John Wimber was a product of the Jesus movement in the 60's. He met Christ in a dramatic way, and began reading the New Testament, beginning with the Gospels and then on to the book of Acts. He was excited about what he was reading, but when he went to a church he was disillusioned. The polite and tidy service was over exactly on time. Wimber looked at some of the people around him and said: “When are you gonna do the stuff?” “What stuff?” they wanted to know. He said, “You know. . . the stuff!” He had been reading about the conversions, healings, deliverance and other miracles that took place in the early church recorded the book of Acts. But instead of signs and wonders, he saw no sign of anything that would make him wonder, except the deadness of the ritual he had just sat through.
I have been rereading the book of Acts recently myself. I am seeing again that signs and wonders were not the exceptions, they were the norm of the early church. Healings and supernatural happenings were expected and occurred regularly. Now some explain this by saying we are living in a different dispensation and that the age of miracles is over. That was for a specific time and place to authenticate the message of the apostles, but we no longer need that today. Really!! Does God really divide history up into neat little segments where he acts one way with one generation and a totally different way with another? If so, then God is not, “the same yesterday and today and forever” (
Hebrews 13:8). If he does respond differently at different times, then he is one kind of God at one point in history and an entirely different God at another.
The church today needs to discover once again that we have an unchanging God and an unchanging kingdom. We need once again to discover the power of Pentecost.
We need to become a Pentecostal church — and I am not talking about a denomination — I am talking about an Acts 2 church. We need to be filled with the Spirit. We need to be operating in the gifts of the Spirit. We need to see people’s lives turned around. We need to see people healed physically, emotionally, relationally, socially and spiritually. We need to experience the unity of the Spirit as the early church did. We need to be living in genuine love for each other, and when we fail at that then we need to seek reconciliation. We need to have the fire fall and the people of God to rise up.
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