It's Not an Event, It's a Person

It's Not an Event, It's a Person by Steve Montag

John 11 is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. There are some practical things we can learn from this story. Some of us are waiting for God to do things for us that God has already done but we don’t yet recognize it. Sometimes the enemy tries to fog our insight to the fact that God has already done in us what we’ve been after Him to do for a long time; God has even done things that we didn’t even think we needed.

“Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, ‘Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.’ When Jesus heard that, He said, ‘This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.’”

Verse 5 is interesting. It says Jesus loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus. So when you read that and didn’t know what came next you would think that if you love someone and you heard that they were sick to the point of death, you would get up immediately and go to them. Wouldn’t you? So he loved Martha, and he loved her sister, and he loved Lazarus, and then he hung out for two more days and didn’t move. That is how much he loved them!

God has been pouring out His Spirit in the last few meetings in such a powerful way. He’s done so many great things for us and a lot of times we don’t “feel” free after God has touched our lives. That’s why we need to stop depending on our emotions. But the goal of all the junk in our lives and the reason God allowed much of that to happen to us is to work death to those things in us that cannot stay in the Presence of God.

The Lord said every plant that My Father hasn’t planted he plucks it up and He kills it. There are things that have been in our lives, even since childhood, that were tares the enemy planted, things that God didn’t plant in our lives that He literally laid the axe to the root to remove. He didn’t allow those things in our lives to ruin us but that He would get glory from it. And when it seemed that He would never show up or do anything about our situation, it was because He was just hanging out. The reason for the Lord tarrying was so He could do an even greater work than we wanted Him to do.

There is a verse that sometimes blesses me and sometimes makes me mad. Isaiah 30:18 says this: “Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you...” The Kingdom of God isn’t a fast food restaurant! He doesn’t have a drive-thru window. “And therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.”

A messenger came from the home of Lazarus and said, “The one whom you love is sick.” Jesus must have loved him so much that Lazarus’ name wasn’t necessary. Jesus already knew who he was talking about. The scriptures tell us that Jesus sat another two days after that. Verse 17 lets us know it was a total delay of four days from the time the messenger came to tell them about Lazarus to the time the Lord got to Bethany that Lazarus had been already dead and buried and Lazarus’ family was already mourning. We need to understand that God’s delays in our lives always mean a greater blessing for us.

Don’t ever forget in that waiting process that God always does exceedingly, abundantly, above everything you could ask or begin to imagine. We need to get rid of the fast food mentality. It doesn’t work in the Kingdom of God.

The second thing we learn from this passage is that we need to re-adjust our focus and vision from where we are at, to where God wants to take us. Verse 20 says: “Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met Him, but Mary was sitting in the house. Then Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to Him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.’ [When the event of the resurrection happens at the end.] But Jesus let her know that she got it all wrong, that her vision was skewed. The resurrection of the dead is not an event. Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, [not in an event or an experience but in Me] though he may die, he shall live.

Whatever your need is you’ll find it in Jesus. You won’t find it in an experience or in an event but in a Person, the Person of Jesus. Understand this, God wants to give you an event and an experience but He wants the focus to be on Him. He is the Light of the World, He is your Redeemer, your Healer. He is your Deliverer, your Refuge, your Protection. Get the picture? It’s not an event, it’s a Person.

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