Turning Disappointments into Divine Appointments for Greater Miracles

Rob brought this short exhortation before the notices on Sunday 22nd February 2009 in response to a personal tragedy that has obviously deeply affected City Church International. I was profoundly moved by it but I found it such an important message to transcribe. I'm sure Rob gets accused of preaching a "health, wealth and prosperity" gospel of triumphalism in which suffering is rejected. Nothing could be further from the truth. When suffering and trial comes along - this prophetic exhortation is a strong reminder that Rob is more than confident to face tragedy head on and to lift his people's heads to the risen and ruling Jesus Christ.

Because suffering and trial affects us all whether we like it or not (usually not). But there is a glorious hope throughout this! We don't have to go to the excesses of "health, wealth and prosperity" teachers who claim that suffering equals a complete lack of 'faith'. But neither do we have to go the rather foolish excesses of the "Together for the Gospel" four who claim;

"We further deny that any teaching that offers health and wealth as God's assured promises in this life can be considered a true Gospel".

I think anyone who hears the care and compassion and love in his voice will find their hearts warmed by a caring father's breaking heart. Rob isn't some distant "Christian celebrity" using Hong Kong as a platform to further his status. You listen to this message and you will hear his heart breaking for these people that he clearly loves.

So here is the 20 minutes of what he said;

"Well - well done to the worship team for once again just leading us in and well done as a congregation for not being conservative or formalistic or cautious in your expression of love for Jesus. The Bible is full of a culture of extravagant expression and the nature of God is of extravagance. I really need your faith and help over the next few minutes before Glenda gives the announcements - I want to speak some "faith" things but I really need your support and I need your faith expressions all the way through! I would rather have "please be quiet!" than you just sit there and listen quietly while I say these things. This is very important.

We need these times to see them as defining opportunities that can be defining moments or watershed times - crisis that can often precipate or catalyse greater advancement of the Kingdom of heaven depending on how the people of God respond to tragedy and respond to things they don't understand.

I have been a pastor for over 30 years now and it is still amazingly mysterious to me how some human beings can face the most terrible grief and pain and cry their tears and then move forward almost with a greater sense of confidence on their face.

It is almost like the departure of their loved one created a slip-stream of glory that enveloped them with a concious awareness of that celestial realm of safety and glory that their loved one had gone to.

And Paul the apostle writes that they never referred to someone in Christ dying. Not once! Both Jesus and Paul said that they fell asleep. If you are in Christ you have already died and He said; "Those who believe in Me shall never perish". You have already died with Christ - you died with Him on that Cross and died to the old life and died to the law and was raised with Jesus and are seated with Him - you are alive!

So the Christian in Christ does not die! Ever again! You fall asleep and you just shift conciousness from the planet earth into the heavenly realm - the glory realm!

So he writes to the Thessalonian church that is suffering from losses of loved ones and he says; "Do not grieve as the world does". He didn't say; "Don't grieve". Grieving is a very important part and process anytime you lose anything! Especially a loved one. The world grieves without hope. Unbelief grieves without hope. That grief is then contaminated by tormented by demonic powers that will snap people's minds and move them into morbidity and psychological breakdown that is destructive.

The grieving with hope is painful but redemptive and brings you through a process where you have greater confidence and greater strength in life because death is not a fear to you!

I have been at the bedside of a number of dear ones come near to exiting this planet and there is always glory! I watched my own dad go that way and you are left with wonder at the glory of God! And you look at that body and you know that is just the earth suit - they have departed! And there is a grieving afterwards because there is a temporary recognition of the abscence of that person. Only temporary! There is a heavenly hope that we all will see that precious baby in our eternal future! There is a grieving as well because maybe that person who fell asleep in Christ didn't fulfill all their hopes and their desires and all their dreams and aspirations! And you grieve that was not given opportunity to be fulfilled! But if you have this hope and grieve with hope then there is a guarantee that heaven will give everything that didn't have an opportunity to fulfill on this earth - heaven will more than compensate and fully satisfy and fulfill in eternity!

So heaven is not some glib excuse or silly cliche to dismiss or surpress grieving. But heaven is this hope that everything we have been robbed of on earth will be fully satisfied in eternity and in the realms of heaven's glory! Heaven is real!

This is not to say it was God's will to take that little baby. I promise you with all the venom and anger and strength of my hatred of that demonic lie that God kills. There is a song that says "God gives and God takes away". That is Old Covenant and a statement out of Job's mouth. Jesus never taught that! God did not take that baby! God did not take her but He received her! God didn't contribute or cause the situation at all!

