenyan children pray for their country, ask for rain - and it pours)

I believe Christians can learn much from the Word of Faith (a.k.a. Prosperity Gospel, Health and Wealth Gospel, etc.) movement. Of course, there is a lot to be avoided too. As I’ve learnt in my Christian life, movements are formed in reaction to something being neglected. Movements emphasize a particular belief or practice which had been neglected before. In their desire to recover the importance of a previously neglected belief or practice, they often go to the point of overreaction and overemphasize the previously neglected belief/practice. Because of their overreaction, excesses and abuses occur. People who observe such overreaction and excesses respond to the movement by themselves overreacting to it and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The result is not learning anything good from the movement and going back to the status quo of neglecting or underemphasizing the original doctrine or practice in question. This tendency of movements is true of Christian things as well as non-Christian things (e.g. modernism and postmodernism).

In the case of the Word of Faith (Health and Wealth, Prosperity Gospel) movement, certain Christians recovered the importance of faith in relation to prayer and also the fact that God desires to heal and prosper Christians. Before this movement came about, most Christians neglected the role of faith in prayer and hardly acted as though God desired to prosper and heal Christians. However, the movement was an overreaction and excesses and abuses resulted. The overreaction was in believing and acting as though every Christian could prosper and be healed in this life if they had faith.

As in most cases, I think the truth is somewhere in between. I don’t agree with the above movement nor their critics 100%. However, neither do I disagree with either side 100%. Therefore, I do think all of us Christians can learn much from the Word of Faith movement. If there were no truth whatsoever in the movement, the devil wouldn’t be bothered with it and there wouldn’t be so much controversy over it. But I think the devil’s plan is to make sure that there are abuses in the movement so that many Christians would thoroughly discredit it and therefore not care to learn anything from it. The devil delights in us throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Knowing the history of movements should alert us to the fact that there is always truth in all movements. The trick is to accept the good, and get rid of the bad - not throw everything out.

May the peoples praise you, O God;
may all the peoples praise you.
Then the land will yield its harvest,
and God, our God, will bless us. (Psalm 67:5-6)

I just finished a short book on Praise - “There’s Dynamite in Praise” by Don Gossett. Don’s a Word of Faith teacher. I’m not a huge fan of Word of Faith teachings, but then neither am I afraid nor ashamed to read their writings and learn something from them.

I’ve always felt that praise was closely related to faith. Praising God is an expression of faith in God when doing so in the context of difficulties one is going through. Let me explain.

1) Crying out to God is OK: It’s so easy to fall into depression and sadness when one faces obstacles in life. Certainly, we read this in the Psalms. People have emotions and we do get sad over things! So it’s OK for our soul to be downcast. There’s definitely a place to cry out to God and plead and beg Him for His mercy. There’s no need to pretend to be happy when you’re not. It’s OK to cry and be sad.

I was just reading Psalm 42 and 43. There’s talk of “tears” being the Psalmist’s food day and night (42:3). There are cries of “When can I go and meet with God?” (42:2) and “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning…” (42:9; similarly in 43:2). The Psalmist no doubt was unafraid to show his emotions and sadness. He didn’t consider it unspiritual or ungodly.

2) Yet in the midst of crying out, one should not forget to hope in God and praise Him: Despite the cries from the Psalmist, we read three times in those two chapters these exact same words:

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God. (42:5, 11; 43:5)

While it’s not unspiritual to be sad and cry out to God for help, as we clearly see all this in the Psalms, we need to remember that interspersed between all these cries are praises and exaltations of God. The Psalmists never forgot this. Perhaps we could even say that they ended with praises - i.e. in the beginning may be cries of help, but in the end were praises.

In the above quotation, the Psalmist seems to be speaking to his soul and saying, “Soul, eventhough you’re downcast and sad, put your hope in God and praise Him!” Indeed, we needn’t and shouldn’t come to a stage of despair because there is always hope in God. The Psalmist knew that God would deliver him. And he praised God.

3) A form of praising God that expresses faith: Going beyond the above, I think also that as we choose to praise God in the midst of our difficult situations, that expresses our faith. I’m not talking merely about the normal praise of God we do so all the time. I’m talking about praising God because we believe He will bring us deliverance and so choose to praise Him in advance for such deliverance. I think as we praise Him for the deliverance when we don’t see it, we are expressing our faith in Him. We’re saying to God, “I know you’ll deliver me and so I choose not to dwell in self-pity but rather to express my faith that You will deliver me by praising You right now for your deliverance.” I believe God honours such faith. And He’ll respond to your faith. Praise thus obtains the answer, when praise expresses faith in God to deliver and bless. There is power in praise!

I think a balance (I hate this word because it doesn’t convey what I have in mind) is needed here. As I said before, there’s nothing wrong with crying out to God. And yet, always being sad and crying out to Him may not be what God is looking for. Sometimes, maybe it’s good to praise Him in the midst of our difficult situations for the deliverance, we believe by faith, He’ll bring. It’s not about faking it, it’s about faithing it.

Whatever the case, it’s always good to praise Him - whatever the situation, good or bad. For that’s what God wants of us. And I hope to do this more in 2008, eventhough I know it’s so difficult to do so when one faces problems. It’s so much easier to cry out to God. It takes faith to praise Him.

In one meeting, a 20-year-old came to the microphone and chided me for not taking literally the Bible’s promise about faith that can move mountains. I agreed I needed a larger dose of such childlike faith, yet at the same time, I could not dishonor the pain of suffering people by telling them their faith is somehow defective. From such souls, I learn that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Prayer offers no ironclad guarantees, just the certain promise that we need not live that mystery alone. (Philip Yancey)