Are there patterns of compromise that are holding you back? Throw them off! Throw them off! They're not going to be part of your future anymore. Are there things that have kept you in bondage for years? Throw them off! You're going forward. You're not - this is a day to change. It's a day to get vision in your life. Throw it off. Throw it off. Pull off those old things that hold you back.
Is there unforgiveness and bitterness because of what happened to you? Throw it off! Disappointments? Throw them off! Don't let old things keep you locked up and defying who you are... so he came to Jesus and Jesus said what do you want? Ah, well I'll tell you what I want. I want my eyes back - and Jesus said I see you have faith and according to your faith it's done to you. And immediately his eyes were opened and he could see. I want you to notice the distinctive thing that happened after that. He didn't just jump up and down and shout. The Bible says he followed Jesus in The Way. He become a follower of the Lord. See, his whole destiny was altered by that one encounter when he reached out and extended his faith to believe God could give him a miracle. One encounter changed his life.
I remember many years ago and I was just young and give my life to the Lord but wasn't going anywhere really. We went occasionally to a church, about six times that year I think. In Auckland we went to Assembly of God and they had a revival meeting to go to. I don't know what 'revival' was. They had miracles. I didn't really know what they were either and it was this eerie service. It was a Pentecostal service, but just being in that atmosphere, a spiritual hunger began to awaken in my life and I began to realise I needed the Holy Ghost. I needed God to encounter me. I become more and more aware of it.
Someone had spoken to me about this before and wanted me to come to a meeting where they spoke in tongues and so on, Catholic charismatic meeting. I said keep away from me, this is - no way! You know, I wouldn't have a piece to do with it. I just didn't want anything to do with it and so I was quite resistant. But as time went on I started to have a hunger come and a desire for God, desire for the Holy Ghost and so we decided we'd go down to this conference and I believed that God would touch me that Easter. Now we got in the car and here's the interesting thing; we got in this car, the Mini Cooper. It was a hotted up little Mini Cooper, went like the clappers and it had a remote gearstick in the thing so they'd taken out the original gearstick, put in a remote shift in this thing and boy could you wipe that thing down the road! It was fast, very, very fast. So anyway, we got in the thing, I think Joy was pregnant at that time and we whipped off down to Waikanae and we got on the Desert Road and suddenly there's a shower of sparks and a bang and this thing comes loose in my hand.
So now I've got what used to be a remote shift. It's no longer remotely moving anything anymore. It's just flopping and that's not a very good thing because that means you can't change gears, so I'm stuck in one gear. We can't go anywhere and so anyway I stopped; oh, this is such a pain and so I got out and had a look at it and there's no way we could fix it. We just slept in the car overnight and hitchhiked back to Taupo. There was no one available, it was Good Friday and no one around to help us fix it so we hitchhiked back to the car again and here we are by the car, stuck, no way we we're going to make that conference.