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Imagine going to church some morning, getting in the building and then at some point during the time when everyone is singing and worshiping God, a cloud of God's Glory begins to fill the room, and it gets so thick that you cannot see anyone around you.

"Oh, come on, Brother Copeland, that's just too far-fetched."

Let me tell you, it's already happening. I know of a church in Africa that had a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and the daughter of a witch doctor was born again and baptized in the Spirit. Her daddy didn't like that one bit, so he went to that church during a service and planned to curse them—and I don't mean just say ugly things to them.


When he got there, there had been manifestations of God's Glory in that service and he said, "I don't care what kind of miracle you do, I'll match it!"

Well, he actually pulled off a couple of things, but the devil's been doing that since Pharaoh's days.

Then all of a sudden, everyone in that church building started rising off the floor and got about four feet in the air where they were suspended—that is, everyone except that witch doctor, who just kept running across the front of the room, jumping as high as he could.

But God's presence was so strong that no one paid any attention to that old boy. Finally, all this got to him and he fell on his face and gave his heart to the Lord. Sure enough, everybody just floated right back down.

This went on all night, and by morning the man was baptized in the Holy Spirit and free from a whole bunch of devils.

So what do you do in the middle of an outpouring like that? What do you do when the Glory of God, the signs and wonders of God, start spilling over into your everyday life, and not just down at the church building on Sunday nights?

Well, Jesus is our standard of living, so let's remember what He would do in a signs-and-wonders-type situations (John 6:5-6).

Now, have you ever noticed that to those who believe, signs and wonders are a sign, but to those who don't believe, it makes them wonder?

We see particularly in the book of Acts that people were always marveling or being filled with wonder and amazement over the miracles, signs and wonders manifesting in the lives of the apostles and believers.

We can take that a step further, however, and say that signs and wonders have never produced any faith. If they had, the nation of Israel would be a faith giant today, just from all those miracles recorded in the Old Testament.

But even as we get into the New Testament, it's obvious that signs and wonders produced no faith, because if they had, Jesus could have simply walked the streets of Jerusalem with His arms raised after He was resurrected so people could see the holes in His hands, and everyone would have followed Him.

I'm sure if He had done that, tens of thousands of people would have followed Him. Yet, there still wouldn't have been an ounce of faith in all of them put together, and not one of them would have been born again. They would have been a bunch of people full of wonder, following a man with holes in his hands, and even the excitement—or wonder—of that would have worn off in time.

I realize you may think I'm being pretty hard on these folks, but if you've studied the ministry of Jesus any, you know that even His disciples were not much different than all the other people in the crowds that followed Him.

Jesus' disciples were continually walking alongside Him, watching Him work miracles and manifest the Glory of God, and all the while just as full of wonder as everyone else. We know from the Scriptures that they spent plenty of time asking themselves, "I wonder why He did that...I wonder why He didn't do that...I wonder what He'll do now?"

The reason we know they were thinking those thoughts—and even asking each other— is because Jesus asked them over and over, "Where's your faith...? Where's your faith?"

So here in John 6, when Jesus asked Philip, "What do you think we should do?" His purpose in asking the question was to get Philip to think. He was working on changing the way they all thought.

Besides, Jesus knew good and well what He was going to do with all those hungry people. He was going to feed them. He may or may not have known all the details of how it would happen, but He did know what to do. And that's what I want us to examine.

I want to show you three aspects of Jesus that will help anchor us and keep us steady in the ways of God and the plans of God, especially when we begin stepping out more an more into these great end-time manifestations of God's Glory in our lives.

Excerpt permission granted by
Eagle Mountain International Church, Inc.
aka: Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Author Biography

Kenneth Copeland
Web site: Kenneth Copeland Ministries
 
For the last 50 years Kenneth and Gloria Copeland have been passionately teaching Christians all over the world how to apply the principles of faith found in God’s WORD to their lives.
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