Yesterday, I went to a Church of Our Saviour (COOS) service where Deborah Reed was ministering. Deborah is the director of the Children’s Ministries in Bethel Church in Redding, California and also the founder of Kingdom Treasures International. Bethel Church is pastored by Bill Johnson. In the past 6 months or so, I’ve been coming across a lot of Bill Johnson’s stuff – through conferences and bookstores I’ve gone to and a recommendation from a cousin of mine. Before this time, I hadn’t heard about him. But these various encounters have made me quite interested to find out more about his ministry, which can be described as prophetic and very focused on the supernatural (healings, miracles, etc.) Check out this YouTube of Bill Johnson on the 700 club (part one, two, three) and also this creative leg-lengthening miracle that occurred during a Bill Johnson conference. I love how Bill encourages Christians into go to the streets to heal people – i.e. to pray and believe for healing for anyone they see that needs healing when they’re just going about their daily life. That’s pretty much exactly like how Jesus ministered healing, isn’t it! Jesus didn’t call people who wanted healing to come to his healing meeting. Rather, he went out into the streets and healed people. And Johnson’s ministry is all about expecting the heavenly miraculous to invade earth and expecting a supernatural form of Christianity.
Anyway, yesterday’s service was quite an eye opener. Deborah preached a little bit about children and how God can move through them. She recently held a Children’s Ministry conference at COOS and she also taught the children there how to pray for the sick. So after her preaching, she got a few dozens of children to come out to the front. The children were going to pray for the sick. Then she asked the children if God gave them any Words of Knowledge. This could come through the children feeling a pain in their own body – a way that God could speak to them regarding what He wants to heal. The children who felt God speaking through them this way spoke into the microphone regarding what sickness God wants to heal (e.g. back pains, pain in the right ankle, etc.) and then people who were sick in that area could come up to the front for the children to pray for them. People who felt the pain completely gone then started to testify and probably about 15-20 people testified of God’s healing power during that time.
It’s exciting and wonderful to see God working through these children. Some were probably as young as 5-6 years old. During the ministry time, as time wore on, some children started running and playing on stage. Deborah mentioned that we should realize that they’re still kids. They may pray and God may heal through them, but the next minute they could be slapping their friends!
Just like this situation, I do believe God dearly loves to work through children. It’s all about childlike faith and children have that. They haven’t had enough of life experience to learn how to be scared or shy or embarrassed if their prayers aren’t answered. They just believe and expect God to be true to His Word to heal when they pray for people. I think we adults have to unlearn so many things, get rid of so many negative thoughts and past experiences. We have to renew a lot of our mind and thinking – something that children don’t need to. Unlike adults, they’re not too smart for their own good. They don’t rationalize or reason out everything. If they did like most adults, it’d be hard to have faith. I think Kierkegaard and Luther are right in believing that in a sense faith is opposed to reason. Children don’t use their minds to reason that much. They just believe. And God responds to such childlike faith.