There is a robbing and a stealing there! Yet in it all God's victory prevails because of heaven's hope and because of the Cross! Jesus Christ is Perfect Theology! And He proved beyond doubt or debate the revelation that His Father's will is to bring life and power and to heal and restore and do miracles!

It is a blasphemous deception to credit God with Satan's works! That is a deception that much of the church has come under!

There are only job descriptions in the Bible - Jesus and the Devil's! Both are in John 10:10. "I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly". Satan's job description is to rob, to kill and to destroy. Wherever you see death - life that has been ended early then that does not fit Jesus job description but whereever you see healing, miracles, abundance of blessing then that is Jesus in operation! God didn't cause this or contribute to this! It is the fallen state of the cosmos reaching back to Eden's betrayal through Adam that there is frustration in our mortal planet.

But we will never stop contending to conduct more of the beauty of heaven's influence into this earth! For Jesus still means what He means; "Father Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven!". They are not killing babies in heaven! The Father didn't do it!

We will enquire from God, we will request from God, we will investigate revelationary realms and Scripture and we will seek God to know how to do this better so that future babies will live their whole lives on this planet! But we will never question the goodness of God because He has already proved irreversibly that truth on an old rugged cross and on a hill called Golgotha.

We will aggressively and passionately pursue more of the Presence and power of God so that we come to a place where our minds are so renewed from the traditions of men and the corrupt wisdom of this age - we will not partner with unbelief which is partnering with the devil - we will contend and pursue until our minds are so renewed that we look at seemingly impossible situations that our minds are in harmony with heaven and our hearts are in harmony with heaven and we can say; "THAT is not the will of God - THIS is the will of God!" and BANG instant healing takes place!

We will never tire or allow ourselves to grow weary of our quest and our pursuit to see the power of God in not partial manifestation - not a 2/10 but a 9/10 or a 10/10 and full manifest power of God healing everyone of sickness and disease! We will weep our tears and hug one another and deal with our sorrow then we will lift our heads and rejoice that we are alive in 2009 by God's appointment to discover the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven that will help us release more miracle power according to what we see in Acts which the early church had so that future, future, future generations will say of us in Hong Kong and CCI that they did not flag or fail or fade in their faith in the face of setbacks but they set their hearts to the heavenly Jerusalem and that they released and unleashed so much of heaven's glory and power into the earth that evil was broken and every manner of sickness and disease was healed by the power of God!

They will say of us that because of what we did that heaven's love and gracious justice rained down on planet earth and heaven's perfect peace and justice kissed a guilty earth in love and earth lifted it's face to heaven and gave thanks for a generation in Hong Kong that did not give up in setbacks and did not allow disappointments to surrender but saw every disappointment as a divine appointment to release more of heaven into the earth! The devil should not pick on us! He should not choose to hurt people in our ranks! He should know better but he's brain-damaged and he will pay seven times for what he has done! We have had two situations - Phil who died of cancer over a year ago and know this little baby before we even met her - that to me is unacceptable!

There was a man and he was commissioned to raise an expedition to climb Mount Everest. The first team he took up failed because the weather closed in. They tried again and they too failed and had to come back. They tried a third time and this time they did more training and exercise and equipped themselves with higher standard equipment to get themselves better placed to succeed. They went up and half the way up there was a terrible avalanche that wiped out most of the team and even the leader was killed in this avalanche. When they came down the survivors went to a banquet in honour of their comrades who died on that mountain.

The leader of the survivors got up at the end of the banquet and stood up to speak with dignity and boldness and he spoke as if Mount Everest was in that room. And he pointed at an imaginary Everest and he said; "Everest - you have defeated us once. Everest you then defeated us a second time. Then even a third time Everest you defeated us by taking the lives of our friends but Everest we will defeat you because you cannot get any bigger! And we CAN!".

Cancer is not getting any bigger, the devil is not getting any bigger, disease is not getting any bigger but we are growing into the measure of the full stature of Christ - we are getting bigger in the power of our God and we will conquer!

I was speaking in London and was doing some training for evangelism to go out and heal the sick and on the third day I heard the Lord say; "They think too much of you and too little of themselves - they think that they are useless and you get everyone healed and that you have never had disappointments or struggles because all they have heard is of the cancers healed and the wheelchair cases that walked. And they think you just lay hands on anything and it happens!". God said; "Tell them of every failure you can remember - all the people that died - all the people I prayed for that got worse". So I went and gave an hours talk on every person that I prayed for and failed.

