“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, who will stay with you forever.” (Jn 14:16)

Who is the Helper? He’s the Holy Spirit, the One who empowers us to show and tell the gospel of the kingdom (Rms 15:19). (Note that the Holy Spirit doesn’t come and go. Jesus said He will “be with you forever”!) Jesus then tells the disciples that on the day that the Holy Spirit is given,

“… you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (Jn 14:20)

This is the most awesome, incredible thing in the world! This is the mystery that Paul sought to make known to the Gentiles – Christ is in you! And you’re in Him! Do you need a picture to help you see this? Then look at the picture on the right…

Jesus said He is the true vine and we are the branches. Look at the picture and draw a mental circle around the vine. Do you see any branches that are not part of the vine? The vine is bigger than any branch but there’s no branch that is not also vine. Touch any branch and you are touching the vine. This is how Hudson Taylor describes it:

“Here, I feel, is the secret: not asking how I am to get sap out of the Vine into myself, but remembering that Jesus is the Vine – the root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit all indeed… I have not got to make myself a branch. The Lord Jesus tells me I am a branch. I am part of him and I have just to believe it and act upon it.” (Quoted in The Normal Christian Life, pp.56-7)

Now Jesus knows that you can’t bear fruit – “no branch can bear fruit by itself” (Jn 15:4) – but He plans to bear His fruit through us. What’s our part in this? He wants us to abide in Him, which means to dwell or stay put. It means don’t run off and try to do your own thing in your own strength. What’s His part? He plans to live His life through us and go on healing the sick and delivering the oppressed and doing all the other heaven-on-earth things He did when He was here in the flesh (Mk 16:17-18).

Are you a branch with no fruit?

What happens to unfruitful branches? Jesus said the branches that don’t bear fruit are “lifted up” (Jn 15:2). They are not cut off – that is a bad translation that would’ve made no sense to a Mediterranean listener! A viticulturalist would never throw away a branch for that would be like amputating part of the vine. (If you’re thinking of suckers, see my note in the comments below.) Unfruitful branches are lifted out of the dirt and re-dressed so they can be nourished by the sun. Sticking with that metaphor, the reason why some Christians are barren is that they’re facedown in the dirt and not looking at the Son. They’re busy, distracted, stressed, and have wandered from their protos agape, their primary love. When believers lose sight of Christ’s love they tend to become religious, just like the Ephesians. The next thing you know, they’re thinking that they have do stuff like obey His commandments to prove their love or earn His.

What is the remedy for unfruitful branches? God is. He is the Gardener who does the lifting up. He is not there to slash and burn but to prune and lift. As you begin to bear fruit it will be for His glory, not yours. If you’ve been distracted doing the dead works of religion, just stop and come back to your first love which is His love. His love is like food for us. We are energized by it. I might tell myself that I am writing these posts because of my love for Him, but in truth, it’s His love for me that compels me to tell others the good news. I would not love Him except that He has first loved me (1 Jn 4:19).

God believes in you!

When Jesus said, “if you love me, you will keep my commandments,” He was not making a threat but a promise! He was saying, “If you love me you will do the works and greater works that I have done because I’m the one who’s going to do them through you. Trust me! Believe in me! Abide in me!” Why does Jesus say we will do greater works? Because 2000 years ago there was only one Christ, but now there are millions of Little Christs. Back then He was just a tender shoot (Is 53:2), but now He’s a mighty vine with branches reaching into every place.  Back then God lived in just one man, but now He lives in millions of men, women and children all around the world and He wants out! What are the greater works? They are the works of Jesus done millions of times over, every day, all over the world by ordinary branches like you and me.

Aren’t you amazed that God operates this way – through people? It’s like God is saying, “I believe in you. I have confidence that you will come to rest in my love and allow me to reveal myself to you and through you.” Carnal religion says it’s all about you and your faith so you’d better perform, but the gospel of grace declares it’s about Him and His faith so rest! Paul understood this which is why he said, “the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me” (Gal 2:20).

Branches can not bear fruit but vines can and do so naturally, without any effort. As a branch you carry the nature of the True Vine in you and He will bear His fruit through you. He promised! Do you believe Him?

At this point you probably want me to tell you what to do. “What’s the takeaway? What must I do?” We Christians are so hung up on working for God that we don’t know what to do with Jesus when He says, “just abide!” Okay, here’s something you can do. Write this down. The next time you’re faced with a problem or trial, take a moment to let Jesus love on you. Allow the Lifter of your head to turn your gaze from the dirt back to Himself and then bask in His love. He is already shining on you. He has already been gracious to you and blessed you and given you His peace. Receive it!

