Encountering God through Videos - Joshua Shaw

            As soon as I gave my life to the Lord, I had a need to tell people about Jesus. It was in me. A few years into my faith, I started doing a lot of online ministry on a poetry website. I would spend time chatting with people and sharing the Gospel with them. I would share my testimony and saw a lot of people were come to the Lord. Soon, I stumbled across strong atheists and I started studying science to be able to answer their objections to Christianity. The Gospel turned into trying to prove I was right and they were wrong simply based on the way apologetics is structured. I remember reading the bible and thinking if I could only walk in what the early disciples walked in, the debate would be over. I’d be able to show them.

                A few years later, after some radical encounters with the Lord, I stumbled across the documentaries Finger of God and Furious Love by Darren Wilson. Those planted such a hunger in me that I started crying out to God to just take me around where that was happening. I started praying for people on the street on my way to work. I didn’t see healing at all but kept praying because I was hungry to see God move. A month goes by of not seeing breakthrough and I stumbled across a video of Todd White on a website that didn’t allow YouTube videos at the time. Someone posted it and it was deleted as soon as it was posted. I just happened to go on there the second before it was deleted. In the video, Todd White was praying for college students, calling out words of knowledge and seeing them get healed. My heart was burning with a hunger but my mind was in a battle. I started praying, “Lord is this even real?” I heard very clearly in my heart, “Do you want to do this?” In tears I cried out  “Yes!” and then He said, “Start praying for the sick.”

                That morning, my wife woke up and she had problems with her back. I prayed and she said she felt heat fill her back and she was healed. I started seeing breakthrough everywhere I went. I was watching any healing video I could find and that would fuel a deeper hunger that would propel me into even more break through. It’s amazing what God can do through a video.

A year or two later, I had the privilege of teaching a class on supernatural evangelism between services at the Church we were attending. I typed everything out and read off of a paper the whole message, sloppy, but there was such a thick sense of God’s presence as I was teaching. We filmed it and put it on YouTube. Later on, someone watched that video, then went out and started praying for people and they had back to back breakthrough with healing. He had received an impartation from one of the sloppiest teachings I’ve done.  

                My wife and I started taking teams out to the street to pray for the sick and share the Gospel. It was on my heart to film some of the things we were seeing happening. One day, the Lord prompted me to bring a camera, he told me where to be and who to bring. We went to the skate park and the mall where the Lord showed me and we started seeing God move with an increase of words of knowledge and healing. From that point on, we started filming what miracles we could in hopes to show others God is real and encourage others to step into a supernatural lifestyle.

               A few years of filming, we started capturing greater and greater exploits. One time, we went up to a group hanging out at the park. They were dancing to Dubstep, and at first didn’t want anything to do with Jesus. I felt like we needed to hang out a bit. After a while, I asked three guys if they wanted to experience God. They said yes, so I invited the Holy Spirit to show up. One of the kids felt something touch his shoulder. The rest of the group was like, “no way, do that to me” They all prayed for Holy Spirit to show up and one of them jumped. The other one ran away screaming. Then, I had them pray over each other and one by one they started getting healed. The whole time this is going on, we have the camera rolling. When I put up the video someone sent me message saying that their knee was healed by watching it. Others have said they encountered God’s presence through watching it. From that point on, we started to regularly receive testimonies of people encountering God in a tangible way through the videos.

Acts 19:11 Now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul, 12 so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them.

                There is something tangible about the presence of God. Handkerchiefs and aprons became tools to carry God’s presence and the results were healing the sick and delivering the demonized. With this in mind, we started praying over our videos that they wouldn’t be just videos to entertain but would lead the viewer into an encounter with the living God. People started encountering God’s presence, the baptism of the Spirit, conviction, angelic encounters, healings, and impartations just to name a few. I’ve even had people send me messages saying, “Now I know God is real, how do I get Him in my life?” or “How can I know this God?”

                One video, I heard very clearly pray for someone’s right hip to be healed at the end of the video. I used to think it was cheesy in a video where someone would call out words of knowledge into the camera, but I obeyed. Later on I got a message from an elder at a Calvary Chapel that he was healed of a nearly 30 year old injury in his right hip. After the video, he was able to sleep without pain. Another video we were filming, someone’s neck got healed. My friend Dem said that he felt someone was going to get healed of the same thing when they watched that part. The night I put the video up, someone said they watched it and got rocked by the Holy Spirit. At that same part, their neck got healed.

Psalm 119:2 “Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart”

Psalm 77:12 “I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”

Revelation 19:10…. “Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”

                There is something powerful to keeping the testimonies of the Lord. The videos are a visual testimony of what God has done, and an invitation for God to do it again with you. I’ve seen many videos of God moving and it imparted something that I could use to minister to others. For example, I saw a video where Pete Cabrera Jr. asked an angel to give someone a hug and they encountered an angel hugging them. I went out and tried it and a girl broke down in tears because she encountered a hug from and angel and was overwhelmed with the presence of God. I believe that in these visual testimonies of Jesus, there is a grace released for you to do the same.

                The reason why I make these videos is because I want people to encounter God and be empowered to go and do the same. One night I was praying and the Holy Spirit said to me, “I’m not camera shy, I just don’t want it to be just about the camera.” The videos are not so you can say, “Wow, look at Josh!” But that you can see how active God is and have a grid for how He wants to use you. They also dramatically increase our expectation for God to move.

                God is using videos in a very powerful way, and I’m excited to see that the internet is getting flooded with videos of people getting touched by Jesus. There is also a rise of movies displaying God’s supernatural power such as Holy Ghost, Paid in Full, and Sons of God to name a few. I believe that this trend is helping bring the Church get back to normal Christianity in the power of the Holy Spirit as well as a powerful tool to show who Jesus is to the world.

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