So I showed up. I went to the Bible study and there I got to get prayed for and in the midst of them praying for me, they prayed for tongues, and I received tongues. It was interesting because I had this schema set up and now I am praying in this unknown language. They prayed for healing for me, but nothing happened. 

Well, in the midst of that, I went on a mission trip to Houston, and it was my freshman year of college, and it’s Friday night, I’m worshipping, and I’m praying, and my knees start to hurt again. So I get on my face, or get on my knees and I’m like, why am I on my knees? That hurts. And I get on my face. I’m like, Lord, I don’t understand. Your Word says, by Your stripes, I’m healed. You took upon Yourself my infirmities, my sicknesses, and my diseases and Your word does not return void. Why am I still in pain? Why is this still happening like this? And it was like Truth came down, and all of my pain left. I got up; I left my cane there. 

So then I am like, something’s real, something has happened, and so I started praying for people. In the midst of all of that, I’m seeing people get healed! But they’re getting sick again. And I am, my pain starts to come back. So I think to myself, what, what do I do with this? Like, here’s what the Word says…But here I am, here and these two things, they aren’t matching up together. How do I reconcile this? And I didn’t know what truth was. Truth was like the big question of my life. It was like, How do I know what truth is? I’ve got these people saying this, and these people saying this, and everybody says different things. How do I know what it is? Because I could go to this church and they’d tell me one thing, this church, they’d tell me another thing, everybody’s got their own corner on the truth, but I don’t know Jesus. At least I think I do, but I don’t. 

I got impacted by a book by Brother Lawrence called The Practice of the Presence of God when I was a kid. And it’s a book that takes…Brother Lawrence, he would go and he was a monk and he worked in the kitchen. And in that place, he encountered the Lord in such a way that he would get upset to go into the official prayer time. He’s like, “You’re taking me away from my time with Jesus.” And this life verse for me has been Psalm 27:8 which says, “The Lord said to me, seek My face and my heart said to You, Your face Lord, I shall seek.” And so these two things created this desire inside of me to know Jesus, to see His face, to know that it’s possible to hear His voice now, to see Him, to encounter Him, to not just be a scholar, but to have a real relationship with Him. But I’m still not able to find him. 

I’ve been in this place where I’ve done the research of Greek and Hebrew, and the books of the Bible, and the study and the history with my own strength. I had made Jesus Lord of my life. And in the midst of that making Jesus Lord of my life, I… It’s like, you make Him Lord and then you have to do all of these things. You go to church, you tithe, you show up, you wear nice clothes, you go and evangelize, and you do all this stuff. And in the midst of doing all this stuff, then you’re going to be acceptable to the Lord. So I’m making, You’re Lord and I’m making You Lord, and, and you can’t do it. You can’t be acceptable to Him, because He accepts you as you like, He accepts you. You’re accepted by Jesus. Like, that’s why He came. You’re His creation. And I think that’s where Paul, to the Galatians says, “Who’s bewitched you? Why do you keep trying to earn something that He’s already paid for?” 

I had this transformative moment where it was, I can’t do it. I can’t make it. My own efforts are not making it. I couldn’t make it on this side of the cross and I couldn’t do it on this side of the cross. And it lifted this weight off of me that I didn’t know was there because I had been taught, or at least the way that I had interpreted what I had been taught, was to make Jesus Lord and then do all these things. And there was this freedom to go, You are already Lord, and I believe it. And here’s the thing that had to happen in my life; I had to take God’s word and place it over my circumstances. What’s happened with me, and I suspect with many of the people that will hear this, is that we’ve taken our experience, and we’ve placed it over God’s word. And what happens in the midst of that, is that the word of God now hits that experience and the experience ends up trumping the word. And you never see God’s word come true. Sometimes, in God’s grace, what has to happen is we have to take God’s word and place it over our circumstances. And what’s going to happen is, if you take God’s word and place it over your circumstances, you’re going to begin to see that your circumstances line up with the word. And that’s what began to change for me. 

As I said, This is what God’s word says, By His stripes I am healed. By His stripes you were healed. He took upon Himself our infirmities, our sicknesses, our diseases, our pains, our grief, our sorrows, and our iniquities. If you look at Isaiah 53, that word bore is the word nasa, N-A-S-A, it might be nasa, I’m not sure how to say it. In the Hebrew, it’s the same word for infirmities, sicknesses, diseases, pains, grief, sorrows, and iniquities. (The actual meaning is to lift up, bear, carry, support, sustain, endure.) He says He bore all of those. And if you go through the scriptures, Jesus healed everybody that came to Him. The only ones that He didn’t were the ones that didn’t come to Him. So if we go to Jesus, we can look at the Scripture, we can say, “This is real.