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.” (Jn 15:9)

___
Related posts:
- Fear and trembling
- John 15:6 – Abiding in the Vine
- Incomplete deeds: The zombie church of Sardis (Rev 3:1-6)

I saw some of that first-hand when Bill Johnson preached at the recent Manifest Presence conference. Hundreds were healed, including me. And the really neat thing about it was that Bill Johnson hardly prayed for everyone. He just preached on the kingdom of God, stirred our faith, and got people to pray for one another.

Before going to the conference I read what is probably his most well-known book, When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide to a Life of Miracles. Now there’s a title to catch your attention! In this book Bill Johnson writes about two things: the kingdom of God in the here and now, and how you will miss it unless your mind is renewed.

Heaven is not merely something to look forward to. Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus revealed heaven on earth by healing the sick, delivering the oppressed, and forgiving sinners. Jesus came to reveal the superior reality of his world and to show us how to exercise faith so that we might bring that reality into our world. John said that the works of Jesus might fill the planet if they were all recorded. Yet Jesus was just one man working in partnership with the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not come to show us what God can do, but to reveal what God can do through a man.

Imagine what might happen if we all did the works and greater works of Jesus? The answer is obvious – we’d have heaven on earth.

Why did Jesus come to earth? According to WHIE, the ultimate reason for Christ’s coming was not that we might be saved, but that we might be filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the greatest gift ever given to man. As Johnson writes, “He is in me for my sake, but He is on me for yours.” There’s no economy version of the Holy Spirit. He comes fully equipped. He is the ruling spirit of every place He’s invited and He bears no teeth marks or battle wounds.

Few of us will doubt that the Holy Spirit can do great things, even through us. So why doesn’t He? According to Johnson, the main cause of the problem is found between our ears. We emphasize understanding over belief, reason over faith. This is fatal. Often we are more convinced of our unworthiness than we are of His worth, or our inability instead of His ability. “The mind makes a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.”

God will never contradict His Word, but God is bigger than His Word. If we try and chart our way based on our own understanding of the scriptures, we will find ourselves living under law. That’s what happens when you prioritize boundaries over relationship. Jesus never said, “My sheep will know my book.” Under grace we don’t get a road map, but a tour guide – the Holy Spirit. I love the way Bill Johnson said it at the  Manifest Presence conference:

“It’s difficult to expect the same fruit of the early church when we value a book they didn’t have more than the Holy Spirit they did have. It’s not Father, Son and the Holy Bible. No, this is the word of God, but you’ve got to understand… it is the Spirit of God that makes it living.”

God is more eager to invade this world than we are to receive the invasion. We sit and think when we could be praying and acting. We warn each other about the sin of presumption, while God warns us of the sin of unbelief. We strive for balance and control and end up with the order of the graveyard. All this happens because we submit the things of God to the mind of man, instead of the other way around.

These are themes which Johnson explores more fully in his book on The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind. But the main point is neatly captured in WHIE: When we submit our way of thinking to God’s way of thinking, we end up with faith and a renewed mind.

“It’s no longer a question of heaven or hell. It’s only a question of how much of hell’s thinking I will allow into this heavenly mind of mine. Doesn’t it honor Him more when His children no longer see themselves as sinners saved by grace, but now as heirs of God?” (p.149)

The central challenge of this book is to re-present our loving Father to an orphaned world. This is not a call to engage in acts of charity – even though these things are important – but to release His presence and His kingdom in places where darkness still reigns. His kingdom come is not some future event which requires no faith. It’s the dominion of His kingship in our communities today. What does it look like? It is characterized by miracles of conversions, healings and deliverance. We are not merely to tell people about God’s goodness, but we are to show them. Just like Jesus did.

WHIE’s main takeaway is for believers to pray with faith until they get the breakthrough and to exercise their Christ-given authority over the circumstances at hand. If your world isn’t marked by conversions, healings and deliverance, then you might say that the kingdom of heaven has not fully come. This means you have a wonderful opportunity to show and tell the good news of God’s grace. If you don’t know where to start, read this book. There’s a lot here to make you think and it will inspire you to act. Even the chapter titles are helpful: “Repent and see,” “Teaching into an encounter,” and “The high cost of low power.” I particularly liked the author’s take on the Sermon on the Mount (it’s a treatise on the kingdom) and the Beatitudes in particular (they are lenses through which the kingdom is revealed). But be warned, if you take the lessons of this book to heart, the invasion will be underway. Heaven will come! Warn your neighbors!

