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 social player. I had a friend that I used to play squash with from time to time and he was a very good 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 absolutely 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 alter 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 the faith of the Holy Spirit manifested through us as He wills.
Michael E.B. Maher
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