Special Miracle Service First Service Sunday, July 2026 by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: Sermon Notes

The Whole Council of God

Paul described the scope of New Testament ministry with the phrase Acts 20:27, the whole council of God, meaning the entirety of God's purpose, not one favorite message. Every teaching ministry carries a temptation to center on a single message, whatever works or fits a preacher's bias, and many people do not even know they carry a subconscious bias of their own. The way to grow is to embrace the whole of what God has for you, even when it pinches your preference. A full gospel holds together teaching on salvation, holiness, and repentance alongside the practical realities of marriage, family, work, and spiritual gifts. Anything less leaves people without the fullness of God's plan for their lives.

Everything that matters to Jesus must matter to you.

God Meets Needs

Some believers only want doctrine, and doctrine matters, but the model set by Jesus was different. He taught for three days, then looked at a hungry crowd and said these people are hungry, they will faint on the road, give them food. Treating people's needs as beneath consecration or spiritual maturity has no place in the Bible. Those needs must be met not merely by welfare, but supernaturally.

Wrong or extreme teaching can close a heart to what God wants to do just as easily as an extreme prosperity message can. Israel grumbled in the wilderness, preferring the false contentment of slavery in Egypt over the discomfort of walking toward the promise, an example of settling that can look like faith while it is really disobedience.

The prophet's widow who ran to Elisha because her sons were about to be taken as slaves for debt is a reminder that a man of God can still die leaving lack behind him, and that is never something to shrug off as things happen. Stop theologizing when people are dying of hunger and sickness.

The Trinity in Healing

Hebrews 1:1-3 shows Jesus as the exact image and character of the Father revealed. John 14:10 records Jesus saying the Father in him does the works, meaning he never acted apart from the Godhead. Acts 10:38 describes how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Ghost and with power, and he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil, for God was with him. Every person of the Godhead is represented in that verse. Healing and deliverance were never Jesus acting on his own.

One third of his earthly ministry was healing, which is why a believer cannot be indifferent to it. Medical science, and the medicinal properties God placed in herbs, are themselves an expression of his healing power, but there will always also be a place for the miracle working power of God. You do not have to go under the knife to be healed.

Stretching Out His Hand

Acts 4:29-30 raises a real question. Healing seems to describe what Jesus did in the past, when he walked the earth. Is God still with us now? The disciples prayed, grant to your servants that with boldness they may speak your word, by stretching out your hand to heal. Jesus is in heaven, yet the prayer asks him to stretch out his hand as they preach, because believers are the body of Christ, and the hands are in the body. He stretches out his hands through us.

The man Jesus was the servant of God on earth, and he calls us servants too, so what he did, we do too. But it must be done with boldness: speaking the word with boldness, confronting sickness with boldness, confronting negative patterns with boldness.

Determination Is the Key to Change

The second law of motion states that an object stays at rest, or in constant motion, unless acted on by an external force. A situation does not change simply because you are tired of it or have had enough. Something new has to happen, an external force has to act.

Isaiah 30:19 says the Lord will be gracious at the sound of your cry. There is a cry of holy anger and holy determination that heaven waits to hear before it answers. In Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, God does not act on the prophet's behalf alone. He tells him instead to speak to the wind, speak to the bones, speak to the situation.

Deuteronomy 32:26 shows that the Lord judges his people and has compassion on his servants when he sees. There is a dimension of intervention that a person only steps into at the end of themselves, once their own scheming and backup plans have run out.

There Is No Other Rock

Even the word used for the salvation of the soul, sotaria, is a generic term that covers every kind of salvation, physical deliverance as much as the salvation of the soul. The same wholehearted determination that insists there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved should mark how a believer approaches God for anything. He must be seen as the only rock, even when he chooses to work through other means.