Greater by Steven Furtick

Author:Steven Furtick [Furtick, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781601423269
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

Back-and-Forth Faith

John and Heather Bishop are two of my favorite people at Elevation Church. They are one of the original couples who burned their plows and moved to Charlotte with us to start our church. John built the first deck I had on the back of my house. I take great joy in frequently giving him a hard time about overcharging me for it, but it was a nice deck. Heather was the first ministry assistant I ever had. She also ran the children’s ministry and the entire church office while managing to put up with me. She did it all gracefully. I love the Bishops.

So when they struggled with fertility issues for several years, it wasn’t just a general prayer request in our church. It was a personal call to faith for Holly and me—to believe God on behalf of this couple who are so precious to us. I remember how nervous I was when my wife laid her hands on Heather at a staff retreat and asked God in bold faith to give the Bishops a baby. I asked Holly in the car on the way home, “Did you have to pray that one out loud, so specifically, in front of people?”

“I felt like God told me to,” she replied. Then she smiled at me. That was the end of that conversation.

I was relieved, and Holly was vindicated, when Heather announced in 2007 that she was pregnant. The struggle was over now, wasn’t it? It certainly seemed that way. The Bishops bore a son. They named him Jeremiah. He was completely healthy and very handsome. And the Bishops were elated. They weren’t the only ones.

Six months later, full of expectation, they began trying to conceive again. After all, once you’ve seen God do greater things, it’s addictive to believe Him for more. Remarkably, Heather was reading the Shunammite’s initial promise of a son from 2 Kings when she felt like God supernaturally spoke to her that she would have a son in a year. And they believed. And prayed. And waited.

Nine months later, she still wasn’t pregnant.

Still, the Bishops aren’t the kind of people to feel sorry for themselves. They stayed busy doing God’s work and enjoying the son God had given them. They knew they were already far more blessed than they deserved.

That same month John got on a plane with me, and we flew to Uganda to check on one of our church’s international partnerships. It was John’s first time in Africa. And for the entire week he was there, he was moved by the joy he saw from believers in the midst of dehumanizing poverty, by the hope he saw in communities ravaged by HIV.

On one of the last days of our stay in Kampala, while we waited at a busy intersection, John looked out the window and noticed a small boy, about eighteen months old, sitting on the sidewalk with his little hands cupped in front of him, begging for money. John rarely heard God impress anything on him more clearly than in that moment.

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