Dry Spring

Thursday 1/2/2014 6:52 AM

Last night Jaci and I attended a worship service with Emily and Garrison at the church where they have been worshiping recently.  The speaker encouraged those present to remain focused upon God and upon his kingdom in the coming year.  In the course of his message he recounted the story of how a Korean pastor had prayed for the healing of a paralyzed woman.  He fell into a trance where he battled with a snakelike creature that he eventually defeated by invoking the name of Jesus.  The next day he saw the woman walking and, when she saw him, she thanked him for coming to her house healing her.

Some of my siblings have had similar experiences in which they were doing battle with demons or they have had visions of a spiritual world where good and evil were doing battle.  The Bible says that the believer’s battle is against an unseen enemy and, because of that, a believer must fight with different weapons than those that are used in our visible world.

I have experienced the presence of God in a very tangible way on more than one occasion but I have never had visions like those of my siblings or the Korean pastor.  I have experienced the pain of those going through difficult circumstances and wept uncontrollably during times of intercessory prayer for them but I have never seen the enemy with whom Christ is doing battle.  When I hear about the experiences of others it makes me wonder about the validity of my own faith.  I have regular times of reading the Bible, trying to determine God’s will for me, but I do not experience dramatic revelations or miraculous events as a result.  I simply have a deep-seated assurance that God is real and that he is with me at all times, when things are going well and when the wheels are coming off of the bus.

Jesus commanded his disciples to go into the world and make disciples.  The speaker in last night’s worship service told the story of the Korean pastor that I cited above, which resulted in an entire area of Seoul coming to faith in God.  He also told the story of a blind woman who simply called people on the phone and talked to them about Christ.  The result of her ministry was that over three thousand people came to faith.  When I look in the wake of my life I see very little.  I once prayed with someone when they accepted Christ as their Savior but it was not because of my urging.  In fact, I felt as if they came to faith in spite of my presence, not because of it.  As far as I know I have made zero disciples in my life.

When speaking with the Samaritan woman Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  It seems that if I am drinking from God’s love it should well up in my own life and spill over into the lives of others.  When I see so little evidence of others being affected by my life I begin to wonder if my spring is dried up.

In his book The Manhood of the Master, Harry Emerson Fosdick describes the prayer life of Christ out of which his ministry flowed.  He writes, “The Master’s preeminence comes not chiefly from his describable virtues, but from those deep sources of his life with God, out of which his virtues flowed, begotten not made, and fragrant, every one of them, with the quality of his perfect fellowship with the Father.”  I am spending time with God but somehow it seems like I am disconnected from the source.  Perhaps, like Jesus’ disciples, I need to ask him to teach me how to pray.