“I am restoring you to who you’ve never been.” That’s what He told me. Jesus.

He came to me in an early morning dream, before the sun was fully up, on March 14, 2012, and invited me to a take a journey with Him, in answer to a specific prayer lifted before bed the night before.

“I have breakthrough for you.  But I can’t bring it unless you do this.  Take this journey.”

“Okay.”

“I’m restoring you to who you’ve never been, so you can be the authentic version of who you were created to be.”

And so began the most spiritually and physically transformational journey of my life.  Though the totality of that journey isn’t the topic for this post, one specific event that occurred during it is.

Get ready, this particular testimony is apt to blow your hair back just a bit.

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Isaiah 40:31 – But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.

The fighter stumbles to his corner. With what energy he has left, he spins around and flops into his seat. It’s the early rounds of the fight but there appears to be little left in the tank. The corner team descends on him, cooling his body, checking his hydration, massaging his muscles. In only a whisper, his ring man is in his face trying to penetrate the dead stare with a commanding mix of reassurance, encouragement and challenge. Time is short. The bell will soon ring. Will the fighter answer the bell? My money said, no.

But wait! This is not some stuffy, smoke-filled auditorium with a center ring hosting a boxing match. We are in a sun soaked field of tall, golden billowing grasses in the midst of the Green Mountains of Vermont. This is the Vermont 100, an excruciating endurance race – an ultra-marathon stretching for 100 miles.

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But, as the announcer says in the cheap TV infomercials – But wait! There’s more!

Isaiah 9:3-5 – You have multiplied the nation. And increased its joy; They rejoice before You According to the joy of harvest, As men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For You have broken the yoke of his burden And the staff of his shoulder, The rod of his oppressor, As in the day of Midian. For every warrior’s sandal from the noisy battle, And garments rolled in blood, Will be used for burning and fuel of fire.

(Continued from the Blog Post of 7/9/2018)

The day after our gathering at the lake, I was up early to drive Chuck and his team to JFK airport. The drive to the airport was a great opportunity for me to pick their brains about how they work the ministry they are in and ways that we can encourage churches in our area to move a little bit further out in their expectation of how God can work.

As we were driving Chuck asked me if there was anything they could pray for me about. I gave it some thought and the lightbulb clicked on.

I had been suffering from a damaged right shoulder resulting from a ski accident. I had gone to several doctors but couldn’t get a definitive answer. They just said it was something that I should rehab with a certain set of exercises. But, the exercises were not working. My range of motion was severely restricted. If I tried to extend my arm in any significant way in any direction, there was a great deal of pain. My sleep was suffering for the pain caused whenever I moved about in bed. Our prayer team had prayed for this on a number of occasions but not resulting in much improvement.

Finally, I had concluded from speaking with others that it was a torn rotator cuff injury. The prayer/supernatural approach had not seemed to work,  so perhaps God wanted to used the medical system to do His healing. I had decided it was time to go to the doctor to investigate having surgery.

Now, with the lightbulb burning brightly above my head, I was taken back to the night before when Chris first asked if there was anyone with an “arm” problem. I guess because I didn’t hear “shoulder” it didn’t register. (I checked this out – the shoulder is most definitely part of the arm). I told the guys about my shoulder and right then and there driving down I95 to JFK they laid their hands on my shoulder.

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Why Does Jesus Keep Shouldering My Burden?

Isaiah 9:4 – For You have broken the yoke of his burden And the staff of his shoulder

It was a Sunday evening in July. I had learned that my cousin Chuck, along with his team, was ministering at a church not far from us. Chuck serves at a West Coast Church known for operating in the miraculous.

At the time I was serving as the Prayer Director at our conservative East Coast Evangelical church. While God was and is doing amazing things at our church, we have not been all that comfortable with operating in the “sign gifts”. I invited my cousin and his ministry team to stay with us at our house by the lake for a couple of days.

It had been decades since I had seen my cousin and both of us had become Christians along the way. Now, spending time with him and his guys was a real treat. While he stayed at our house, I thought I’d invite our Prayer Team and some like-minded friends to come over and let Chuck and his team minister to us. My intent was to let the team stretch us a bit out of our comfort zone.

After some beautiful worship time down by the lake, Chuck gave a teaching. I expected that they would then start praying over people for physical, emotional and spiritual healings, exercising spiritual gifts that his team was blessed with. But, what they did do was simply call out people who had physical infirmities and then organize groups of us around them to then pray for the issue.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I had heard of amazing miracles that God has done through Chuck’s ministry and I wanted to see my cousin in action – slaying people in the spirit, casting out demons, some wild healings and maybe even him taking a stroll across the lake.

One of Chuck’s guys named Chris called over to the area where I was standing and asked, “Is there anyone over there who has a problem with an arm?” We all looked at each other until my friend Bill raised his hand and announced, “I do. I tore up a muscle and now it is all twisted and misshapen.” He exposed his arm and it was obvious that his bicep was not in the right place. With that they asked all of us standing around him to start praying for God to heal Bill’s arm.

So, I’m standing next to Bill and I begin praying with the others. But, as I’m praying I can’t help but feel totally inadequate. Our prayer team had been stretching ourselves to be more expectant about praying for God’s healing and we had recently seen some great results. We had begun to see things happening but here I really wanted to see the “professionals” at work.

All I could think of was that I was the wrong person for the job. I just did not have the faith to see this kind of healing. I mean, really, did I expect to see Bills muscle contort and move right back into place? After we all prayed for a while for Bill, we checked in with him.

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Wasn’t it Doubting Thomas?

We certainly have examples in the gospels where the disciples failed to exercise the same power and authority as Jesus, to his apparent frustration. Jesus attributes their failure to their lack of faith – doubt. But, there is one story in the gospels that I find particularly astounding.

Most of the Christian world agrees that Jesus is the Savior of the world—THE Son of God. He always was, is, and will be. Yet, we find in Mark 6:4-6 an interesting phraseology found only here and in one other location. It reads,

“But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.’ Now He could do no (dunamai—ability, poieo—to do, oudeis—nothing) mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marveled because of their unbelief.”

It is saying that, Jesus on earth, at that moment as Son of Man/Son of God, had the ability to do nothing or was unable or powerless to do the mighty works he was normally able to do. Why? Because the people in his home town were offended that Jesus was acting in ways that were beyond who they believed he was—at worst an illegitimate child or at best merely a carpenter’s son. They knew his background and understood that he had no real religious pedigree.

• D. Pentecost writes of Jesus’s family’s unbelief, “The unbelief that characterized Nazareth where Jesus grew up had permeated the home in which Jesus grew up; thus John noted, ‘His own brothers did not believe in him’ (John 7: 5).”

Jesus’s own brothers did not believe in him and lacked faith in him. This seemed to limit Jesus in his exercise of the Father’s powers. Is it possible that this lack of faith in him, for this moment caused a limiting doubt in himself? Ouch! Is that possible?

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