I am not making this statement about those who are extravagant or whatever. I am making it about matters of healing and the such, so please understand that my comments are NOT saying that a person with all of the bells and whistles has more faith....It is MY belief that one reason we don't see more miracles is because most people do not really know what faith is. They are under the impression that faith is saying you believe something over and over...or affirming a Bible passage over and over...or praying really hard...or saying things with a lot of intensity.The ONLY reason I know what faith is (assuming I actually do know) is because I linked answered prayers to how I felt/prayed for the answer. In other words, while I've prayed thousands of prayers, there were a few that I feel certain were absolutely effective. These were not those long-term prayers where we just pray until it happens, but prayers that I just knew had made contact...and this was soon confirmed.People know the word faith, but I am not sure they really understand faith. And I don't hardly know how to teach it myself. I recall many years ago, an old Church of God preacher was speaking about things like prophecy and the such, and he said something along the lines of You'd never understand it in a million years. He wasn't saying that arrogantly, as if he was better than anyone else, but rather saying it to emphasize that he didn't know how to relate it.Some years ago, reading Oral Roberts' autobiography, he said something that clicked with my own growing understanding of faith. He said that faith was a knowing. Suddenly, I had the insight that I had needed to understand the difference between praying...and praying in faith.I was able to (I think) make it a bit more clearer with the passage of time. Let's say you lost your car keys. You have looked everywhere you think they could possible by--TWICE! You have even looked in places where you know there is no way that the keys are there. The--suddenly!--you remember exactly where they are! More than that, you KNOW where they are!Now,this is not empirical knowledge at this point. It is instead the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That is, even though you can't see your keys, you have full evidence in your heart/mind/soul/spirit or what have you, that they ARE where you know them to be. It is a spiritual certainly, I suppose you could say. Most people pray in HOPE. And so often God has answered our prayers just on that. But I believe there are SOME THINGS that come only if there is faith.In one place, it says that if we know that He has heard us, then we know we have our petition. I made a mistake on this in my teenage years. I assumed that--duh!--God ALWAYS heard us, so I was going to have my petition. That didn't happen. A man died that I had prayed for, thinking I was praying in faith. I was very despondent. For a while there, I pondered if healing was really a thing anymore.But then, when I had better learned about the knowing, I revisited that verse. And this time, I believe I caught the truth: If we KNOW that He has heard us.... There is that knowing again! And in every single instance, to the best of my memory, when I have prayed or received with that knowing' present, it has always been a matter of God doing the miraculous or the wonderful.We teach faith as really, really, really believing. But while I cannot be sure how to cause someone to have faith, I do think I have a little piece of understanding, perhaps, on how they can kind of tell if it is faith or not. AGAIN, of the billions of prayers that God has answered, I dare say that most of them were not this type of faith, but rather a beseeching, a desire, a imploring of God to help a situation, and God has responded so generously to such prayers. But I believe faith will bring us even more results. Ask yourself this question: What is the difference between us and cessationists? Yes, we know about the difference in beliefs, but what is the net difference between OUTCOMES. That is, if we randomly take 50 people with terminal cancer and we pray for 25 of them, while the Baptists pray for other 25, does anyone think we will see all ours healed, while all of theirs are not healed? And if there is no real difference (assuming that would be the case), then why are we acting like there is a difference? If the same result comes from being Pentecostal and being cessationist, we need to reevaluate, right?All I know is that in the FEW instances where I was able to pray in such a way that I was COMMANDING things to change (and feeling heaven weigh in behind me!), IT HAPPENED! They may be small things to you, but it opened my eyes to the fact that there was more than what I had experienced.And when I grasped something in faith, I GOT IT! (Some of you have heard how I received miraculous healing in, of all places, a SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS!).
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