He asked them a question, how did you receive the Holy Ghost into your life? How did you get born again? How did you get baptised in the spirit? How did you get a supernatural change in your life? Did you get it by working hard, or did you get it by the hearing of faith? Very simple. What is the answer? The hearing of faith. How do you get saved? You hear the word of God, and you believe and respond, and the power of God is activated by your response, see? That's how a person gets saved, so he appeals to the foundation of their Christian experience. How did you get saved? Did you get saved and supernaturally changed, and the spirit come into your life, because you worked hard and went to church and did good things - or did you get it because you heard the word of God and believed, and when you responded the spirit of God came? The answer's really clear. It was never by the works of the law. They were supernaturally transformed when the spirit of God came into their life.
He wants them to get that answer, because now he's going to ask them the real question. So he asks them the first question to get their head clear - how did you start in this game? Did you start by working hard to be a better person, or did you start by believing God? Well believing God. Great! He's asking now the real question he wants to ask, so then he goes on and he said: are you so foolish? You began in the spirit, and you think you'll become mature by the flesh? Have you suffered so many things in vain? He says now, He that supplies the spirit to you, and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or the hearing of faith?
So you notice he's asking almost the same question, but he's applying it to something else. So the first one was like this: how did you get saved? How did you get your initial experience with God - work hard, or believe God? Which was it? Believe God.
Now he does it a different way, he asks the same thing. This time he says how does God supply the spirit to you? How does God do miracles among you? So in other words he's saying, how do the gifts of the spirit flow? How do miracles happen? Work hard, or hear God and respond? The answer's really clear isn't it? Now he's framed it up that way by appealing to how they started as a believer. They heard God's voice, heard God speaking to them and they chose to believe and respond, and they were into a flow of the spirit. It was supernatural. He said the moving in the spirit's the same way, it's exactly the same way. It's not by working hard. It's not by trying hard. It's by extending your faith to believe and listen to God, so here is why, if we want to move in the supernatural, we must practice hearing and identifying the voice of God. This is the significant key to operating in the spirit. It is the hearing of faith. I extend my faith to believe God will speak to me, I extend my faith to believe God wants to use me.
Now for some of you that may be a challenge, because it's easier to believe He'll use someone else, than use you, and the core challenge is: will you believe in your heart, actually there's no reason at all why God would not use me. There's no reason at all why He would not want to do this. God loves me, He's justified me, I'm accepted. He wants to work through me. He's designed me to work this way. Of course I believe, and I'll extend now to listen and hear His voice, expect to hear His voice - and I'm going to apply this when it comes to working with one another in the exercises. I'll get you starting to stir your faith to believe, and listen, and then stretch out to see what God does. That's how the activations will work, so for example - so always it involves faith, I must extend out and believe that God will work through me.
Secondly, I need to tune in to hear God speaking to me; and three, I need to step out and actually act on what God gives me. Think about how you got saved. You heard the word of God, faith rose to believe it to be true, and then you stepped out and acted by speaking out, or confessing Christ in some way, so the flowing in the spirit actually works the same way. It all works the same way, and so we just need to practice hearing the voice of God. In John 5, 19 to 20, Jesus answered and said: I tell you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but whatever He sees the Father do, that's what He does. So He says the Father tells him, or shows Him, everything He's doing, so Jesus' miracles were done by what He saw the Father doing. He just spoke out and did that. Notice He didn't heal every person. Sometimes He healed everyone, but you know there's a guy by the door of the temple, He walked past him every time He went into the temple and never did anything. Why was that? Because He never saw the Father healing on that day, but when Peter went by, after being baptised in the spirit, Peter looked at him and he worked a miracle and the guy was healed.
So was it the will of God for him to be healed? It certainly was, but there was a flow of the spirit that Jesus listened to. So He went to one place by the well, by the Bethsaida [a place reputed for its healing properties] and the porters there, and there's a whole heap of crippled people and one He heals. So why one? That's not very fair. I don't know. I don't understand all the ways God works. All we know is, He saw what the Father was doing, and did that. He avoided or resisted pressure to try and meet every need. He learned how to listen to the Holy Spirit and work with the Holy Spirit, so we're not called to fix all problems. We're not called to solve everything. We are called to learn how to yield, extend our faith, listen to God, and obey Him, and it's in the little things you get the miracles. Let me give you an example.