How desperate are you?

A while ago, I began to get very dissatisfied with Church as I had known and experienced it. I don't mean I had a problem with God or His people - that would be trying to pass the blame for my dissatisfaction on to someone other than myself; I was the problem. It was my own relationship with Father that bothered me. It was my own attitude to Church life that dissatisfied me.

Grace will set my course but passion will keep me on it.

GAPS

When I began to question the "things of God" I had been taught since committing my life to Christ in 1986, I realised that I had some serious gaps between what the bible described as the life and experiences of the early Church and what I had been living and experiencing as the end-time Church. For instance:

There's an enormous gap between believing for the relief from a headache and raising the dead.
There's an enormous gap between believing for a parking space and seeing a mountain being uprooted and heading for the nearest ocean.
There's an enormous gap between believing for God to supply your next meal and believing that you are called as a giver of millions to the Church.

These are serious gaps. Faith is all about the substance and reality of the things you have hoped for as well being the evidence of things not seen. My faith has to be so real, I need to have the picture in my heart and mind of what God has promised and believe Him so implicitly that I can feel and even taste it. Now that's mountain moving faith.

Read Hebrews 6:1-3

We have become very poor imitators of characters we have read about in a book. We need to emulate and not imitate. We need to move on from the entrée and get to the main course.

Why would the world want the scribbling of a 3 year old when they can have a Picasso?

As a Church, we are;

too pre-occupied with the blessings of God and too little concerned about the God of the blessings
too concerned about making ends meet and not even worried about meeting our end.

If we get so consumed with the “now” of our living, we'll miss the promise of our “tomorrow”.

You've heard the expression, "....can't see the forest for the trees…”", well what about this:-

You can't see the forest, because YOU are a tree!

Our perspective about who we are must be determined from God's viewpoint and not our own. Listen if you scratch around in the dirt long enough you're bound to find some worms. Rather get up to where the eagles soar and lose sight of individual trees - all you'll see is the forest. What I mean is, get Kingdom vision.

There are many stories of courage and faith in the Bible but I would like to examine 3 particular people. They stand out as examples of 3 fundamental characteristics of desperate people - the kind of people with whom Jesus spent a lot of time. The woman at the well, the centurion of faith, the Gadarene man possessed of legions of demons, the lame man lowered down through a ceiling to get a touch from Jesus, the man at the pool of Siloam, the woman who anointed Jesus with Nard. There are many, many more but 3 speak particularly loudly to me because they so completely represent the kind of people who we, as the body of Christ, sometimes are and always should be.

These are the characteristics that I've seen in them:-

They did not give up
They were very, very desperate for a touch from Jesus
They believed implicitly that if He would only acknowledge them, their needs would be met.
They had faith that what they wanted more than anything else, was what God would give them.
They had no thought for what others would think of them.
Nothing mattered but a touch from heaven.

Touching heaven changing earth.

A) Luke 18:35-43 - Blind Bartimaeus Bartimaeus means son of Timaeus or son of the unclean one. What a heritage to carry with you all your life! His father was unclean, yet he had to carry the stigma of it.
Look at how much passion this man has in getting the attention of the Master passing by. How intense is the appeal when Bartimaeus cries out "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me". The more the crowd tried to keep him quiet, the louder he shouted until he got the attention of Him who could restore his sight.
God does not want you to shout like a lunatic every time you need Him to hear you - He isn't deaf - but God responds to your desperation.

Look at Ezekiel 18:20

20. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.

Bartimaeous was not responsible for the reasons behind his father's name; he carried his own responsibility for his own sin!
The end result of his desperate call to Jesus was 3-fold;

He got his sight back
He followed Jesus and praised God
The people who witnessed the miracle praised God

Besides getting his sight back, he also got his purpose back because he would no longer have to beg, he was able to work and earn a living again.

B)Luke 19:1-10 Zacchaeus – the tax collector Zacchaeus The root meaning of his name is "to do good" yet he was a tax collector. He was despised by his own people because he worked for the hated oppressors and took their money from them. Like Bartimaeus, he appeared to be unfortunately named but God has a sovereign role to play in every name we call our children. Be very careful what you name them - it could be prophetic of their future calling.
Despite being very wealthy, Zacchaeus had the worst of both worlds - he was hated by his own people for collecting taxes for the Romans and he was despised by the Romans because he was a Jew. He was also very short.

