1 Samuel 10:6 “Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man.”
In the examples which we discussed in the previous section, we saw that the Holy Spirit described both the apostles Peter and Paul becoming fully focused to the exclusion of anything else when the anointing came on them. In the above quoted passage of scripture the Holy Spirit gives us a bit more insight as to why individuals become so focused when they operate in the gift of faith. The context of this passage is that Samuel the prophet was prophesying to Saul as to what would happen to him as he journeyed back home. In this passage Samuel tells Saul that when the Spirit of the Lord came upon him that he would be turned into another man. Although Samuel is referring to the gift of prophecy in this passage, the principle remains the same for the gift of faith, i.e. one who operates in the gift of faith turns into another man when the anointing comes upon them, because at that moment they are filled with the faith of the Holy Spirit. As with all the spiritual gifts, the gift of faith is only manifested as and when the Holy Spirit chooses. In other words one who has received this gift cannot operate in it at will; they can only make themselves available to the Holy Spirit to be used by Him when He chooses to do so.
I will end this section with an example of this gift being made manifest through my ministry. I used to play squash, and I was what you would call a very average player. I had a friend that I used to play squash with from time to time, and he was a league player. As you can imagine our games were never equal, and he used to always soundly beat me. On a good day, I would only ever get a couple of points off of him in our encounters, but I used to enjoy the challenge anyway. He was an unbeliever and he knew that I was a Christian. I had witnessed to him on occasions but he was not interested, and always viewed my faith as a bit strange. One day on the squash court he insisted on telling me a joke that he had heard. I said that he could share it with me as long as it was clean, otherwise I was not interested. He assured me that it was a clean joke, and so he proceeded to tell me the joke. As it turned out the joke was not clean, but he found it very amusing even though he could see that I was not impressed. Something then happened on the inside of me, and I found myself saying the following to him, “because you have shared this joke with a child of God that was not clean, even though I asked you not to share a dirty joke with me, I will now play the next game with you and you will not get one point off of me. I will beat you with a whitewash”. I had no doubt that this is exactly what would happen. My friend then really began to laugh, because he knew our comparable games. And so the game began. The first point fell to me and he laughed even more. The second point fell to me and he still laughed, but not so convincingly this time. As each point fell to me he became quieter, and at the end of the game when I had beaten him eleven nil, he was completely astounded and shaken. He went to church with me that weekend for the first time ever (even though I had invited him on many occasions previously). I would like to say that he gave his heart to the Lord that weekend when the altar call was given, but he did not. We have both since moved on and I no longer have contact with him. I do not know whether he has subsequently given his heart to the Lord, but I do know that the Holy Spirit convicted him that day on that squash court. The Holy Spirit manifested the gift of faith through me on that occasion. I must emphasize that this was not my faith. I did not say what I said as an act of exercising my faith, I did not have the kind of faith to do that, this was all God. If it had been my faith I could have gone on to becoming the league champion. But the very next game we played, we got back into our old routine of me barely getting two points off of him. That is what the gift of special faith is. It is God’s faith manifested through us as He wills.
Michael E.B. Maher
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