If you haven’t head there is a healing revival going on in Florida and people are flooding there, it’s being headed up by Televangelist Todd Bentley, if you google search you’ll find all sorts on it, in particular the ‘Fresh Fire Ministries’ website which includes Desktop Wallpapers for the Florida Revivals plus a live stream.

Apparently the revival has been going on for almost 50 days and so far at least 12 have been raised from the dead…

So why blog on this?

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about healing in particular from books by Pete Greig and Philip Yancey, both written about prayer, but including a lot on the topic of unanswered prayer. Greigs book ‘God on mute’ focuses largely around the unanswered prayer him and his wife face for her severe epilepsy.

Now I completely believe in the healing power of God, I believe that he does heal today, however this kind of thing makes me uncomfortable…if people have been raised from the dead I cannot argue with that, nor if people have been healed of physical sicknesses…in particular when mainstream TV in America is reporting on this too, however I do question it, no where in the bible do mass healings seem to take place, in fact, there isn’t a huge amount of healing in the bible, there is far more suffering than healing.

I also wonder what kind of Christians this revival is producing, to me it seems to run the risk that Christian’s who’s faith is purely based on the experience of God are going to be the result, however unless we disciple these people properly and teach them about unanswered prayer too and the difficulties of life they’re going to come to the first hurdle and give up…Jesus didn’t teach his disciples to have a fluffy life but to have a difficult one, he taught them about unanswered prayer, he told them that they’d be persecuted and even killed for their faith. I wonder how much of this is being told to the new converts in Florida?

The fact remains that more often than not we find our prayers of healing unanswered, I don’t think it’s because of our lack of faith, or because of sin in our lives but just that sometimes God is beyond our understanding, if every prayer we asked was answered God would be a vending machine, if God never drew away from us our faith would be based on a feeling and a faith based on a feeling is only good as long as the feeling stays.

I don’t have any reason to believe that God isn’t working in Florida, although if I’m perfectly honest the whole thing makes me very very uncomfortable and I’ll be interested to see the long term effects…I just wish people would report of not being healed there as well as those being healed reporting…I also hear (from someone who was telling me about it) that people are being healed just by watching it on the God Channel, and yes I’m sure God can work through TV but I do feel very uneasy about the whole thing.

Comments would be good readers…