Pain to Purpose

Introduction and Welcome

Firstly, I’d like to thank you all for coming tonight and welcome you to our very first initiative night. We are incredibly excited because we believe that this is the beginning of seeing a Vineyard Church planted here in Cairns and we’re excited to see what God does in and through this initiative.

Prayer

Body

A big part of what we’re hoping to achieve can be found in Matthew 10.7-8

Matthew 10:7–8 LEB

7 And as you are going, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near!’ 8 Heal those who are sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, expel demons. Freely you have received; freely give.

it says “Go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of Heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with leprosy, cast out demons.” This is the charge that Jesus gave the discples as he sent them out, not only the proclamation of the kingdom “go, preach, saying “the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.” But also the demonstration of what it looks like when the Kingdom does come, by healing the sick, casting out demons etc.

This is something that I am particularly passionate about because not only have I seen the effects in others lives when the Kingdom breaks in, but I myself have experienced first hand what it’s like to encounter the Kingdom, and I’ll share more around that in just a minute but I don’t want to breeze over the importance of this command in matthew because I find often times that’s exactly what happens. We Christians are really great at the proclamation, right? “Have you met my friend Jesus?” Let me tell you about all the ways He’ll change your life!

We’re good at that right? But we fall short when it comes to the demonstration, and I think the most common reason for this, particularly in Western culture, is that we’ve lost the art form of how to do it. How can you go and heal the sick if nobody has normalised the practice of it. And so that’s what we hope to do within this initiative is gather people who want to learn, who want to grow, who are seeking truth, and normalise both the proclamation and demonstration of the Kingdom, because all it takes is one person, armed with the knowledge and ministry of the Kingdom to change someone’s life, and once upon a time that life that needed changing was mine.

In 2016, shortly after I had moved to Hawaii and married Shawn, I started to experience things that I’d never experienced before and I really didn’t have the framework to be able to comprehend or make sense of what was happening. I started to experience extreme levels of fear and dread. I constantly felt like something bad was going to happen to me, and this was severely limiting because in order to ‘minimise risk’ I felt like I needed to keep existing in whatever current state I was in and any slight change to that was panic inducing. Now when I say slight change, I’m talking about things like, brushing me teeth. I was so terrified that something was going to happen to me when I started brushing my teeth, that twice a day every day, I had to force myself to do it, and the spend the next 30 minutes afterwards trying to convince myself that I was fine and that everything was ok. It was the same when I went to take a shower, I had to work up the courage to get in but then once I was in I started to panic because I would realise eventually I would have to get out. I wasn’t able to eat, I couldn’t hold down a job, I was being paralysed by fear and the worst part was I didn’t have the framework at that time to understand what was happening or what help was available to me.

Initially I thought it had been brought on by stress, obviously I’d just done a big international move, gotten married and done a very lengthy and stressful visa process so I just reasoned that as things started to settle down and I got into a new routine that this would just go away. But what ended up happening is it actually got worse. We then reached out to a few people and briefly mentioned some of the struggles that we were experiencing and asked for prayer. This actually ended up being more hurtful then helpful as some of the advice or suggestions offered centred around reading the bible more and wanting to know if I had been baptised.

I was also now experiencing frequent nightmares, I would often dream that I was being chased, or attacked, in one particular dream I was kidnapped and had a hood placed over my head, in another a car pulled up and as the window rolled down I saw a handgun point out of the window, I turned to run and was shot square in the back. So not only was I being terrorised during the day, but now also at night, and this continued for months.

Eventually we started seeing a psychologist and he diagnosed me with General Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Agoraphobia. We saw him frequently over a number of months and despite taking on board any advice or techniques he would recommend, it didn’t even make a dent into what was happening. Finally Shawn and I decided the best thing to do would be to return to Australia. We figured that being around friends and family and having more of a support network would be a good thing, and so that’s what we did.

I returned weighing 46 kgs and a shell of the person who I used to be. Now while there was a certain amount of relief at coming back to Australia, even that didn’t resolve the things I was experiencing. But having exhausted what we felt like were all our options at that point we just tried to get on with life as best we could, so we found a local church that we started attending and while there met a person who was prophetically inclined. Now Shawn and I didn’t really know what that meant, we didn’t have any knowledge or experience at that point in time of what the prophetic was, but this person said to me that they could see something around my neck and would I like that gone?

So they begin praying for me and I didn’t know it at the time but deliverance starts taking place, and over the next few weeks they prayed for me a handful of times and after every time, things got better, I began to feel lighter and freerer then I had in a very long time. This really blew our minds, because for the last 18 or so months, we had tried everything. We had sought help inside of our Christian faith with no results, we had sought help through modern medicine with no results and yet here is this random guy who knows a thing or two about a thing or two and hey presto I’ve improved leaps and bounds. Neither one of us could really comprehend that but that was the turning point for us, that was the game changer. I said to Shawn, “if this is available, then why hasn’t anyone told me?” because I had been struggling with very real things for months and the answer seemed so easy and simple and so very effective, I almost felt like this information had been hiding in plain sight and why hadn’t anyone clued me in to it sooner? And if this is available, if this is actually true, that demons can wreck havoc in peoples lives and minds and bodies, if we can lay hands on people and they recover from sickness and illness and injury, then why aren’t we doing that? If we have access to this, then why aren’t we doing anything with it? And that was a very sobering thought for me, because if I had of known about this sooner, if there had of been someone in my life who had the knowledge of this kingdom reality way back at the beginning of my struggles then I could have avoided 18 plus months of suffering.

But this was the turning point for us, the things we had gone through and the experiences we had had weren’t going to be for nothing. Yes there had been a season of pain and suffering, of despair and hopelessness, but that’s not a story unique to us. Everybody goes through seasons of difficulty and struggle, and even though the details and the circumstances might be different, there is one thing that remains the same, and that is that God isn’t absent. He is making all things work together for good and out of our deepest pain he can bring purpose, if we let him.

Being that it’s Easter I think this is maybe one of the best examples we have of how things can sometimes look desperate and dire. Sometimes we can be in the middle of something and have more questions then answers, like I’m sure the disciples did when they saw Jesus being taken off and crucified. They were likely overcome with grief, despair. They couldn’t comprehend what was happening, even though Jesus had alluded to them on more then one occasion, that he would die and rise again. There was no reason for the grief or despair they were feeling, but like us, the disciples couldn’t see past the moment they were in, they didn’t see the bigger picture, they didn’t know that actually this was going to work out for good, because that’s what God does, that’s who He is! The very things we think will destroy us, the things we think there’s no coming back from this. That’s the very thing that God takes, he flips it on it’s head, and outworks his will through. He’s in the business of taking our pain and reworking it into purpose.

Conclusion

And that’s why the beginning of this initiative is so significant, because this isn’t just a nice idea for us, we didn’t just wake up one morning and think wouldn’t it be great if we started a church and could sit around every week eating yummy things and just having a chat with friends. No, it’s because we don’t want anyone to have to go through what we went through if they don’t have to. If we can help bring the reality of the kingdom to just one person, then that is worth giving our lives too.

So we’ve spent close to a decade now, seeking out truth in these arenas. Learning and growing, being stretched so that we could not only operate in these type of giftings and ministries but so that we could also train and equip others to do the same because if we are taking the command in Matthew 10 seriously, then it is our job not only to proclaim but to demonstrate the Kingdom of God.

So I hope that gives you a little bit of a clearer picture of firstly the things we’ve had to journey through which has lead us to this very point tonight, and secondly the heart behind why we do what we do. We not only want to see people, set free, but we then want to help them set others free.

Questions