Then I said; "Okay I want to pray for the sick - who wants to come and be prayed for by a failure?!". They all came and that day Steve was supernaturally healed of a serious back problem. That night we went after a testimony of my failures and Glenda and I prayed for a woman in a wheelchair who said we were wasting our time - the doctors said she was in the last chronic stages of M.E. You will not walk ever again. After fifteen minutes of praying for her she starting feeling divine voltage and heaven's influence and began tingling all over. She could feel feeling coming back in her legs. Within minutes she got up and jogged around the building to people rejoicing!

You cannot get confused about this! God good! Devil bad!

But we need to walk in such humility - everytime someone doesn't get healed don't form a theology to accomodate failure! Don't lower the Word of God down to your bad experience! Trust God to lift your bad experience upto the level of His promises in His good and keep contending! Bill Johnson sees thousands healed but he will equally tell you of thousands that aren't healed. Thousands! Many medically verified! Yet Bill Johnson's own dad died. He said; "I declare Reading a cancer-free zone!". In a short space of time his own dad was diagnosed with cancer and died in four months and it was humiliating to do that in front of his congregation. His own secretary died of cancer. His son is deaf in both ears! To this day they see hundreds of deaf ears healed, cripples walking! But they keep contending!

Because every time you face disappointment, it's another divine appointment to go through that crisis and it is a question of "Do I believe God is good all the time and yes we haven't figured it out how to get everyone healed all the time like Jesus did and the book of Acts did". But we are learning the ways of the Spirit. Most of the church has been taught religious traditions and have not been taught the mysteries of the Kingdom or ways of the Spirit and how to walk in the supernatural. They have not been taught the supernatural! That's why you have got to train Christians who haven't got a clue how the anointing works or how to release this authority! But many in this church DO have a clue how to do this and most in this church are lightning conductors!".

Tsunami Prayer Meeting

12th January 2005

I think this transcript may go down in history as the shortest of Rob Rufus's yet! Normally Rob tends to average at one hour of glorious preaching. I chose this short message because I do progressively want to add the older material from City Church International as the blog continues to grow. This prayer meeting was of course just after the awful tsunami which wrecked much of the South-East of Asia and many of Rob's comments are wonderfully encouraging and up-lifting. It isn't a full sermon - but it demands a place on the blog!

"We do not want this night to be just human sympathy being poured out or a mood of morbidity but an up-tempo mood of faith that God is working in the nations and no matter how small we may appear in our own eyes - God is working in the nations and wants to work through our prayers as we co-administrate with the Holy Spirit the agendas of God into the nations of the world. So I want to read 3 or 4 Scriptures and they may look a bit heartless or insensative to the human suffering that's going on because there is some terrible suffering going on in our planet right now.

But we have to look at Scripture and lift our faith to what God is doing in the nations in these days. So our prayer is for the kingdom to break in and we are going to pray that all the relief gets through and God works miracles with medical supplies and water but the ultimate thing we are praying for is that the nations will be in awe of God and will be shaken out of complacency, shaken out of unbelief, shaken out of the belief that God is a push-button pleasure machine or He is their little puppet or they can make a god in their own image. God is wanting the nations to turn to Him at this time.

I really believe that we are living in the end day events - whether you believe that is 100 years, 25 years, 5 months or 5 days - I still believe we are in the last days and in Acts 2 when the Spirit of God was poured out on the Day of Pentecost, Peter said; "This is that which Joel the prophet spoke about - in the last days I will pour out My Spirit on all people". Not just on the Church but all peoples and all flesh. If that was the beginning of the last days then we have got to be at least 2, 000 years into the last days right now! We can say we are pretty much in the last of the last days.

It has never happened where God has poured out His Spirit on all people's on the earth - only select people but we are coming into a time when God will pour out His Spirit on all the nations of the world.

(Isaiah 2) - This is just setting a prophetic foundation to pray. (Isaiah 2:2) - He is alerting us that this is something to do with the last days.

"Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; And all the nations will stream to it".

In prophetic language "mountains" refer to "nations" and the holy nation of God is the "mountain of the Lord" and it will be chief among the nations and all the nations will start streaming to the mountain of the Lord. It speaks about the mountain of the Lord which is the Church - the people of God - they will be administrating the grace and the peace of God into nations that are being shaken in these end-day events. If you go on to (v11) - this is hard for some Christians to understand because we know God is love and God is a loving God and it is hard to preach some things like this when we know how loving God is. But Romans 11:22 says; "Consider the sterness and the kindness of God" and we need to know that God has authority and Lordship - He is the King! The nations are in rebellion to Him because of arrogance and making idols of gods they want to worship rather than the God who is uniquely Creator of the heavens and the earth and it says;

