Joel's Story // Causeway Coast Vineyard

[Music] so i remember back at the start of walk down um when we were all on our computers watching facebook lives for about half the day and i was watching my friend do a facebook live and he just dropped this offhand comment where he said hey you know we're locked down the holy spirit isn't locked down i'm like kind of cheesy we've said it a lot since but at the moment it felt like the first time i heard that and i thought wow yeah that is true i'm kind of slow but that that sunk in that moment i realized the holy spirit isn't locked down and so i began to think differently about my daily exercise my daily walk and the first time i i had this experience that made me think differently about this i was in a little town called port rush just above our church here in colerain there's a prom there it goes around the coast and i had my coffee in my hand and as i walked down the prom i meet the first guy he's standing there and i stand two meters away from him and i just say to him hey is there anything that i might pray for you for my name's joel i'm just practicing praying and he says yes there is i'm a medical dr supplies driver and i have tinnitus explains that to me what that's like i get to pray for him that moment and he describes to me this feeling of electricity and and kind of like a tingling that starts here and kind of goes down his body and tells me that his tinnitus is partly beginning to heal so i'm pretty encouraged i'm like okay this is this there's something in this i go down a little bit further i see a guy on a bench looking kind of detected and again two meters away i just say to him my name's joel i'm out here learning to pray can i pray for you for anything uh he kind of recognizes what's going on and he says you're from that church right yes and he he describes that he's had a food box from the church in the last week he talks about his home life which is pretty difficult and he describes to me pain in his leg from a pretty constant joint problem ongoing joint problem and i pray for that but it doesn't get healed no healing there in that moment and as we go on and talk he talks about his desire to reconnect with jesus to give us recommit his life to jesus we're talking about that he interrupts me and he stands up and he just says the pain is completely gone and he begins to walk around and says i'm able to walk again with no pain in my leg he says this is the first time this has happened for eight years and so i'm pretty stoked at this moment this is exciting for me i begin to like i keep walking i get to the end of the prom i see this other young guy with a bike just sitting down on a bench again same deal same situation he's getting out of his house he's pretty tense indoors locked up and he wants to get a breather and so he's gone out and as i get to talk with him all of his questions he talks about all the things in his life that he wonders about a higher power he's heard about jesus he doesn't know how to connect with him and we share stories and then he just turns to me and he says hey how do i how do i pray how do i let jesus in that's an amazing question to get asked i get to share the gospel with him and he said yes to entering into the story of jesus as he does that he describes this physical feeling of peace and electricity just beginning to settle on him let's talk to him about how that's the spirit and he tells me how excited he is to connect with god as a father it's just such a precious moment to be involved in and as i walked away i realized okay that's 30 minutes and i meant 30 minutes i met these three guys who were desperately hungry to have some kind of encounter with god and i walked up and i just think goodness me that like the holy spirit isn't locked down people are hungry people are desperate why don't we just begin to connect with people in the way that we can and let the holy spirit guide us in that and keep going

Channel: Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland

Views: 387

Keywords: vineyard, vineyard churches, local church, churches, uk, ireland

Id: Q7lplypxH9w

Length: 3min 45sec (225 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021