Called To Abundant Life
Some of you may have heard of these crazy Jesus lovers that go around believing for the sick to be healed and the dead to be raised. Most likely, you are one of them because you are affiliated with the Healing Rooms. Our very own Jim White boldly walks up to car accidents not only looking to pray for the ones that are hurt, but the ones without life! What would this world look like if more of us went after Jesus’ commissioning in Matthew 10:8 to “raise the dead” like Jim does?
Once, I asked the Lord why we raise people from the dead if they are just going to die again later on in life. I was perplexed at the reasoning behind raising someone from the dead if they were going to die again in a few years. I pictured myself praying for someone every few years, them dying over and over again. It didn’t make sense, and the logic of it was somewhat humorous. What was the point? Why pray to raise the dead if people are just going to go and die again? Wouldn’t it be better to just let them die and go to heaven if they were just going to die again in a few years?
The Lord responded to my questions. “Because you don’t have to die. I died so that you don’t have to.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “We don’t have to die? Do you mean that we can live forever? Are you telling me that we raise the dead because death isn’t our portion, ever?” I have to admit; this was thoroughly puzzling and mysterious to me when I first heard it. Healing the sick, sure. Raising the dead, okay. But living forever? I needed some scriptures to believe that.
So, the Lord led me to John 11:25,26:
“He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
Jesus first confronts Martha’s paradigm (and ours) of eternal life and validates it; He tells her that she is correct in believing that through Him, when someone dies they will have eternal life in heaven. He then reveals to her an even greater reality; that there is a place in faith where one can embrace deathlessness. Verses that follow this line of thinking are literally everywhere in the Gospels, but here are a few more: John 10:27-29, John 4:14, John 6:46-51 (He didn’t say die and go to heaven, He said live forever), 1 Corinthians 15:26, John 10:10, Luke 9:55-56, and Hebrews 2:14 just to name a few.
God did not create man in an atmosphere of death. Death became a reality only when Adam and Eve invited it into the world when they ate of the forbidden fruit. The Good News is that Jesus is called, “The Second Adam”, and through His blood we have been reinstated to the same sinless state that Adam and Eve resided in prior to the fall. The wages of sin is death, but when the wages of sin have been lifted through Christ we are left with deathlessness.
This may come as odd to those of us still stuck in a churchianity that focuses more on going to heaven rather than bringing heaven to earth. Anytime your hope is derived from what will happen more than what Christ already accomplished, you willingly give yourself to a degree of deception, with the inevitable result of surrendering a measure of the power you were given. Yet, to those of us that are escorts of revival, forcing hell’s soldiers back to the pit from which they crawled from, it is not a foreign idea to live and not die. We live to bring the Kingdom to earth rather than live to go to heaven. We begin to see the end days less as a rescue operation and more as a bridegroom coming back to meet His victorious bride for their glorious wedding. We live not to go to heaven but to have heaven come invade our world! Jesus prayed that we would not be taken out of the world, but rather that we would be protected from the evil one in the midst of us being here. The thought of living a long life of giving worship to our King, winning sinners to grace, and seeing the sick and dead brought back to fullness strikes a particular joy in our heart.
When we get a conviction that death isn’t from God we will raise the dead, and not every so often, but whenever someone dies. In addition, we won’t just raise the dead; we will live forever. We will step into the “abundant life” that Christ spoke of. God has given Cal an anointed vision for long life through supernatural healing, eating rightly, and regular exercise. That is a vision from God! Christ taught about long life as well, so lets embrace it rather than walking in a religious spirit of suicide masked as a desire for heaven.
Why do we pray for the sick? Because you aren’t supposed to be sick, and sickness leads to death. Why do we raise the dead? Because you aren’t supposed to die. I exhort you to change the way you think about death. I challenge you to not just heal the sick and raise the dead when you get the chance, but through faith to step into the abundant life that Christ purchased for you with His costly blood. Will you believe for long life?
The Dead Raising Team holds trainings for people that want to be renewed in their mind so that they are more equipped to raise the dead. The above teaching is a short excerpt of some of what is taught during a training. If you are interested in hosting a DRT training, mail the DRT at thedeadraisingteam@gmail.com.
