Idols 3

I want to close this topic by looking sharing from my heart my own experiences regarding this.

And it spans more topics than provision.

When I responded to God’s call almost forty years ago, there was an excitement about doing God’s will and sharing His message of salvation to His people wherever I went.

Incidentally, God opened a door for me to get into the wards of Kenyatta National Hospital, the only referral hospital in Kenya then.

This happened because I was living in the compound and I was also in fellowship with the nursing school, among other reasons.

I would get into the wards any time I felt like as God had extended favor for me all around. This means that nobody blocked me, from the gate keepers to the ward nurses.

How did I operate?

I would get to the person God led me and share the Gospel when the patient gave me a chance to do so.

Then I would pray for their healing.

Though I am not writing about motivation and the prosperity ungospel, it is important to repeat that as I have written elsewhere, I was a firm believer in the doctrine, having been fed on it since childhood. I therefore believed that sickness had nothing to do with God or faith.

The first person I prayed for (probably the most memorable incident) was a young man with tubes protruding from all over. He was in a bad place. His name was Rotich, if I can still remember.

He communicated through gestures since there were tubes protruding from his mouth and nose.

But when I shared the Gospel, he indicated that he wanted to get saved.

I therefore prayed for him to get saved as he agreed with me.

Then, probably with baited breath, I prayed for his healing. I doubt my faith had encountered that hurdle before.

Then I left.

Two or three days later I returned to the same ward and on asking his neighbors where he was, they told me that he had healed enough to be discharged.

You can imagine what that did to my faith.

I of course continued sharing the Gospel and praying for healing, but now with even more favor.

I will bring you now to the last incident. And I call it last because, like the one I have just shared, it was one I couldn’t ever forget.

I went into the pediatric ward to of course share the Gospel.

Among the first mothers I met was a lady who was a believer. We connected immediately.

I therefore teamed up with her to share the Gospel with her immediate neighbors and they responded positively and we had a great fellowship. I remember even giving her my first Bible, the Bible I treasured since it was the one that set me of into a consistent reading and study of the word.

Then we prayed for healing. And I will hasten to add that her child was not as bad as the children of those we were sharing the Gospel with. I was therefore certain that her child would be the first to receive healing.

Then I come to the same ward probably a day or two later.

The ladies we had shared the Gospel with had been discharged but my sister’s child had died.

To say I was crushed would be an understatement. Whipping could not have inflicted as much pain as I felt then.

Why of all people had this sister’s child died?

I ruled out lack of faith because the others we had prayed for (with her) had healed.

Why then? I cried to God.

As we see in Psalm 73, it is when I resorted to God’s word that I was able to make sense of this hurt. And this is what I am writing about.

God is never at our mercy. God is the Lord and never subject to anybody or anything, even if this is a person who believes in Him.

God heals for His purpose. God heals when and how He chooses.

God does not heal because I believe. I believe because He heals. There is a very clear distinction here.

It is very possible for faith to be an idol instead of a sign.

The bronze serpent was a sign. But we later see it as an idol.

And for me that is the greatest error of motivation. We want to box God into our faith instead of allowing Him to shape that faith.

That is why someone starts as a true prophet and eventually ends up being a false one.

Because God must speak, irrespective of whether He wants to or not. Irrespective of whether He needs to speak or not.

That is why preachers regurgitate other preachers’ sermons since they have no time to wait for their own word. That is why those people called Gospel musicians produce spiritual trash and error because they must produce those songs in their season and not God’s.

It is idolatry because our focus shifts from God to what He does for us. It shifts from Him to the faith that accesses what He has to offer.

And that idolatry does not happen all at once. It happens after we have gone some distance with God, a distance where we have established that He is all He says He is.

We then become too familiar with Him and are able to ‘accurately’ know how and when we can access Him and His.

We were full of faith when we were growing. Then that faith became the focus, many times because it starts getting the accolades of those around us.

It feels nice when our faith is applauded. Until we forget the object of that faith and transfer our commitment to that faith instead of the object of the same.

Incidentally that is the reason some ministers buy miracles so that they continue being relevant in their performance.

 Miracles started becoming more important, not only than the one performing them, but even than the purpose of the same.

When people attend our meeting because of the drama those miracles become, we will be afraid to declare that they are not the focus of those meetings at all. The purpose of those meetings is the message of the cross that will connect each and every respondent to the miracle source.

But that will diminish our status because we want all those fans to follow us, and especially those miracles.

That is why prophets must have that word whether God speaks or not. Because everybody is coming to hear that word from our mouth and pointing all those people to the source of that word will diminish our relevance.

That is idolatry.

But it is important to realise that God still heals. God still speaks. God is at work on our behalf.

But on His terms.

So God continued healing and saving as I continued ministering in those wards.

Allow me to close with a demonstration of that.

I was in school when I responded to God’s call. My first assignments were therefore in the school setting amongst fellow students.

I started a devotion in the morning before the assembly. Initially I was with a friend I wish I could be able to contact, Joseph Wafula. We would share a word of encouragement and pray. Then we would leave for the assembly.

In a short while, almost half of the school (and it was a Catholic sponsored school), would attend that devotion. Until the school started giving me a chance to share in the assembly.

I was also discipling as I was being discipled.

One day, I became very sick. I think it was that bad malaria that refused to respond to medication.

I felt that my time had come. And I was at peace because for the few months since I responded to God’s call, I had given my all to following everything I felt God leading me towards.

I felt like Paul that my assignment was complete and that I was ready to go home and shared the same to the small group I was discipling. I asked them to release me to go to my rest.

They said something very interesting.

You have taught us to know God. You have taught us to believe God. You have taught us to pray. We will pray and believe for your healing.

And that is what they did.

And God healed me immediately.

I hope you can understand what I am sharing.

Shifting the focus from the object of your faith is idolatry. And it becomes so when you have waxen fat from feeding from that faith that you slowly detach from the object or focus.