So I’m seeing all these things in the Bible and I’m going, What do I do with this? I started to call people up on the phone. Because I don’t know if you’ve ever been on any social media but people post a lot and they go, “I’m sick. I’m this, I’m that. Please pray for me.” So I just started messaging people. “Hey, can I pray for you?” I remember the first time I saw something happen. There’s a friend out in East Texas and she had a headache. I call her, I text her, “Hey, can I, can I pray for you?” She said, “Sure.” And so we ended up on the phone, and I’m praying for and I tell all the pain to go. Headache, go. Be healed in the name of Jesus. And she goes, “It’s, it’s like mostly better.” I said well, let’s get the rest. I command the rest to go and it goes! And she’s like, “It hurt so bad that I forgot my ears hurt.” And so then I prayed for her ears and all of her ear pain goes. And then she says this to me, “Brian, I don’t know what to do with this. This doesn’t fit my theology.” And so I said, “Well, you’re gonna have to take it up with Jesus because you’re better now. And, and that was like this moment where I went, I’m not even in the same room with this person. It’s over the phone and something has happened here. 

So I started going out on the street and I start praying for people. I’m going out to like different parks, going to malls, anybody I can see, and I’m just praying for people. I didn’t tell anybody about any of this until I saw 250 people get healed in the name of Jesus. And when you tell people about healing, and you get them healed in the name of Jesus – I’m seeing arms healed, I’m seeing people get up out of comas, I’m seeing sickness go, I’m seeing broken arms…I remember this one girl who had a broken arm and she starts doing push ups! I’m seeing canes go away. But I’m not telling anybody about this, because…I follow up with them. “Hey, are you better? Are you better? Are you sure you’re better? You’re definitely better?” Because in the past, they got sick again. But there’s something different this time, people are actually getting better, and they’re actually staying better. But here’s the key: compassion. 

What would Jesus do in this moment? How would He love this person? How would He set them free? How would He come into this time, and in this moment, to bring the Kingdom into this person’s life? Everything flows out of compassion. If you’re trying to prove that I can heal people, I can do these things…Man, you’re going to get into works. You’re going to get into the same thing that was happening earlier, trying to be good enough. It’s not about that. It’s about loving people, bringing people to Jesus, sharing the gospel. And all of these things are beginning to grow for me.

Let me just kind of like, pull this together. I used to read the word and I saw things in scripture, and I went, That’s cool. I’ve never experienced that. I don’t know anybody who is doing that. Except I hear stories about it in other countries. But it doesn’t happen here. And then, as I did the research, I saw that this stuff is real. Early church fathers, it continued throughout church history, it’s happening now, and then I took God’s word, and I placed it over my circumstances. And then I started to do the things that Jesus was doing. Because He’s in me. We’re the body of Christ. I’m His hands, His feet, His body. There’s nothing special about me. I have the same Spirit that you have. And then I saw things begin to happen. I saw people get healed. I saw that you can have dreams and visions. I saw that you could hear the Lord today, that He wants to speak to you. 

I had been longing for so long to know Jesus, and trying to find out what was truth. – I mentioned earlier about how the question that I had been trying to figure out for so long, because everybody was telling me so many different things, was, “What is truth? – Truth wasn’t an idea. It was a person. I had been trying to figure things out, but I had to meet Jesus. I had to come to know Him. It wasn’t the right doctrine. It wasn’t the right steps. It wasn’t all of the, the formulation of theology. I had to know Jesus, and Jesus had to know me. We had to, John 17, I had to experience Him. It says that, “This is eternal life, that we may know Him.” That word “know” is the word experience. 

A lot of people are waiting to die to go to heaven. A lot of people are waiting for their physical body to die to meet Jesus. If you look through the Scripture, people are encountering Jesus in so many wild, amazing ways. If you’ve heard the stories about people in, in Muslim countries, they’re having dreams of Jesus, the man and white, and then they’re coming to meet Jesus and they’re becoming a Christian just because of a dream. If it happens for them, why can’t it happen for us? We make differentiations for people, places, things, times, but Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. If it happened for them, it can happen for me. And if it happened for me, it can happen for you. 

I think that one thing that the Lord has had for me, for us, is to break the mold of putting limitations on the Lord and saying, “That was for somebody else.” I want to tell you today that everything that the Bible says is for us now, for today, for you, and for me. You’ve been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. You have Jesus inside of you. It’s not, a lot of people say, “You have to have a gift.” Yeah, people do have gifts and the people with the gifts are the ones that are supposed to teach everybody else how to walk in the Kingdom. You have Jesus! He’s not limited. He’s in us right now, today. 

And that’s been the thing, that’s, I mean, there’s been so many things. Like, so many things I wish I could walk you through – the stories about the guy that got, sat up from a coma. The times where the dreams, the visions…The time where the Lord said, “Hey, I want you to go here.” And then I had a dream and I show up to that place and those people are there! I wish I could tell you the stories about how people have gotten healed through text messages, people have gotten delivered of demons through text messages. Like, the things that are possible in the kingdom are astounding. There’s nothing impossible with Jesus. 

So, final thing, I just want to pray a blessing over anybody that’s listening to this. Father, I thank You for every person that’s here. I thank You that You love them. I thank You that You want to encounter them. Father, I pray a blessing over them, that they would know that they can hear Your voice, that they can see Your face, and that You are here today and You want a relationship with these people. So I just say, you are blessed! He loves you! And He wants to encounter you in the fullest of ways! Be blessed in Jesus’ name. Thank you.