Class Notes 18

Week 18 Principles of Intercession – Class Notes – January 22, 2017

God’s Power Tools, continued

FYI – some people group the power gifts differently or name the individual groups differently. I’m sharing those that seemed to me to be organized well.

II. The second group of gifts is Sign Gifts, where God enables a believer to DO certain things:

• The gift of faith — God enables a person at a given moment to believe something without human reasoning or logic. The result is that he then prays or speaks (commands) something in the name of Jesus and what he asks or says will come to pass. This kind of faith is not natural or logical: it is supernatural and comes via the Holy Spirit.

Examples:

1. In Luke 5:17-20 the friends of a crippled man carried him to a roof top, then let him down through the roof in front of Jesus. Jesus SAW their faith. Whose faith was it? Not just the friends’ faith, it took faith for the crippled man to let them do all that. Note that Luke 5:22 says Jesus perceived the thoughts of the Pharisees who were sitting there. That’s the gift of discerning of spirits.
2. I shared an event that was carried by secular as well as Christian news organizations some years ago. A teenage girl lifted a fallen farm tractor off her dad. He couldn’t even lift it in the natural… but she received a gift of faith that she could lift it, and combined with a gift of miracles, she did.

• The gifts of healing — enables a believer to be God’s instrument to bring healing to someone who is sick, whether spiritual, psychological or physical. Notice – this is the only gift that is plural. Jesus healed every sickness and every disease (Luke 4:40). Even in his home town of Nazareth where he could do no mighty miracles, he still healed some of the sick people (Mark 6:5-6).

Examples:

1. Ten lepers – they were healed as they obeyed Jesus. Note, they could not have entered the Temple unless the leprosy was completely gone. (Luke 17:12-15)
2. Sick man at Pool of Bethesda – he was healed as he obeyed Jesus and got up.(John 5:2-9)

Some evangelists or revivalists are used more in gifts of healing than in other gifts – Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman in the past, Heidi Baker and others in the present. Heidi Baker has raised more people from the dead than any other that I know of, hundreds so far.

See blog posts How to Heal the Sick: https://estherspetition.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/how-to-heal-the-sick/, and also the Addendum, Are You the One Who is Sick: https://estherspetition.wordpress.com/2015/10/03/how-to-heal-the-sick-addendum/)

• The gift of miracles — a manifestation of God’s power whereby some obstacle is removed or opportunity seized in a way that could only come from God’s intervention into human affairs. This gift is a sign of God’s presence and power and, therefore, often a source of belief to many.

Examples:

1. I shared about my car running hot; I laid hands on the hood of the car and it was instantly cool.
2. Mel Tari and a group of other believers walked across a river, thinking the water was shallow… but it was very deep, 15-20 feet or more. Because of that, many villagers were born again. Still alive at this writing, he is traveling around the world and preaching. From Timor, he is the author of the autobiographical book “Like A Mighty Wind,” the story of the Indonesian outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the 1970’s.
3. Read John 6:1-13 about Jesus feeding the 5 thousand. This event appears in all four gospels, with more details in some than others. Here Philip pointed out that a boy in the crowd had 5 barley loaves (poor people’s grain) and 2 small fish, which apparently he had brought for himself but was willing to give to Jesus. The disciples wanted to send the crowd home, but Jesus asked Philip, what should we do? But Jesus knew all along what he planned to do. The food was multipled when the disciples, obeying Jesus even though it seemed like an unreasonable request, began to distribute the tiny amount of food each one had. This is how many miracles happen, when people begin to do what they cannot do, what seems impossible for them to do. (The ten lepers, the man at the Pool of Bethesda, for example.)
4. I shared a personal testimony from the 1970’s. A group of 10 or 12 students came to my apartment during a snow / ice storm because we still had electricity while the power in their dorm was out. I used the food I had to cook a chicken and vegetable stew, which in the natural would feed 4 or 5 people, but we all ate lunch and supper and were full, with some leftovers.

Remember – God loves people. He wants to help them, and he wants to use us to do it.