Ultimately, though, this is not a book about signs and wonders. Yes, there are many riveting accounts of the miraculous in the book. But all of these simply point to the goodness of God. It is Him alone that we need and His heart that we must reveal to a world in peril:

“In this present hour we need much more than to learn how to identify our personal gifts or discover ways to be more successful in ministry. We need the Father Himself. We need His presence – His alone. The gospel is the story of the Father wooing the hearts of mankind through His love. All the other stuff we do overflows from that discovery.” (pp.100-1)

Related posts:
- Bill Johnson on the goodness of God
- Jesus’ Medicine: Tastes like Ribena
- The gospel of grace

God has given us minds to think, but we are not led by our our thinking. We are called to live by the Spirit rather than the cerebellum. Our spirits are made new the moment we are born again but from then on our minds have to play catch-up. They have to be renewed. We need to take on new attitudes, new ways of thinking. We need to cultivate the habit of saying yes and amen to the promises of God. We need to call things that are not as though they are. We need to believe we can do the works and greater works of Jesus, just as He said we would.

In the past few months I have read two excellent books about the mind of the believer.

The book I have just finished is The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind by Bill Johnson of Bethel Church. My favorite line in the whole book is, “God is changing the way Christians think about the so-called impossible” (p.30). Certainly the so-called impossible seems to happen all the time at Bethel Church. It happens so frequently that they have a member of staff whose sole job is to record the miracles taking place.

Many people distrust their own minds, but Johnson writes that the mind is actually a powerful instrument in the hands of God. So, what are we supposed to do with it?

“Our job is to tap the revelation of the Lord in our area of talent or gifting so that we can accurately and powerfully reflect the King and His Kingdom.” (p.75)

Johnson writes about the three kinds of leaven mentioned by Jesus. The leaven of Herod is a godless belief in the strength of man and man-made systems like politics and persuasion. Christians who hold such beliefs are indistinguishable from their atheist neighbors when dealing with problems.

The leaven of the Pharisees represents the theory of God but not the experience. It’s lifeless religion based solely on reason. Reason-minded Christians provide explanations for the way things are, but no solutions.

The leaven of the Kingdom is the faith-provoking revelation. It is revealed in the life lived from the Kingdom toward earth. Consider Jonah and Jesus sleeping in their boats during storms. Jonah slept to escape an unpleasant reality. Jesus slept because He was Kingdom-minded Kingdom and in the Kingdom there was no storm.

Johnson compares powerless preaching to a vacuum cleaner salesman who throws a handful of dirt on your floor, promises his cleaner is powerful enough to remove everything in sight, hands you’re a brochure and then leaves. That’s what we do when we merely tell people that the King heals all their diseases and delivers them from all their torments. How much better if we showed them!

A startling insight in this book is the idea that God is enamored with our desires, that He longs to see what makes us tick. Before we were saved our desires were corrupt. But when we are intimate with the Father our desires are pure. Perhaps your mind wanders when you pray. Just maybe, says Johnson, it’s not the devil distracting you but God leading you to creative solutions to problems.

Transformed Mind will certainly make you think! You will never look at your desires and daydreams the same way again.

Last year I read So You Think Your Mind is Renewed? by Cornel Marais. This book starts from the same place as the other one – God calls us to do humanly impossible feats – but it has a heavier emphasis on healing. If you are sick, or know sick people, or ever pray for sick people, read this book! If you can’t afford to buy it, go to Charisma Ministries where you can download a free copy up until 28 May 2010.

In his book Cornel asks, “Would you go fly a plane after having only read a book about flying?” Of course not. So why do Christians think that just reading the Bible is the answer? Mature Christians exercise. They act on what they believe. They reconcile, they set free, they save, heal and deliver. They do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

This book provides a sound introduction to the gospel of grace (“grace upon grace”), demolishes a few mindsets (“sickness is never from God”), then gets down to the business of training people how to do the works and greater works of Jesus. It’s “be, know, do,” just like in the army.

Don’t ever wonder if it’s God’s will to heal someone. The root word for “heal” in the Greek is the same as the word for “save.” Just as it is God’s will to save everyone, it is His will to heal everyone.

“Healing is not our privilege, it is our right. Jesus didn’t suffer and die for you to have the privilege of maybe being healed. He died so you could be well!” (p.92)

There are no formulas in this book. The message has not changed since Jesus first uttered it: “only believe.” But aside from the boost to your faith, you will learn some practical tips that will help you get healing for yourself or those you pray for.

In medicine the golden hour refers to the brief window of opportunity for saving a life that follows a critical injury. A degree in medicine is not required. Anyone with a little training can save a life during the golden hour. So here’s the challenge:

If you had just one “golden hour” with an unreached people group, what would you do? In 60 minutes you don’t have time to do very much. But could you do enough to save at least one life? What would you say? What would you emphasize?

