How Can We See More Miracles Today?
1. Make Room for the Holy Spirit to Move in Your Services
The Holy Spirit does not move where He is asked to move. The Holy Spirit moves where He is ALLOWED to move. There is a big difference! You don’t have revival by asking God to move. You have revival by doing your part according to Scripture and then ALLOWING Him to move.
Churches all over pray for the Holy Spirit to move and even say, “Come, Holy Spirit!” yet see nothing of any consequence happen in their services. Yet I see plenty of miracles without ever asking the Holy Spirit to come or move! Well, for starters, we believe He’s present to begin with, not on a long journey where we have to beg Him to interrupt His plans to come “be with us.” Also, we already KNOW it’s His will to move because Scripture makes it clear that He wants us to flow in His gifts and that we should earnestly desire that. Any prayer to twist God’s arm to move is wasted time. He already wants to move more than we what Him to move! The question is, will we give Him the space to move?
I’ve seen too many services where people have been praying for revival and praying for the Holy Spirit to move, but you can set your watch by different phases of the service each week. We have three fast songs and two slow songs from the current top 100 Christian worship songs combined into an immutable set list, then a pre-offering sermonette, then the offering, then announcements, then special music to get us back into being spiritually minded after the announcements got us out of being spiritually minded, then a sermon that is also immutable so that the two or three services are sure to get exactly the same message. This varies between churches, but you get the idea. Too often people ask the Holy Spirit to move, then don’t give Him a chance to get His input in edgewise during the carefully structured service. Then they wonder why they don’t have any signs and wonders even when they’re preaching miracles, faith and healing.
We have to be willing to turn on a dime in our services if the Holy Spirit prompts us to change the order of things. The obvious question is why He doesn’t tell us in advance how He wants to move so that we can schedule around that. Sometimes He does tell you something He wants in advance, but sometimes He doesn’t. You have to be willing to go with the flow on the spur of the moment. Ignoring His promptings is the easiest way to have services that are doctrinally great but dry as the Sahara. The key to having wonderful moves of God is to be open to sudden changes as the Spirit leads. Don’t just try to be different for its own sake without His leading, but be sensitive to quiet nudges on the inside to do something you weren’t planning to do.
2. Teach God’s Healing Covenant Clearly.
People must have a biblical basis for believing in healing. Faith comes by hearing God’s Word (Romans 10:17). If people hear that they were healed by the stripes of Jesus and that any sickness in their body is trespassing and is not rightfully theirs, they have a basis for faith to be healed. If they are just trained to wait on manifestations of the Spirit in services and they are never taught to know for sure that Jesus has paid for their healing, they may never receive their healing.
Many churches say, “We believe in healing,” but they don’t believe that Jesus paid for everyone’s healing. If you do not believe that Jesus paid for your healing, you have no firm basis for faith. Many relegate healing to the moving of the Spirit, yet Galatians 3:5-6 speaks of God doing miracles in response to faith. When people come with expectant faith like that of the people who came to Jesus, they will get healed as they did in Jesus’ ministry.
3. Preach the Gospel to the Lost!
Too many of us ask God to have signs follow us when we aren’t going anywhere. Great signs and wonders followed the preaching of the Word. If there is no preaching of the Word to the unsaved, there will be few “signs and wonders”-type miraculous healings. The signs to follow mentioned in Mark 16 are clearly to follow those who believe as they obey the Great Commission by GOING to tell others the good news about what Jesus did for them. The gifts of the Spirit are not playthings for the entertainment of the saints. They confirm the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why should God “confirm” anything when no one is preaching the resurrected Christ to the lost? There is no message to confirm then! Besides, if you don’t even have the boldness to tell a lost person how to avoid hell, what makes you think that you have the boldness to raise up a person in a hospital bed surrounded by pessimistic doctors and unbelieving relatives?
The Great Commission never even mentions praying for the lost – it only mentions preaching the gospel to the lost. This is not to say that there are no prayers you could pray for lost people, but the emphasis is on sharing the Word. A sinner who hears the Word can get saved without anyone praying for him, but a sinner who never hears the Word cannot get saved no matter how many people pray for him.
If you want some horrible meetings, invite an evangelist who flows in sign-type gifts to your church, and then don’t invite the unsaved. Just show up wanting a good time for the saints. You and the evangelist will both be frustrated. He will have to try to get the saints revived so that they will start inviting people to church rather than hoping that people will come because they saw ads for the services.
4. Ask God for Boldness.
You can’t pray for more faith, but you can pray for boldness. The apostles did, and God answered their prayer (Acts 4:29-33). You will see a connection in the Bible between bold preaching and signs and wonders. The more boldly we preach Jesus, the more signs and wonders will follow.
The united believers in Acts 4:29-33 prayed for, and got, miracles, though the emphasis was on boldness to preach the Word, which God said He’d confirm with signs. You need to note that that this kind of “praying for miracles” has to do with gifts of the Spirit and signs following the preaching of the Word. We have other witnesses on this subject. Paul commanded believers to earnestly desire the gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:31, 1 Corinthians 14:1, 1 Corinthians 14:39). Therefore, we should desire that God use us in spiritual gifts, which include gifts of healings, working of miracles and (special) faith. Any believer can receive a miracle through faith without asking God to do anything new and without requiring a gift of the Spirit to operate (Galatians 3:5-6), but God will do special signs and wonders to confirm His Word when it is preached (Mark 16:20).
5. Get Rid of Hindrances.
The believers in Acts were in one accord. If there is strife and discord in your church, you don’t qualify for what they got. Sin in the camp will stifle the move of God even under our new covenant, as is discussed elsewhere in this book, despite modern teaching to the contrary. This applies more to leaders and active church members, not to the flakes who flit from church to church and fringe people who attend but never help in any area. Those people don’t qualify to be part of a revival anyway, so don't worry about what they do. Those who can’t start a revival can’t stop it either.
6. Pray in the Holy Spirit.
You can have accurate teaching and still have a dry church. If you want the Holy Spirit to manifest Himself but no one is praying, you will probably miss out on a lot of manifestations. I don’t teach as some do that you need real-time intercessors backing you up at all times, but I’ve found that things flow better when you do some praying in the Holy Spirit in addition to your other preparation. Now please don’t get in bondage to this and let the devil tell you that you can’t have anything because you didn’t pray “enough.” His version of “enough” is always more than you actually prayed, no matter how much praying you did. But if you’re not praying in the Spirit at all, you’ll miss out on some things because Scripture is clear that we are supposed to pray in the Holy Spirit (tongues) as well as with our understanding (1 Corinthians 14:15). You can’t figure out with your understanding everything that the Holy Spirit wants to do, so makes sure that you “lean not to your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). Paul, who certainly saw a lot of signs and wonders, said that he prayed in tongues more than all of them in Corinth (1 Corinthians 14:18), so it must still be important.
7. Reverence and Worship the Lord in Spirit and in Truth.
The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10), so it stands to reason that when Jesus is exalted, manifestations of the Spirit will follow. No one will have to “change gears” when Jesus is already being glorified when the manifestations of the Spirit further glorify Him. This is a bigger concern in developed countries where the time of worship is often transformed into entertainment or a concert instead of a true corporate worship experience. If worship is reduced to a sing-along or a rock extravaganza, it creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to a move of the Holy Spirit. The #1 thing missing in the church in developed nations is the fear of the Lord. We have always strived to promote an atmosphere of true reverence in our services, and I believe that this is part of why we’ve seen a lot of miracles.