Your passion, and your desperate persistence will help you to overcome obstacles in your life and bring you into the very presence of God, where you will receive what He has to give you.

All Zacchaeus wanted was a look at this renowned teacher and prophet, Jesus but he got more than that. He received Jesus into his life, his home and his whole family got saved. Why? Jesus said it – in vs. 9 His faith brought about his salvation and that of his family.

How much passion do YOU have to get what God has predestined for you to have?

C) Mark 5:21-34 - The woman with the issue of blood

By way of introduction, the following passage is from NUmbers 5:1-4 and provides some insight into the dilemma this woman faced every day of her life;

1. The LORD said to Moses,
2. "Command the Israelites to send away from the camp anyone who has an infectious skin disease or a discharge of any kind, or who is ceremonially unclean because of a dead body.
3. Send away male and female alike; send them outside the camp so they will not defile their camp, where I dwell among them."
4. The Israelites did this; they sent them outside the camp. They did just as the LORD had instructed Moses

Topicalreference - Leviticus 15:19-30

If you read through this section of the sundry laws that Moses brought to the children of Israel, you get an understanding of just how severe the case was.
If she had to remain outside the camp for 7 days each time she had an issue (remember she had an issue of blood for 12 years!), she would have been permanently separated form her family and friends.
Everything she touched became unclean, anyone who touched her became unclean, if you touched her clothes or anywhere she sat you would have to wash your clothes, and yourself and also be unclean until evening.
Verse 25 says that if this issue of blood persisted for a long time - outside of the normal - she must be treated as if it was her normal time. In other words, even though she can't do anything about it and it wasn't anything she had done wrong, she still had to pay the price for it. Does that not sound familiar to you? Even though He had no sin or uncleanness, Jesus was put outside the camp to suffer for what we did wrong.

Some things to note about this woman,

She had suffered for so long that she must have been incredibly frustrated at not being able to get healed,
She had spent all the money and resources she had to be made well but to no avail
Sometimes, those who think they are helping us are our biggest problem! None of the doctors she went to see were able to help her and they gave her up as incurable. Instead of helping her, they caused her to suffer.
There are times when the cure we are given makes us worse, not better. Contrast this with "if the eye offend thee, pluck it out". God often prescribes radical cures for radical conditions
Too often we leave Jesus until the very last as the answer to our problem. Despite this, he is still our healer, even at the end of our hope.
She had mountain and crowd moving faith to be healed. "If only I could touch the hem of his garment." Not the top, not to take hold of a great bunch of it, just the very edge is all it will take. It wasn't His clothes that made her well, it was her passionate, desperate faith. She didn't just come to a righteous man who had derived authority by virtue of his calling or office but she came to the Son of God who had inherent power because of His relationship to and with God. She was supposed to be outside the camp and separated, therefore she had to approach through the back door or face death.
She was instantly healed of her disease. Leviticus required her to stay outside the camp for a further 7 days to make sure that she was in fact clean yet here we see her immediately healed. That's exactly what Jesus does when our sin causes the life-blood of God to flow out of us - He heals us instantly and restores us to life. There is no record of the bleeding being caused by sin; only her faith is recorded.

Ephesians 2:8-10

8. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
9. not of works, lest anyone should boast.
10. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Jesus rewarded her with acknowledgement and restoration because of the faith she had demonstrated by pushing through crowds to touch Him. He also blessed her because she humbly acknowledged that she had been healed by His touch and not by her actions. He will do the same for us because He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. He said "Your faith has made you well", not "my clothes have made you well".
She was also rewarded with the peace that can only come through Christ when we acknowledge Him and put our trust in Him.
How desperate are you today to get into the presence of God and begin to receive all His promises?
How desperate are you today to put all the past failures behind you and say, "..enough is enough, I need to hear from God?"
How desperate are you today to begin to worship with absolute liberty without worrying about the person next to you or what others will think of you?
How desperate are you to walk in a manner worthy of your calling, to stop thinking about what you can't do because of your upbringing; or your colour; or how much money you need to do something; or how long it's going to take you to do it?
Just how desperate are you?