This is a long one but, I think, worth it.
I was listening to an interview where legendary psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer was describing an experiment where she got approval to inflict a group of people with a minor wound. [1] She then split the participants into three rooms, each with a clock in it, and had them play Tetris to pass the time. In the first room, the clock moved twice as fast as real time. In the second, it moved half as fast as real time, and in the third the clock moved in real time.
In the room where the clock was moving twice as fast, the people’s wounds healed twice as fast as the people in the room where the clock moved in real time. In the room where the clock moved half as fast, the wounds took twice as long to heal.
The result illustrates that our expectations can control our physical reality. When I have a small cut I think, “ehh, this usually takes about 20 minutes to coagulate and stop leaking.” That expectation is based on my experience, and it’s the rule that my body follows when my brain believes that 20 minutes passes, regardless of how much real time passes.
Since hearing that story, I’ve been defining faith as “what we expect to happen”. If I expect the sun to rise and set every day because it has never not done that, and I expect that gravity will hold me to the planet for the same reason, I have faith in the sun’s rising and in gravity.
Naturally, the story made me think about how this expectancy applies to our work in the Spirit. Would you agree that if I’m declaring healing for someone, I’m on better ground if I expect the healing to happen than if I simply hope it happens? Like, “Okay, let’s give this a try,” isn’t quite as potent as “Here’s what’s about to happen.” Yoda schooled us.
Watch how the expectations of Jesus’ disciples evolved. I need to use a couple gospels to piece the timeline together for us, because the deets are spread across them.
In Luke 10:17 the disciples have come back from being sent out to do The Three Things. (i’m a broken record, i know. but you know why.)
The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!”
In Matthew 17:14, there’s this guy who takes his son to Jesus for healing from a demon because the disciples tried and couldn’t heal him. Watch this in 17:18:
And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was healed instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?”
Now regarding this story, tons of things have been said about the disciples’ failure, and faith and prayer and fasting, but here’s what I love about these guys: When they first get sent out, they come back all thrilled and surprised that in Jesus’ name the demons come out. But later on, they’re surprised when they don’t come out. Over time they had gotten so accustomed to all the demons submitting to them, that it’s their new reality. They expect the demons to come out. That is faith, and that’s the pattern we wanna follow. Remember the cuts and clocks thing, this is real.
For fun I call our various supernatural expectations our “faith pockets”. We can get new pockets all the time. Lemme illustrate.
One of my favorite stories of all time is about Joshua fighting against the five kings of the Amorites, who the Lord has commanded Israel to completely destroy. This is in Joshua 10, after Jericho has happened, and Israel has been wiping the map for years. (foreshadowing what the church is supposed to be doing to the principalities and their demons, i might add.) The people of Gibeon have made a treaty with Israel out of terror. The king of Jerusalem is also terrified of Israel and calls the other four kings of the area together to wipe out the people of Gibeon as punishment. Gibeon phones up Israel for an assist, and the Lord tells Joshua, “Do not fear them, for I have given them into your hands. Not a man of them shall stand before you.”
Pausing here: Watch Joshua’s expectation in action. He knows that the Lord has always done everything he said he would. God just said to him, “Not a man shall stand.” So he’s out there with a dual promise & command in hand.
Continuing in Joshua 10:10: Israel is doing Metallica a solid but we’re talking about five nations worth of armies they need to eradicate. Joshua’s thinking, “He told me not one will be left standing… How will we have time for all this? I dunno, but one thing I do know is that the Lord figured that part out before he even told me to go do.”
In verse 11 the Lord himself starts raining meteors down on the enemy armies to help out. I want you to take one minute to pause and paint yourself a mental picture of what it would look like to stand in that battle and see this happening. Blood and screaming everywhere for miles in every direction. Sounds of metal striking and thumping of horse hooves and drums and… more screaming, lots of screaming and shouting. You’re all sweaty and swinging your sword at everything that’s running away from you and – there’s like, a lot of blood. Stinks bad. It’s getting to be like noon and there is still a sea of men running all over the place as far as your eye can see, and then freakin’ flaming meteors start falling from heaven?!?!? And they’re only hitting the bad guys?!?
