In Luke chapter 8 there is an interesting story of a woman who was healed by Jesus without Him actually doing anything. She sneaks up to Him in the middle of a crowd packed in shoulder to shoulder and touches His clothes. When she touched His clothes she was healed from something that had been troubling her for years.
Jesus not only didn’t pray for her, but He didn’t appear to know who had just been healed. The interesting thing is that He did know that power had come out of Him and He began asking the crowd who had touched Him. No one understood because a dozen people were touching him on every side. You couldn’t walk through a crowd that thick without touching everyone. So Jesus clarified His question, ‘Someone touched me, I perceive that power has gone out from me.’
At this point the woman admits it was her and that she had been healed. I don’t know how many of you have felt a power transfer of the Holy Spirit, but often it is an unmistakeable experience. For example, one time I had injured my knee. I was struggling to walk around and it felt like I had torn something and might need surgery. We don’t have the time or money to deal with that but that was the situation. I was considering going to the doctor. My wife, who is a healer by profession and spiritual gifting, has spent a lot of time and effort getting people better by both modern medicine and the healing power of Jesus. She leaned over and put a hand on my knee and prayed.
Now if you’ve never experienced a thing like this it may be hard to imagine. I felt a hot substance come out of her hand and into my knee. It almost felt like a hot liquid going into your stomach only this was not visible and went right through my body into the injured part. When it got there it was PAINFUL! If I hadn’t known this was God from stories others have told of similar experience I might have been afraid. The inside of my knee felt like it was on fire. When I say that, don’t hear, ‘it was really hot’ or ‘it was a lot hotter than normal’. It was on fire, it was so hot I couldn’t stand the feeling of the heat. My flesh wanted it to stop, my mind thought something had to be wrong. But I knew exactly what was happening, the Lord had stepped in and was healing my knee. God had sent power through my wife and into my knee and the power of the Holy Spirit was doing supernatural surgery inside of me.
This miracle wasn’t the TV version. It didn’t just hit me and suddenly I was back on my feet. This lasted several minutes and I just squirmed around trying to withstand the fire so I could come out the other side healed. It took a lot of faith and it grew my faith through the process. In less than 10 minutes my knee was fine and I wasn’t limping around the house anymore.
The Bible calls this dunamis in the old greek. When Jesus said I perceive that power has gone out from me, that word power is dunamis. It can be translated into a spectrum of English words from power to energy to might. Not every church you walk into displays or even believes that God’s dunamis can flow through us today. But in Acts 1:8 just before Jesus went back up to Heaven in a cloud, He said this. “But you will receive power (dunamis) when the Holy Spirit has come upon you”.
The truth is that if we have received the Holy Spirit, then we have the same dunamis that Jesus has. In another place in Romans 8 it says, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” No matter what we think we know, to be a Christian one must have the Holy Spirit and to have the Holy Spirit means that the dunamis Jesus had, we have now.
So why is it that we so rarely walk down the street healing people by accident? I don’t have an exact answer for that, each of our situations is gonna be a little different. But for many of us, it is that we regularly quench the Holy Spirit because we don’t understand how to walk in and with God or even that we are supposed to! For many it is that the Holy Spirit isn’t actually in you and you never truly got saved. For many it is complete lack of faith in that sort of thing to happen, believing instead that our human teacher knows more than the Bible about this.
If you see the facts written plainly in the Bible today and you want to know what the issue is for you, then you’re going to have to deal directly with God. He can show you what you’re doing right and what you need to adjust. His power is for many purposes and it is given to you so that you can be a witness for Him. So go get the dunamis that you are supposed to be walking in and take it forth to those around you and may God bless all y’all.
Practice Outlaw 