Life of Christ #2 -The Centurion’s Faith: Jesus, Spiritual Authority & the Unseen Realm

The Jews had now lived – the people living in this day, in the day of Herod the Great, Augustus Caesar, and Jesus Christ, whom they had never heard of – these people had been living in a dry spell. Nothing noteworthy had happened since the Maccabees, and very little for 400 years. 400 years – the same amount of time that God’s people had been in Egypt. There hadn’t been anybody raised from the dead since Elisha. There hadn’t been many miracles around for centuries, and suddenly, these people recognized that God had taken note of His people. They recognized that a revival was coming, that God had come back.

For the first time in centuries, there’s a prophet in the land. A great prophet, not a prophet, but a great prophet, a great prophet in the land. There have been guys standing in the street corners denouncing that had stirred up; John in the wilderness, denouncing and doing a great job of it. No miracles, but he was a prophet who could preach, teach, and heal. He was different, and God had not forgotten His people. They were praising God for Him, and I am impressed and grateful.

I would say that Christians need to take a little lesson. One of them is, you praise God in or out of a dry spell; you don’t ever forget how to praise God, and you’re really grateful on the day that He remembers His people. I think one of the saddest things that I’ve known in my lifetime is how God’s people treat a visitation cheaply. Once you have it, and you’re in it, and you’re surrounded by it, people think it’s happening everywhere, always has, and always will, and they can choose. Oh, I like this one. No, this one doesn’t suit me too well. I’ll go over and have it there.

I think I get more phone calls and more letters on this subject from people I know. I got one yesterday. Someone said, “Gene, we didn’t know what we had. We thought this was just something commonplace. We’ve never found it again. We can’t find anything like it. We had no idea.” It’s rare. God’s visitations are always rare. If you ever have the privilege of one, hold it as a holy thing. If you ever get a second chance, consider yourself one of the most blessed people in church history and in all of spiritual history. Don’t treat it lightly, and don’t blow on it. It might go out. Don’t go crucify the great prophet. It may go away.

Well, if I would conclude here with anything, it would be: it has not been until my generation and yours that the people of God have had a chance to understand, as well as the first-century people, being free from – I mean liberated from – time and space, because it has only been since Einstein and this new development in physics that many have realized that there are things that are not time and space; that are not matter, and are not physical. This was Einstein’s fourth dimension. It’s a place where nothing physical exists.

That is the dominion of God. That’s Jesus Christ’s greatest single memory, and it is the place that He walked even while He was here. If you will try to immerse yourself in His sense of that realm; not your sense of it, but His sense of it, it will have a great deal of meaning to you.

You have often heard me quote the statement from the History of Christian Mysticism by Evelyn Underwood, who said the one outstanding thing, one thing common to all the Christians of all the ages who had a deep walk with Jesus Christ:

Every one of them had a sense of another realm.

Try to develop a little bit…just a little bit…don’t work too hard at it… A sense of that realm.