Seriously, I don’t want you to read another word until you’ve closed your eyes and imagined the meteors entering the scene.
Is there any doubt that the Lord is helping you do the plan he told you to do, Israel? Now here’s the best part:
Joshua sees that there are simply too many people to kill in a day, even with the meteors. He knows the Lord has it figured out, so in verse 12 he declares a solution:
He said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Here’s my question to you: Where the crap did he come up with that idea??? Is that what any one of us would have come up with??
Seriously! Look, if I’m in the driveway working on my brakes and it’s getting late and I’m not sure I’m gonna finish before dark, I start praying for the Holy Spirit to help all the bolts come off easily and not break any tools and stuff like that. It would never, ever, in a hundred years occur to me to point at the sun and tell it to stop moving so I have time to finish.
But Joshua tells the sun and moon to stop and they obey. I’m sparing you from reading the All Caps of my brain right now, but I hope you’re pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down. Joshua’s thinking, “The Lord told us to kill ‘em all and I need more time. So I’ll just have to stop time for like a day and then we can finish up.” We’re not talking about some “it was an extra hour and people could’ve felt like the day dragged a little” situation. Nope, this is 24 more hours of daylight. (and the physical stamina to go along with it!)
He gets the idea, and the expectation that it’s the right idea, and he executes. No, “please, Lord, this” and “If you could just, Lord, that.” Joshua does the declaring on Joshua’s behalf.
One of his faith pockets held that idea. “When you need more time to do what the Lord told you, you can stop the sun.”
Look at the dominion we humans have been given over the earth and the heavens.
So how do we start thinking the things that would never occur to us? Jeremiah 33:3 says, “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”
Hmm, good idea.
Did you ever think about the fact that when Jesus taught, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find;” in Mat 7:7, that we never really consider, “Ask for what?” We tend to take the self-centered interpretation and think, “He told me to ask for what I want.” I mean, that’s true, because he goes on to talk about parents not giving stones instead of bread to their children… But there’s a better way.
Praying, “Father, I have no idea what you want me to know. Would you please show me hidden things that would never have crossed my mind without you?” Dude, try it, I’m tellin’ ya. He backs up his own words; I guarantee you that he answers this request.
Nextly, nextly, I take us to Acts 8:26, and Philip.
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place. And he rose and went.
Pausing – For 99% of us, an angel showing up to give us an instruction would be like mind-blowing. At this point in the apostles’ lives, an angel showing up to tell you what to do appears to be pretty standard stuff. They’re not making too big a deal of it in this text, are they? Kinda like they expect it to happen? (nudge, nudge) Do you have a faith pocket for an angelic visitation yet?
Back to Acts 8; the story explains that there’s a court official of the Ethiopian queen traveling the road from Jerusalem back home. Philip teaches him about Jesus and the release of the Holy Spirit, which clearly led to teaching about baptism:
And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.
I’ve heard a handful of sermons that refer to this story, and for some reason nobody ever wants to acknowledge that Philip just got teleported. Ask the question and you get, “Well… that was for the time, and –” no, no, no, nooooo my friend. If it’s in the Bible, we can acquire that faith pocket. Remember that the Holy Spirit is writing these things for a reason; all the details are important.
But think about this story in context of the time. Thanks to books and films, we are completely desensitized to the idea of teleporting. We have Star Trek and hyperdrives and wormholes and our brains have had plenty of visualizations and time to absorb this concept. I kinda think this Scripture goes in one ear and out the other for most of us due to said desensitization.
