What You Need to Know About Risk Taking

“We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith…” Romans 12:6

This makes perfect sense: You don’t do something you don’t believe you should do. Also, you don’t do something you don’t believe you CAN do.

Here are a few assumptions we have established in other blog posts:

Believers and Christ followers should practice these gifts.

All believers have the Holy Spirit living within us and therefore we can do these supernatural things.

Our theology is fine. So, this brings us to a question: In view of our assumptions, why aren’t we doing more of this stuff – healing, prophesying, etc.?

It seems as if just believing in doing the stuff [having faith] is not enough to move us to DO the stuff. We are like people who have fallen in love with sky diving. We see a great U-tube video of sky divers and we fall in love with sky diving. We start reading books about sky diving. We put comments in the margins. We read it several times and we dog ear our favorite pages. We subscribe to “Sky Diver” magazine. We watch all the sky diving videos on U-Tube. We join a sky diving club and attend every meeting. We attend all the special events where real sky divers come and talk about their experiences. We have faith that our parachute will open when we pull the rip-chord, BUT WE HAVE NEVER JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE!

What is the missing ingredient to experiencing the thrill of sky diving?

What is the missing ingredient in experiencing the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit?

TAKING RISKS

Jesus said this about experiencing the Kingdom of God; “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” Mathew 11:12

Participating in the Kingdom of God takes force. We cannot sit passively and wait for it to happen to us. Think of most of the healings Jesus did… He called for some kind of response or involvement from the person to be healed.

Think of His parable about the two sons the Father asked to work in his fields. The first said “yes” but then failed to act on it. The second said “no’ but then went and did it. The Father commended the one who chose to act. The truth is; there is more than just believing in the supernatural gifts in order to experience them. We have to take them by force! We have to act. But why?

Check back in for Part 2 next week and in the mean time –

Click here to listen to the audio sermon