IF THE BLOOD IS BLACK YOU WILL DIE …

How hard it is to receive or give a rebuke.

Today in our Gathering we were discussing Paul’s instructions to Titus, who had been sent to Crete to bring correction and lay a foundation of Christ in the lives of the believers. As part of his instructions Titus is instructed to “encourage and rebuke with all authority” (Titus 2:15). Encourage and rebuke. Fifty fifty! It seems that although “the grace of God … has appeared …teaching us to say NO! to ungodliness …” (Titus 2:11), our old ways do not always simply lie down and die without a rebuke. Encouragement is not enough.

Encouragement I’m good at, both giving and receiving. But not rebuke. And neither are many to whom I’ve had to bring a rebuke. Despite the Bible telling us that “faithful are the wounds of a friend”, we take offence and more often than not skulk off to lick our wounds in self-righteous indignation and denial.

Which brings me to the purpose of this blog, a dream that my son-in-law Dennis had. Dennis is quite a dreamer. Not the daytime ones (although he does go fishing alot). No. Early in his walk Dennis realised that God often speaks in dreams and will give the wisdom and skill to interpret our dreams if we seek him. Many a time have we been blessed or warned by the Lord through this very Biblical means of grace. And the following dream is an example.

The dream was of a medieval battle and in the dream Dennis and I are engaged in a sword fight in which I slash his throat. Immediately I show him the blade of my sword on which are written the words, “If the blood is red you will live; if the blood is black you will die!”  Dennis grasps his throat - and the blood is red, at which point he then joins me in the battle.

I then turn to another brother in the church and engage him in battle with the same result. I slash his throat, show him the blade of my sword, which again reads, “If the blood is red you will live; if the blood is black you will die!”  He also clutches his throat but finds that the blood is black! However, he then steps back and in doing so comes into the rays of the sun coming through the mist which shows the blood to be red! Hallelujah, he lives!

The interpretation? Well it is simply this. All fathers, leaders, mentors wound. Sometimes, like the wound of a surgeon dealing with a cancer, the wound is good and life-giving, though painful. Sometimes however the wound is simply because the father/leader is human. Often though, it is without malice or intent. In whatever way the wound comes though, it is the light that we put on it that determines whether it will kill or bring life. Whether it will damage us (and the relationship) or result in wholeness and freedom. And bring us on board as part of a team.

The choice is ours. We can reject the rebuke and remain imature, selfwilled and stunted, battling alone in the shadows and never coming into the fulness of God’s intentions. Or we can value rebuke as we value encouragement, bringing even misguided rebuke into the light of the Holy Spirit and growing in the process.

Lord, help us to value the wounds of a friend.

PALMFEST 2008

Some images from Palmfest ‘o8 - The Yeppoon Palm Sunday Festival. It turned out to be a great day with around 600 people turning out for some great talent and a chance for the church community on the Coast to Celebrate Jesus together. Bigger and better next year.

Kenneth Hagin’s Forgotten Warning

This article by J. Lee Grady of Charisma Magazine will no doubt be doing the rounds but it is worth reprinting in a day when there is a lot of unquestioned practises around, especially to do with giving.
 
Before he died in 2003, the revered father of the Word-Faith movement corrected his spiritual sons for going to extremes with their message of prosperity.
 
Charismatic Bible teacher Kenneth Hagin Sr. is considered the father of the so-called prosperity gospel. The folksy, self-trained “Dad Hagin” started a grass-roots movement in Oklahoma that produced a Bible college and a crop of famous preachers including Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Savelle, Charles Capps, Jesse DuPlantis, Creflo Dollar and dozens of others—all of whom teach that Christians who give generously should expect financial rewards on this side of heaven.
 
Hagin taught that God was not glorified by poverty and that preachers do not have to be poor. But before he died in 2003 and left his Rhema Bible Training Center in the hands of his son, Kenneth Hagin Jr., he summoned many of his colleagues to Tulsa to rebuke them for distorting his message. He was not happy that some of his followers were manipulating the Bible to support what he viewed as greed and selfish indulgence. Those who were close to Hagin Sr. say he was passionate about correcting these abuses before he died. In fact, he wrote a brutally honest book to address his concerns. The Midas Touch was published in 2000, a year after the infamous Tulsa meeting. 
 
Many Word-Faith ministers ignored the book. But in light of the recent controversy over prosperity doctrines, it might be a good idea to dust it off and read it again.
 
Here are a few of the points Hagin made in The Midas Touch:
 
1. Financial prosperity is not a sign of God’s blessing. Hagin wrote:
“If wealth alone were a sign of spirituality, then drug traffickers and crime bosses would be spiritual giants. Material wealth can be connected to the blessings of God or it can be totally disconnected from the blessings of God.”
 
