Momentum (Christ – centred, Spirit – empowered, Mission – focused)
Dave Hearn, President of the C&MA Canada
“…many otherwise orthodox Christians are in effect operational atheists or atheists unawares. To be sure, Christians still affirm the historic creeds, and we say we believe in the Holy Spirit and in prayer and the supernatural, but for many they are now only words.” – Os Guinness
These startling words are a wake-up call to the Western Church. In particular, they are a prophetic invitation to our Alliance family in Canada. A cornerstone of Alliance theology is the firm belief in supernatural things and a supernatural God.
Recently, I received the following email from a woman in one of our Alliance congregations. She writes;
I suffered with a pain in my back for 42 years. With age, my scoliosis became worse, and because of this spot, I could not fully straighten up on the left side, as the pain there caused me to pitch forward in order to relieve it.
After being prayed over, the pain disappeared! I was planning on waiting for a week to see if the pain had actually left before telling the news to my small group.
A friend who overheard part of the prayer came to me on Wednesday night saying, “You have news for me, don’t you?”
At first I didn’t know what she meant. She was excited and pressed on, “You were healed, weren’t you?”
I playfully scolded, “Shh, I haven’t even told my husband yet.”
The pain was still gone the next Sunday, and so I shared the news with my pastor and with the congregation. Praise the Lord!
A bizarre passage in Acts states, “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and evil spirits left them” (Acts 19:11-12).
The supernatural had become natural, and God’s presence was so anticipated that it was normal to have an expectation for the impossible.
A.W. Tozer made the declaration that “We must declare war on the mood of non-expectation.”
My hope for you is that you will live with an unapologetic “expectation” of God’s manifest presence, and that you too will experience a fresh taste of the supernatural power of God.
Please find the original version in C&MA website