"The eyes of the arrogant man will be humbled and the pride of man brought low. The Lord alone will be exalted in that day - the Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty for all that is exalted, and they will be humbled. For all the cedars of Lebanon - tall and lofty and all the oaks of Bashan, for all the towering mountains and all the high hills - every lofty tower and every fortified wall, for every trading ship and every stately vessel, the arrogance of man will be brought low and the pride of man humbled. The Lord alone will be exalted in that day and the idols will totally disappear. Men will flee to caves in the rocks and holes in the ground - the dread of the Lord and the splendour of His majesty when He rises to shake the earth and He will throw away to the rodents and bats, the idols of silver and idols of gold which they made to worship, and will flee to the cabins and the rocks and the overhanging crags from the dread of the Lord and the splendour of His majesty when He rises to shake the earth".

In this context, the Bible says; "Stop trusting in man who is but a breath in His nostrils - of what account is he?".

God is going to bring the Church out in the midst of great shaking - a Church not based on human energy, human plans but a Church full of the Spirit and the power and the glory of God - in the midst of shakings.

Just two other Scriptures - Haggai chapter 5. It is very exciting to pray into the nations at a time like this! People need to understand that God is not a semi-senile, insecure Santa Claus - He is going to wrap up history with the nations coming and bowing their knee and honouring Him as King. It says here in Haggai 2:8;

"This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,' says the LORD Almighty. 'The silver is mine and the gold is mine,' declares the LORD Almighty. 'The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,' says the LORD Almighty. 'And in this place I will grant peace,' declares the LORD Almighty."

I think in times of shaking when God restores the Church into the fullness of glory and grace and pronounce peace in that place, people in the middle of shaking are going to look for places where there is peace and where the Presence and power and glory of God is - they are going to want that and they will come to a place where there is peace.

Where it says; "the glory of the latter house will be greater than the former house" - there is two Old Testament fulfillments. Primarily he is talking about the glory of the Old Covenant house - the temple - having a lesser glory than the latter day house - which is the Church. We will see that right now in our last Scripture which is Hebrews 12 - there is a lot of other Scriptures. "In the times of the shaking there will be a great ingathering" - "The nations will come to the mountain of the Lord". Let's read from (v26);

"At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire."

God wants the nations as His inheritance - it says in Psalm 2; "Ask of Me and I will give the nations to you as your inheritance" - referring to a Messianic promise - Jesus Christ was asking for the nations and now we are in Him asking; "Give us the nations that we may present them to Jesus". "In the middle of these shakings oh God - remember mercy". Let a spirit of grace and power and conviction and of sin, righteousness and judgement open the heavens oh God and remove some from the false gospel that gives false promises and pacifies people and if you just come to Jesus, He will make your life so happy and He will give you a little crutch and enhance your life.

So people come to the kingdom with selfish motives saying; "You are criminals standing before a Holy God sentenced to a judgement you deserve". The wrath of God is not some temper tantrum but it is the only appropriate attitude that a perfect, living, holy God can do to millions who live daily in rebellion and scorn and mock His Name and make up their own God and own religions and yet mercy and forgiveness come to those that repent and acknowledge their rebellion against God.

The Gospel isn't "Come to Jesus for a bit of happiness" - the Gospel is; "Planet Earth - you are in rebellion, turn around and humble yourself for you face certain judgement and the King of Glory will come in His mercy and His grace and forgive you and love you and make you into a new creation and bring you into the Kingdom of heaven where you can be grateful to live in a kingdom that cannot be shaken while the nations around us are shaking".

So we see as we are preaching the Gospel around the world - millions are being saved but I believe God has such a loving heart that He wants to see literally billions come into the kingdom of heaven before the end of history is wrapped up.

I do believe this with all my heart - that there will be more people in heaven than there will be in hell because there are more people alive collectively right now than have ever lived collectively from the beginning of time up till now and so in this hour God is shaking the nations and pouring out His Spirit on all flesh and He will reap the harvest because He wants all men to be saved and doesn't want any to perish - the love of God wants everyone to be saved.

You can go to the nations and beg and plead but many will not respond but the shakings of God are going to bring down the arrogant and the proud down and throw the idols away and turn to the living God and great signs and wonders will manifest in these great shakings.

We are alive on the planet right now to partner with God and see His purposes manifest in the earth. We are not to be asleep and just caught up in business but we have be awakened and ready that the gospel of the Kingdom will go into all nations and then the end will come. That's what we are about. Our work is a facility and we go there as agents of the Kingdom into our work - a daily alert to the seasons and times that we are living in.

We are not to be preserving our lives right now but to be investing our lives seeing conversion of the ages as God sums up history in His eternal plan to bring the nations to worship the living God.