2. People should never give in order to get. Hagin was critical of those who “try to make the offering plate some kind of heavenly vending machine.” He denounced those who link giving to getting, especially those who give cars to get new cars or who give suits to get new suits. He wrote: “There is no spiritual formula to sow a Ford and reap a Mercedes.”
 
3. It is not biblical to “name your seed” in an offering. Hagin was horrified by this practice, which was popularized in faith conferences during the 1980s. Faith preachers sometimes tell donors that when they give in an offering they should claim a specific benefit to get a blessing in return. Hagin rejected this idea and said that focusing on what you are going to receive “corrupts the very attitude of our giving nature.”
 
4. The “hundredfold return” is not a biblical concept. Hagin did the math and figured out that if this bizarre notion were true, “we would have Christians walking around with not billions or trillions of dollars, but quadrillions of dollars!” He rejected the popular teaching that a believer should claim a specific monetary payback rate.
 
5. Preachers who claim to have a “debt-breaking” anointing should not be trusted. Hagin was perplexed by ministers who promise “supernatural debt cancellation” to those who give in certain offerings. He wrote in The Midas Touch: “There is not one bit of Scripture I know about that validates such a practice. I’m afraid it is simply a scheme to raise money for the preacher, and ultimately it can turn out to be dangerous and destructive for all involved.”
 
(Many evangelists who appear on Christian television today use this bogus claim. Usually they insist that the miraculous debt cancellation will occur only if a person “gives right now,” as if the anointing for this miracle suddenly evaporates after the prime time viewing hour. This manipulative claim is more akin to witchcraft than Christian belief.)
 
Hagin condemned other hairbrained gimmicks designed to trick audiences into emptying their wallets. He was especially incensed when a preacher told his radio listeners that he would take their prayer requests to Jesus’ empty tomb in Jerusalem and pray over them there—if donors included a special love gift. “What that radio preacher really wanted was more people to send in offerings,”
Hagin wrote.
 
Thanks to the recent resurgence in bizarre donation schemes promoted by American charismatics, the prosperity gospel is back under the nation’s microscope. It’s time to revisit Hagin’s concerns and find a biblical balance.
 
Hagin told his followers: “Overemphasizing or adding to what the Bible actually teaches invariably does more harm than good.” If the man who pioneered the modern concept of biblical prosperity blew the whistle on his own movement, wouldn’t it make sense for us to listen to his admonition?________________________________________________________

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma Magazine.

The Midas Touch is available from Kenneth Hagin Ministries at-  www.rhema.org

SOURCE:  http://www.charismamag.com/fireinmybones/ 

IN DEFENCE OF APOSTLES AND PROPHETS

This is a comment that I made the other day on the Simple Church Journal, a useful site that I came across recently. It was in support of an excellent piece by  John Marcus in defense of the need to honour and restore the vital ministries of the apostle and prophet in the house church/simple church scene, where there sometimes seems to be a fear of any kind of leadership other than the leadership of the Holy Spirit. 

While I so agree that we must get away from the adulation of men, the “I am of Paul…Cephas…Apollos” syndrome that Paul corrected the Corinthians on, we also must avoid the “I am of Christ” group that he also rebuked. It sounds very spiritual to take that position but I’m not sure that Jesus gave us such a purist option.

After all “It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers.” (Eph 4:11) Paul’s great balancing revelation however is that Christ gave these ministries, not to gather people unto themselves but “to prepare God’s PEOPLE for works of service”, to release that great ‘people movement’  that was birthed by the Spirit to go and fullfill their true calling. But I contend that it is not going to happen just by us sitting in in our living rooms and ‘allowing the Holy Spirit to lead rather than men’, as if the Spirit is restricted and cannot lead through men.

Truth is there has never been a move of God where there was not key men or women in some leading role, whether it be a Moses, a Wesley, a Zinzendorf, an Edwards or whoever. These leaders, although they were rarely acknowledged as such, were actually apostles and prophets, men who carried a bigger picture than just the local fellowship. This is their foundation laying function; to establish Christ, not just in the individual lives of gathered believers house to house, but as the Head of God’s Government over the nations, person by person, street by street, city by city.

It concerns me for instance when I hear homechurches refer to themselves as local churches when Paul, with the bigger picture, seemed to see all the saints in a local area as the local church, encompassing a variety of ways of meeting but with an eldership over the whole town that carried a much bigger vision than the smaller ‘house to house’ gatherings, vital as they were. I believe that that is God’s bigger intention and that only the restoration of true servant apostles and prophets can take us into that fuller expression of Christ.

