Now that takes courage - remember this guy's life is on the line. Can you understand that all moving in the spirit, there's a point where you have to take a risk? This was a big risk; He has to go to the house of a murderer of Christians - that's a step of faith. He probably said ‘goodbye’ to everyone before he went… just in case!
Notice he says: “Ananias, I've heard a lot about this man, he does much evil to Your saints” - so he started to reason with God about it. The Lord said: “go, he's chosen unto Me, and I will show him great things he must suffer for My name's sake”.
So Ananias went his way, entered the house, and laid his hands on him. He said: “Brother Saul, Jesus that appeared to you in the way as you came, sent me that you might receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost. Immediately he was healed; and filled with the Holy Ghost, spoke in tongues.
Isn't that a great story! There's an example of: words of knowledge; works of wisdom (knowing what to do); prophetic utterance (speaking over him); gifts of healing; and faith flowing - it's great! That's a great story, of many of the gifts all flowing together, with one man.
We see now that: you are designed to be supernatural. God wants you to operate in the supernatural. He is willing to do this for you.
What is your part? What is the bit you've got to play? There are some responsibilities we have concerning the gifts of the spirit, so let me give you what they are. I'll lay them out for you, and then we'll finish this session, then we'll give you something to do - give you a little activation. This will be quite an easy one as well. Everything will be easy; you've just got to step out and do something - it's really simple.
Gifts of the spirit are given to everyone; so if God gives it to me, what does He expect me to do? What's my part?
There's a number of things that we're called to do, so I'm going to identify them. I'm referring to the Bible all the time, because I want you to get a base from the word of God, for how to operate in the spirit. If you have lots of spiritual experiences without having a word-of-God base, you can go all over the place. You'll find we'll continually draw you back to the written word of God as the judge of your spiritual experiences.
So here are several things that God requires of us:
1) He wants you to learn how to flow with the Holy Spirit. He wants you to learn it. Your responsibility is to be a learner; and learning starts tonight, and goes on for the rest of your life.
1 Corinthians 12:1 – “Concerning spiritual gifts, I don't want you to be ignorant”.
God expects you to put in the effort to learn. Nothing comes easily; you have to put in some effort. You have to do something. We'll show you what kinds of things you do.
He wants us to learn how to work with the Holy Spirit… to build others. Here's an interesting thing: God wants you to be a builder of people.
Many people have got the wrong paradigm - they have very much a paradigm where you come to church, and you get blessed and ministered to - and church is all about you having your needs met. That's only a part of the truth; actually the real truth is higher than that.
God wants to meet your needs or bless you - so you can become a blessing to others. Flowing in the spirit is about discovering how to fulfil my destiny with God… in the workplace, in the marketplace, wherever I am. So God expects me to learn; and learning is a lifetime thing.
2) We're expected to passionately desire the gifts of the spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:31 – “earnestly, passionately”, oh! “Love with the gifts of the spirit!”
Why? Because when you flow in them, it answers all arguments. If you have a miracle… no one can argue with the miracle. I remember being in a meeting, and there was a lady there and she was born deaf. I prayed for her, and both her ears opened up, and she could hear for the first time. You could just - like the whole meeting all stopped for this woman; and I watched in a moment as, first of all there was shock, because she could hear, then she started to cry, then she started to laugh. Then she was just bewildered about what was going on. It was quite extraordinary, and no one could deny that God had touched the woman. There was just no answer for it! So in particularly spiritual cultures, people just throng to get a miracle; so when I go into Asia, they'll have meetings, and they'll expect the power of God to flow. People just get saved - all kinds of people get saved, because you can't argue with the power of God. You just can't argue with the power of God. You get deaf ears opened, blind eyes opened, people get healed and things happen. That's God - and people want the God who does that.
In Pakistan, in the meetings there that Dave was at (Pastor David, my son), all kinds of miracles were happening, and people just flock to come in and receive Christ. Muslims come in from all over to receive Christ, because they're seeing the power of God. There's something about the power of God that just stops everyone in their tracks.
I had one guy, we did the seminar here, and he learned how to pray for the sick; went back to his workplace, and he was working on one of the machines there, and one of his friends walked by. He was obviously in pain in his back, so he said: hey, what's happening? He said: I've got a lot of pain in my back. He said: well I've got two answers for you; 1) you come to church on Sunday, and we pray for you there; or 2) I pray for you now. Which will it be? Now that's pretty bold to do that; and so he said: oh, okay, pray for me now. So he just left the machine for the moment, laid hands on him and began to pray. He said: how do you feel? He said: well it's a little bit better - prayed again; the guy was totally healed - and everyone's watching.