In Philip’s time, teleporting is something that nobody on the planet would’ve conceived. Like, they wouldn’t have a word for it. One day Philip knows you have to walk or ride a donkey everywhere. Next day… he prolly goes back to the apostles and tells them, “Well, apparently teleportation is a thing now.” They’re like, “whaaaat are you talking about?” Maybe they go scouring Ezekiel and Enoch and realize that the dominion of the Christ unlocks that, too.
Imagine how disoriented Philip must have felt when he’s coming up out of water and then poof, he’s in a city. He has a new faith pocket for something he never dreamed of before, and now he can expect that to be a part of life.
So, as always, I want these thoughts to start to crack open who we really are in the kingdom. Some of us have experience that has taught us to expect a different “real world” from the one Jesus is teaching about. We might expect pain and disappointment. I propose to you that all the disciples had that, too.
It took them months or years of hanging around Jesus to un-learn what they had learned. (soon you and I will be talking about that quite a lot) If you’d like to be changed like they were, spend time in the gospels reading about his words and works. The Holy Spirit and the disciples wrote all that stuff down so that we could follow the path they were shown – in a fraction of the time!
Do we truly believe that our Father wants us all to act like him; that we are being transformed into his image? Do we believe that his kingdom looks nothing like this earthly one that we consider to be reality, and that he wants ours to be overwritten by his? Do we believe there is a spiritual world just beneath the thin veil of ours, with patterns that affect how our natural world behaves?
Maybe our first step is to measure our memories of experiences that are contrary to the gospels. Speak over yourself: “I know the Truth. The truth is a person, and his name is Jesus. Things that I expect that are different from what he’s saying must be lies that I’ve been told, and I want to be cleaned of them. I curse the lies that became my beliefs, and bless the words of Truth to become my expectation.”
You might pause at my use of a curse... Do you remember Mark 11:12, the story where Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree and it withers away to its root? We’ve established that in the Spirit we are trees. Some of our spiritual roots are not of the Lord. Hebrews 12:15: “(See to it) that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.” A root supplies food to a tree, and we are what we eat, right? Experiences that discourage the things of the Lord likewise supply a kind of food to our view of “the real world”, but when we identify them we can wither those roots through prayer, declaration, and discipline.
Consequently, underscoring this concept of expectation equating to faith, look at what Jesus teaches the disciples when they see the withered fig tree:
Mark 11:22 And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Many people have eloquently referred to that mountain as a parable or metaphor for “big problems” - but he wasn’t speaking a parable there. And he was saying it in response to an actual physical response of the earth to his words. For fun, think about that for a minute. Moving a mountain might seem like a simple thing next to stopping the sun…
But in the real world, stopping the sun, moving a mountain, withering a tree, rebuking a storm, casting out a demon, raising the dead, growing a leg, and coagulating the cut on my finger are all the same, aren’t they? If the authority of the kingdom, the dominion given through Christ, and the name of Jesus can change one drop of water, they can equally change the whole sea. I’d love to see us hear testimony about any one of those things and honestly reply, “Yeah, I’m not surprised.” We could have pockets to hold any of that stuff.
Lastly, you may have had the thought, “Well, look, God’s only gonna do the stuff that’s his will. You can’t just go around saying any old thing with expectation and it’ll happen.” Let us understand how potent our tongue and our faith is, and I take us to Luke 9:54, where Jesus was rejected by a village of Samaritans.
And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them.
They could actually do that. Or there would have been nothing to rebuke.
Furthermore, do you agree that witches’ rituals and spells and curses are spoken things that actually change stuff? Would the Bible adamantly rebuke those actions if they didn’t matter? And those surely aren’t God’s will, either, are they?
Together let us pray selflessly, “Show me what’s going on in your kingdom so I can see what in the earth needs to be aligned with that. Teach me about things I’ve never thought about. I’ll do whatever, because I trust you and I know your thoughts are so far beyond my thoughts.” Remember the disciples and the demons; experience becomes expectation. Our Father backs up his words. If we go do the work, through it he’ll add pockets where what once was hope has become faith.
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