Without a conviction of God’s goodness, it’s not possible to develop the clear focus and the strength of faith to pursue the breakthroughs that the earth itself aches for.
How we see Him defines how we think and how we live. The way we understand Him is the way we will re-present Him.
When I talk about the goodness of God and His greatness displayed in Jesus, I don’t forget that He was also the one who chased the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip. This, too, is love, as Jesus hates whatever misrepresents the Father! The religious leaders of His day used their position for personal gain instead of in service of the people. In the same way, it is a misrepresentation of the Father to say He permits sickness to discipline us. This is not true any more than it is to say He uses sin to discipline His children. For sickness is to my body what sin is to my soul. It’s time for those moneychangers to get chased out of the temple.
When we understand the nature of this truth, we see that Jesus is not warring against the Father to reveal Himself as a new and improved standard of God. He is accurately revealing and manifesting the nature of the Father, as He has always been.
We can either create a doctrine that allows for lack or seek God until Heaven comes according to promise.
The only time we know of that the disciples didn’t get a miracle breakthrough was in their attempt to bring deliverance and healing to a child that was being thrown into the fire for his destruction. (See Mark 9:14–29.) They had no reason to think that they couldn’t bring about the deliverance that the father requested, as it had always worked in the past. The absence of an answer was so surprising to them that they asked Jesus why they couldn’t bring about the breakthrough for this family. In other words, they expected it.
An environment of expectation naturally creates a question that has to be answered. We owe it to ourselves and the people we love to find out “why” when a breakthrough doesn’t come. He gave them insight to the effects of prayer and fasting on such deeply rooted demonic situations. While the answer Jesus gave offers us great insight, the part that often gets overlooked is that when you don’t get an answer, get alone with Jesus, and find out why.
adapted from ‘God is Good’ ch 10 by Bill Johnson