Recently I posed this challenge to a group of preachers and their responses are below. I did this to see whether there would be any consensus that something of lasting significance could be achieved in a short space of time.

The suggestions made by the preachers speak for themselves. It was not a competition, but one of the responses stands out for actually having been tried and succeeding brilliantly. If you have ideas of your own, click on “leave a comment” at the bottom of this post.

What would you do in one hour with an unreached people group?

“Well obviously I would try and pick up in the Spirit which is the way to go. I would probably go after healing and words of knowledge to demonstrate the reality of the power and love of God. Then I would try and explain what’s happening from the scriptures and how Jesus is the name above all names, and His uniqueness apart from all other gods and that He meets mans’ need. I would try and explain the futility of self righteousness and how God is not looking for it, but a surrendering in faith to the righteousness that comes from God in Christ, and that they exist to know God and have a relationship with Him, and outside of Him things are empty and meaningless. I would explain the cross – propitiation, justification and being made righteous – and eternal life.”

~ Ryan Rufus

“Since they are ‘unreached’ nothing I say in 60 minutes is going to change anything.  Perhaps this is cheating but hypothetically I would trust the Lord for a supernatural healing / manifestation (which would be the only way anyone in an unreached group would make a truly transformative life decision in such a short time) and then give them Peter’s admonishment in Acts 2.”

~ Steve Hackman

“I would preach Christ crucified for about 20 minutes then pray for healing and deliverance. I’d ask for a response to the gospel then pray for the baptism of the Spirit. The last thing I’d do is ask God to reveal a leader, set him in, and commit the church into the mighty hands of our King! If the church survives it’ll be a miracle, a testimony of the Holy Spirit’s power.”

~ Paul Ellis

“I have in fact been in this exact situation in Sri-Lanka when we had 30 minutes to preach to some Hindu workers in a factory. This is what we did.

“I told them to look around at nature and people and they would for sure know that there is a God. I then told them that many of their god’s were made of stone, wood or gold, but I wanted to tell them and introduce them to a God who made stone, wood and gold. That their god’s required hours of hard work to get them to prove their devotion to it, that these so called gods did not know how to love because they had no life. I asked them if they had ever experienced their gods. I then told them that I wanted to show them a God who doesn’t require us to prove anything to Him but in fact He proved His love for us through dying on a cross to set us free and to bring us into a real relationship with Himself. That all He wanted was for us to understand that love. That His name is Jesus.

“I then said that He would prove His existence and love by healing them from pain, sickness and the tormenting spirits. We saw people violently manifest and get delivered, some were healed and all 60 of them gave their lives, including our Muslim taxi driver.

“I think that the most import thing to relay if we had limited time is not the fear of hell or judgment, but rather the love and grace of God. The kindness of God leads people to repentance.”

~ Bradley Dearlove

“If I only had one hour, I would preach the kingdom (God’s superiority), heal their sick, cast out their demons and set the oppressed free. That is what Christ was anointed to do and that is what He is still anointed to do through me. If I had more time, I would still do exactly the same thing, I would just have more time to do it. Time should not dictate our methods. Jesus dictated what we should do. Preach, heal, cast out, set free. Stick to the basics no matter what the time constraints. I will take displays of kingdom power over man’s knowledge of the Bible and Christian psychology every time. People aren’t interested in the Bible, they are interested in freedom. Show them the Way and they will follow Him.”

~ Cornel Marais

“First off I tell people that I am not religious. That normally makes them listen, because how can you say you’re a Christian and you’re not religious? Second, I’d tell them that religion is actually a world system that has been implemented to control the masses, and that the misperception that Christianity is a “sin management” or “behaviour improvement” program is actually a lie. A relationship with God is all that matters. Lastly I’d tell them that God is not angry at them, I wrote a full article on this here.”

~ Andre van der Merwe

Of the 2,500 prophecies recorded in the Bible around 80% have been fulfilled to the letter so far. The probability of this happening by chance and without error has been conservatively estimated as less than 1 in 10 to the 2000. (That’s a 1 with 2,000 zeros after it.) To put this number in perspective, the probability that the second law of thermodynamics will be reversed in a given situation (e.g., you start your car and the  engine freezes instead of warming up), is only 1 in 10 to the 80.

(Where did these figures come from? For the maths on prophecy fulfillment, plus some Biblical truth tests, visit the excellent Reasons to Believe website.)

To give you an example of the specific nature of Biblical prophecies, consider the following examples of prophecies concerning Jesus Christ.

Source: Gospelcom.net