There was a time when I would ask, “Lord, why do miracles of healing take place so easily overseas but rarely here at home?”
It is so good to rise in the morning in Asia or the UK and wonder what the Lord Jesus will do during the day. Our hosts overseas drive us out and about to the homes of those who need healing, or they come to us where we are staying. The result is that those who are sick or injured are healed, many on the spot. Glory to God!
Time was when an overseas ‘Capernaum’ of miracle healings would end and we would head back home to an Australian ‘Nazareth’ of unbelief and fewer healings due to what I called the Familiarity Breeds Contempt factor. Not outright contempt really but more over-familiarity, and a “We know what happened overseas, but Charity Begins at Home” attitude. “Everyone’s a hero somewhere else” as one preacher described it.
Well, that’s changing rapidly, perhaps because of the lack of speedy access to hospital care that people used to take for granted before ambulance ramping began to take place due to fewer hospital beds. available; or the increase in anxiety due to the explosive problems in the Middle East and an increasing possibility of war that could spread globally. (Not to mention absurd decisions by politicians — or their indecision and failure to act.)
In any case, Australians are now much more open to the life-changing message of salvation through the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and his power to heal them through the hands of those who believe that Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday and today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)
Attend a church where the sick are prayed for with the expectation that the living Lord Jesus will heal them — often then and there! God is always ready and willing to heal. We can’t all leave the ‘Nazareth’ where we are too well known to move in the anointing and go down to a ‘Capernaum’ where the Unknown Factor can get us Back into the Flow!
Have you ever read the Rudyard Kipling novel “The Man Who Would Be King”? It was made into a movie, set in India, in which a British NCO was seen by tribal people in the north as being a god because he was shot with an arrow but didn’t bleed. From memory, it was due to him having a prosthetic limb. Anyhow, a tribal princess who resisted his advances bit him on the cheek and he bled, so they killed him. They killed him because he was as human as they were. They don’t kill preachers who come home from Developing Countries because they know that they bleed!
While thinking on this a few years ago, the Lord spoke to my heart, saying, “Capernaum is not the answer: you need to deal with the ‘Nazareth’ that’s in you.” I saw straight away that a degree of unbelief resides in us, in that in ministering elsewhere we don’t so much have more faith but benefit from the “If not now then maybe never” desperation of those who have little or no access to medical help.
We find it easy to get great results “over there” but not so much at home. We are so subjective about ourselves that we lose the objectivity that comes from trusting in God’s Word rather than our own feelings. And, yes, it’s easier to be seen as a “king” by those who don’t know us and as something less by those who know us a bit too well!
Bottom Line: Nazareth is what it is where it is, and Capernaum is what it is, where it is. We can’t move from the first to the second to see God move in power and then head back to where little or no expectation provides some rest. You might say, “But Jesus could do no mighty works in Nazareth because of their unbelief.” True, but when Peter healed the first person he encountered after being filled with the Holy Spirit — the man crippled from birth — he did so “In the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth…!” Jesus inspired Peter to put the little known village of Nazareth on the map! Jesus brought Nazareth down from the hills into Big City Jerusalem. There’s the challenge.