Hi all,
Shortly
after the USSR fell apart, I led a team to the city of Ekaterinburg, a
city of over 1 million people sitting astride the Ural Mountains over
1,000 miles (1600km) east of Moscow, to help start a church. Over the
course of the week we went to the main train and bus station to hand out
advertisement about the meetings where I would be sharing the gospel.
Those were innocent days that were too short-lived.
Their sudden exposure to the west brought confusion concerning fashions and a desperate effort to catch up. Having no context to set the decades of western styles in proper order,
people would often wear clothing from various decades all at once: One
man was wearing bell bottom jeans from the late 1960's with a pastel
linen jacket from the early 1980's "Miami Vice" era (US TV show) topped
by a baseball cap with an American team's emblem on it. One young woman
was wearing a 1960's mini-skirt with old work boots and a woman's jacket
from a polyester pants suit and had the big hair style of the 1980's.
It
was all very sweet and innocent, and I was deeply touched by the hearts
of the Russian people and their rich culture. I baptized about 400
people who had believed on the Lord that week and cherish those days.
Tzedakah
I've
been talking about the Jewish understanding of righteousness, tzedakah
in Hebrew, because tzedakah says if a person has right standing before
God they will live that rightness in a flow outward to their fellow man.
Church culture teaches right standing with God, while leaving off the
(horizontal) flow to our neighbor.
But, if all we understand is the vertical,
we can be like the crowd at the bus station where no one had the
context to understand how each decade of style fit together.
They could not be sure what to identify themselves with, and I see many
Christians like that. Whe have Christians wearing 'streams of the faith'
styles from many decades all together, having no context to establish to Whom they belong, therefore they seek an identity with some movement to prove their walk with God.
Someone
may clothe themselves with the intercessor movement of the 1990's like
a jacket, while wearing doctrinal shoes ready to walk through the
Tribulation, with spiritual pants trying to relive the Toronto
blessing. Or, they can wear the 'pre-tribulation rapture' hat with the
inner healing coat and have their feet shod with the cowboy boots of
simple church. But no matter the 'spiritual clothing' they cover
themselves with for others to see, it is still all about them and their
lives in a self-centered faith.
Why Jesus healed
Jesus' life
in the gospels was living tzedakah as a flow of being right before the
Father, and therefore He did healings and miracles as evidence of His
righteousness - not just to prove who He was, - but as evidence His life was righteous and what He said about the Father was right and people could therefore believe in Him.
Acts 10:38 says "...How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power
(vertical), who went about doing good and healing (horizontal) all that were oppressed of the devil."
Today the fact Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit and power and went about doing good
is lost on us. Many want to have a greater anointing which they equate
with a personal breakthrough or answered prayer or bigger ministry, but
no one ever says they wanted to be anointed as Jesus was, to go about
doing good.
Jesus
did not go about 'doing good' trying to brand Himself as the newest
product from heaven, He went about doing good because He IS good. And so
is the Father. When He said He is meek and lowly in heart, He was
telling the truth. He is meek and lowly because the Father is first meek
and lowly.
When He turned water into wine
He didn't advertise the fact but let the groom and bride receive the
honor. Did you get that? Jesus though the Son of God in the flesh,
allowed an unamed bride & groom receive the credit and honor for the
wine. Sometimes He would tell people not to tell anyone when He healed
them. Those are His values. That is His humility. That is how He
expressed tzedakah - righteousness.
In
John 9 we have the healing of a man born blind that illustrates the
Jewish understanding of righteousness being vertical AND horizontal. The
man is brought before the rulers who had already stated in v24 they
believed Jesus was a sinner. The blind man answered in v30-33 with his
statement of tzedakah:
"Now we know that God doesn't hear sinners, but if any man is a worshipper of God AND does His will,
him will He hear. Since the beginning of the world it has not been
heard that any man has opened the eyes of one born blind. So if this man
were not of God, He could do nothing."
Why have we been given the name of Jesus?
Healing
and the things of the Spirit therefore aren't side-show attractions at
the Christian Carnival, with people gathering to see a leg grow out or
go to a meeting to see the latest 'manifestation' where God allegedly
turns people into blathering idiots, causes them to bark like a dog, or
shake like a leaf in the wind.
NO!
Healing is part of God the Father's own tzedakah (right-ness), that He
pours out to us because He is righteous. And in the flow of living water
from the throne from Him through us*, that righteousness is to be
demonstrated and proven by healing acts of love towards our fellow man!
*Revelation 22:1; John 7:38-39
Last week
I was on a flight after visiting the Seattle/Vancouver Island/Vancouver
areas. When I was seated I noticed the flight attendant holding her
finger to her left ear. She kept rubbing her left ear, and I asked the
Father if He wanted to heal her as clearly something was wrong. When I
got the chance I asked if she was okay, and she said when the cabin door
had opened after the previous flight there was a jet next to them that
started its engines at that moment, and the sudden loud noise made her
deaf in that ear.
I
started to offer to lay hands on her but she dismissed my concern
before I could ask outright to lay hands on her, quickly turning away to
attend to preparations for take off. So I prayed this, "Father, I know
every good and perfect gift comes down from you to us, and she is just
doing her job and sustained this injury, would you touch her and heal
her out of your mercy and because I'm asking you to?"
About
10 minutes later she walked down the aisle past me and I asked how she
was doing, and she said, "It went back to normal just like that! Thanks
for asking"...and I smiled in my heart at the Father's goodness, and the
expression of tzedakah I was able to be part of.
Today
we have 'healing evangelists' who make a great show of what they do.
Today we have people who run to this meeting and that looking for the
spectacular, thinking that is supernatural. Today we have people
flocking to 'revival centers' where they think God is concentrating His
presence, so they pick up their ear plugs at the door for what is called
'worship', and wait to see who will flop, shake, rattle and roll as a
sign God is in their midst. And He graciously does what He can to meet
people where they are, but there is a better and higher way...
We
have been given the name of Jesus not to make a show, but to change
people's lives where they live, as discreetly as Jesus turned water into
wine and kept quiet*, as nonchalantly as miraculously reattaching
Malchus' ear* after Peter had cut it off, as graciously as healing
Peter's mother in law so she could attend to her guests.* What we find
in house church is that most of the gifts of the Spirit operate outside
the meetings, in day-to-day life, just as we see in Matthew through
Acts. It is a Biblical understanding - God lives in people, not in
temples made with hands* and it is within those relationships tzedakah
is best demonstrated. (John 2, Luke 22:50-51, Mark 1:30-31, Acts 17:24)
Let us remove the 'spiritual clothing'
from the various streams which cause us to be self-focused, and start
living our right-standing with the Father as He intended, in a flow
outward in tzedakah (righteousness) alleging and proving He is good and
Jesus is His Son, with evidence to support those claims by our own
lives, and the good He does through us.
Next week; Understanding marriage/divorce/adultery/remarriage in tzedakah
Blessings,
John Fenn
www.cwowi.org and email me at cwowi@aol.com
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