God’s not dead, his Spirit empowers us

The resurrection message of hope can infuse our everyday lives, says ELS speaker Rachel Hickson. And in a season of storms encouragement has never been more needed

Resurrection truth should not be limited to one weekend but should be boldly woven into our everyday lives: that God’s not dead but alive and his Spirit is working through us, says Rachel Hickson.

This truth is captured in one of my favourite verses, Romans 8:11: “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

As we live with this focus that God is with us, God is in us and that he wants his life to flow through us, everything changes. But this powerful message isn’t only true for our personal lives. This Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead and gave us the Easter story 2,000 years ago not only empowers us, but also our churches and nations too.

However dead our church, community or even our passion seems, we need to believe that the Holy Spirit still has resurrection power to turn every dead, broken situation into a living testimony of the power of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is expressed in many forms in the Bible – as water to refresh, oil to anoint, fire to ignite and wind that blows. In this season of uncertainty, the wind of the Holy Spirit is testing the root structures of our lives. We are living in a season of storms both literally and spiritually! As the wind blows and the trees fall you often discover that their root structures are much shallower than expected.

The many fallen trees can be a spiritual picture for us too in these days. Some big ministries and names in the church scene have fallen in recent days. These events are a good reminder that now is the time to dig deep and love God and one another well. Then, whatever life throws at us, we will stand because we are well-rooted in God and have honest relationships.

God’s spirit is alive and living in us, and as we dig deep into God, this secures us. So dig deep. Love Jesus. Give him time and listen to him deeply. The Bible promises that if we are well rooted we will flourish in every season.

Through her ministry, Heartcry for Change, Rachel touches the lives of leaders and individuals with a message of hope and through practical equipping. Ahead of speaking at this year’s ELS, we asked her about her work and how she is seeing God move in 2024.

What areas are you focusing on currently?
We’re in a really interesting season at the moment and feel the urgency of implementing mentoring and discipleship connections – both with individuals and leaders.

I really feel we need to move away from transactional relationships, where we just connect around functionality, and connect authentically at deeper levels.

I live in Oxford, which is a young city with lots of students. I watch the stress in their lives as they try to establish good financial practice, develop their relationships towards marriage and find their career paths – often alone.

We have a generation that is great at communicating by text but awkward when expressing themselves in face-to-face longer conversations. As I watch these scenes, I sense their hunger – they’re longing for someone to truly invest in their lives and shape them.

The longing for people who are willing to give time to this next generation so that they can do life and faith well is everywhere, but is anyone truly interested in helping them shape their lives? Will we respond by saying, “You matter to me. Can I help you?”

At a leadership level it’s about helping with the isolation and loneliness people feel and the pressure they’re under to perform in so many diverse areas.

Many live with a constant pressure of tasks stretching them in a hundred directions, resulting in a sense that they never do anything well, or the task they love!

So we need to create an atmosphere of encouragement for leaders; to notice what they’re doing and how they are feeling, to give them a call or a hand. It’s about authentic relationships with discipleship and connectivity.

You talk about the importance of supporting leaders… how are you doing that?
I’ve started something called the Roundhouse Project where we bring people from different spheres together to support each other. We’ve got business people, creatives, church leaders, prophets and prayer leaders, people in social concerns, government and justice with a wide variety of skills and experience gathering together to connect, empower and transform their worlds.

To give you an example: at one gathering we had a church leader who’d been locked in a battle to get easy access to use a car park. He shared this challenge on his table where we had a group of diverse leaders including a prophet, a businessman, someone with legal experience and others. As the issue was discussed, the prophet said he felt God had shown him the root of this issue: there were two families who had been fighting and that situation needed healing.

So a prayer team will go and pray over this land, then the business and legal minds can advise on the next stages, and 17 years of pressure can be solved by collaboration. To me this was a sign of what we can do when we use our different skills in partnership.

Sometimes we need a heavenly key of revelation to unlock a situation, at other times we need practical wisdom, business skills or just money!

As we create environments of trust where people with these various skills can work together, we will begin to see Kingdom advancement and community transformation.

You’ve just written a new book too…
Yes, my latest book is called Hope Filled. In this season I have realised that it is so important to understand hope, as our culture is hopeless, and the church has often lost hope too.

I wanted to explore the theological basis of our hope, how we find it and hold onto it. So much of our cultural language is around positive thinking, but in Romans 15:13 it says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

This verse shows us that we don’t have to find or work up hope; it’s not a mental exercise or a physical or emotional discipline. It’s actually spiritual receptivity and belief that the God of all hope can fill you with hope, whatever your season.

In the book I study some of the complexities of being hope-filled. I examine the wrestle of ‘hope against hope’. This is the uncomfortable place where our eternal hope and our earthly hope often collide. In fact, I found myself writing this book when we had just lost our pastor’s wife to cancer at 42 years old – and we had prayed earnestly for healing. I also look at hope in families, finances, our nation, family and relational issues and how those hope dynamics need to be stirred, received and executed. It’s so important that we understand hope from a faith perspective too, as faith and hope together are like two little dynamos! Our hope must remain!

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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