I’m passionate about home church/simple church but I tend to believe that until we welcome the restoration of apostles and prophets among us we will finish up where we’ve come from, “of Paul… of Apollos… of Cephas” with an elitist and marginialised group maintaining that they are “of Christ”.

WILLOW CREEK MOVES FROM PROGRAMS TO PRACTISES

I picked the following off Kerry Denten’s site The Wind Farm where it is actually a reprint of a post written by Peter Matthews, the Vicar of St Patrick’s Anglican Church in Lexington, Kentucky, better known as “Guitar Priest“.

Willow Creek Moves from Programs to Practices

Something has happened at Willow Creek Community Church that will shake the Church world. Willow Creek has discovered after 3 years of research that programs do not develop fully devoted disciples of Jesus Christ.Please Note — I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!!Here is what they say:…increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities [church programs] does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.

Chuck Warnock at Confessions of a Small Church Pastor writes:

Here’s the backstory: Greg Hawkins, exec pastor at Willow Creek, surveyed Willow Creek members to determine the effectiveness of WC’s programs — small groups, worship, service groups, etc. Participants had four choices to describe their spiritual lives:

Exploring — not yet Christians, but interested.
Growing — new Christians and growing in faith.
Close to Christ.
Centered in Christ.

The survey results produced what Bill Hybels calls “the wake up call of my adult life” –
Survey Says: After a person left Stages 1 & 2, church programs did not help them love God or love people more. And, to make matters worse, people in Stages 3 & 4 said they wanted to “be fed.” Some even left Willow Creek altogether.

Conclusion: Church programs are helpful initially for new and growing Christians, but as people mature in their faith church programs are inadequate and ineffective. (Watch the videos and look at Willow Creek’s new REVEAL website for their next move.)

Watch the entire 13-minute segment with Greg Hawkins here, and Bill Hybels comments here

You have got to watch these videos.

BTW — the key thing Willow Creek is implementing is personal spiritual plans that help each person identify a set of practices that move them forward in their spiritual lives. Hmm…

Again — I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!!

 A Final Note from Kerry:
This is truly one of the single most encouraging stories I have read in the last five years of my journey. Upon watching the full 13 minute version of Greg Hawkins’ presentation, I was moved to tears to think that the very things I have seen in the Spirit and have been believing for God to change in the contemporary church, are finally happening .. and on such a grand scale. Pray for Willow Creek! They’ll need all the help and protection they can get to make this transition complete and intact.

MY ‘HOPES’ FOR 2008

I was asked by Bessie Pereira of OIKOS  magazine to write a few lines on what are my ‘hopes’ for 2008 and found the question to be fairly focussing. In previous years I probably would have gone for ‘fruitfulness’, however our journey into simple church has changed my priorities somewhat. In the end I think my primary ‘hope’ for the coming days is simply that we will experience more of the presence of Christ among us.  

I have been challenged by David Orten’s insight into the difference between the ‘GOAL’ and the ‘PRIZE’ (Snakes in the Temple) and the need to not confuse the two in our longing for fruitfulness. Fruitfulness, revival, community, healing power etc (all the things I hope for) are prizes that come to us as we keep our eye on the goal, which is intimacy with Christ. I now am starting to realise our strivings after tangible, quantifiable (and braggable) results are best channeled into a striving after rest, quietness, less activity and more listening, a Mary priority rather than a Martha one. Fruitfulness is God’s business. Abiding in Christ is ours. 

May the Lord of the Harvest bless us all this year as we labour to know Him, whom to know is life and peace. And fruitfulness, revival, community, healing etc ……

CHRISTMAS WITH ATTITUDE!

We’d just finished watching a musical rendition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol during which Gideon (a thoughtful 5 year old grandson) solemnly explained that “all this will happen to Scrooge if he doesn’t change his attitude”. I’d never heard him use the word ‘attitude’ before and it was both amusing and encouraging to hear him say it. After all ‘attitude’ is bigger than just a word. It defines a person (as Dickens’ tale so aptly portrays) and has a huge affect on their life and circumstances.

Paul says, “Let this attitude be in you that was also in Christ Jesus …” I imagine Jesus to be a person who loved festivals and occasions. No “Bah, humbug” would have come from him. So, instead of spending my time criticising the way Christmas is handled by the shops and the TV I’m going to make it my own and celebrate Christmas with ‘attitude’ – the right kind. Have a happy one and may we all walk in God’s favour and rich blessing in the coming year.