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Issue link: http://magazine.kcm.org/i/1259480
A glorious church is a church where God’s presence is revealed in signs and wonders and visible demonstrations of miracle-working power that people can see! What We Believe Determines What Happens Truth be told, that’s the kind of church God has always wanted. He started the Church on the Day of Pentecost with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and signs, wonders and miracles; and He made every provision for those things to continue in full force. They would have, too, if it had all been up to God. But it’s not just up to Him. It’s also up to us. What happens in the Church is what the Church believes for! When we believe for healing to manifest in our midst, healing manifests. When we believe for people to be filled with the Holy Spirit, people are filled. When we believe we can do the works of Jesus, we do them. The Church is heading toward the finish line and we need to believe God for everything He’s promised! We don’t have time anymore to sit around just remembering the great miracles and outpourings of the Spirit that happened in the past. We can’t be content to wait passively for the Church to be filled with God’s glory some day in the distant future. The hour is late. We need to rise up in boldness right now and declare, as Jesus did in Luke 4:18-21: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord…. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” Those are exciting words, aren’t they? Yet when Jesus first said them in Nazareth, people got offended. They weren’t ready to believe for Scripture to be fulfilled in their day. “We believe God moved in the past,” they said. “We believe He’ll move in the future. But we’re not going to start expecting Him to do supernatural things right now!” For many years, the contemporary Church took the same attitude. Preachers and congregations alike relegated the fulfillment of God’s plan to another generation or a different dispensation. But in recent years a wonderful change has been taking place. More and more believers have started expecting the Scripture to be fulfilled in our day. We’ve started expecting God to move among us now and change us into the image of Jesus, “from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18)! Why did it take so long for the Church as a whole to expect this? One reason is because, for a long time, people didn’t know anything about it. All they’d been taught was that if they believed on Jesus they’d go to heaven when they died. For years, that’s all preachers preached because they thought that was the sole purpose of the gospel. They thought the plan of Redemption was only designed to keep people out of hell. 28 : BVOV