So next... the experience thing. Sorry if you're reading from the top down, I'm writing a few posts today. I think that makes them the wrong way around.

A year ago I was a different person. I remember going to Christian events where people laughed or fell over or cried or shouted in the Spirit and I found it really hard to deal with. I had no idea what it was, and why I didn't have it. I knew that I was filled with the Spirit, and I spoke in tongues which is a Spiritual language God gives us to help us engage with Him in a deeper level. A bit wierd but I could cope with that. I have always read my Bible pretty religiously, well since I was 16, not that I gain loads from it every day, but I feel like a better person as I have read, I've blogged about this before. Anyway, I've not been 100% about all this Spirit stuff.

I used to think that if God wanted to move in this way in me, then He'd have to do it against my will, i.e. I actively didn't fall or laugh or whatever just so that He'd be really proving Himself if it happened to me. I didn't want to miss out on it if it was something good that others have, but I am not the kind of person to fake it to fit in. It was hard times. I used to argue that we shouldn't base things on experience, as we're just emotional people and emotions can't be trusted.

WOW.

So I don't know when, but at some point in the last 6 months ish I changed my heart. I heard teaching by Rhys Scott on the Holy Spirit, and how much like a father can say that he loves his son but the son doesn't know it until he experiences the embrace, so also it is with the Holy Spirit. The bible teaches, we know that God loves us, but it is through the Holy Spirit that we can gain the experiences that demonstrate this love to us.

So I stopped actively not responding to God. Instead I just drew near to Him, not seeking the experiences for experiences sake, but seeking from my heart to truely understand and be overwhelmed by His Spirit. and this is the journey that I now find myself on. It is so much more fun! The Bible, exposed by the Holy Spirit, teaches that we should be drunk on the Holy Spirit. It was through the power of this that Peter preached on the day of pentecost, and I want to do mighty things too so I need this power!

I have stopped taking myself, and my religiousness, so seriously. I refuse to be legalistic about my aproach to God, what is friendship when you only spend time together because you feel you should - and therefore do it begrudgingly, quickly and rarely! No, I have a Saviour who made a way for me to enter in to His Glory! And I will do so every day for the rest of my life! And as I draw near, forgetting myself and my inhibitions as blogged below, I let Him minister to me in what way He would like. Sometimes circumstances just become funny from this point of view, the heavenly perspective makes me realise how rediculous I am, and I find myself stumbling around and laughing. Sometimes His power seems to surge through me. I don't get it, it doesn't fit a pattern that I'd like to write, but it is SO GOOD! And my understanding of God grows each time I encounter Him and His Spirit, my joy in relationship grows, my desires come in line with my Fathers desires.

Please, I beg you, don't take yourself so seriously that you miss out on the experience of the Holy Spirit in it's fullness. Read your bible, desire to know truth, and dwell with God the Spirit.

What a couple of weeks!

i HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO START!

Firstly, I shall learn how not to delete whole posts that I write before I've posted them! But now... what a couple of weeks! I may have to do several posts so as not to overwhelm.

I know where to start. A few months back I was supposed to be going for a night out at ministry of sound London, although it never happened. I was pretty gutted, I love clubbing. I remember when I was about 16 I went to a gig back home, and it was one of them where some people there know the music and just start throwing themselves around, arms flailing everywhere, eyes shut, lost in the moment... and I always envied something about that ability to get completely lost in their bodies, caught up in the music...

Since then I've had this fascination with the times when you're in a club and the music is so loud it shakes your whole body, and you're so rammed in you can barely breathe or move, and the lights are flashing so you don't know quite what is around you, and it's so easy just to get caught up in it... i LOVE it! And God spoke to me around the non-ministry-of-sound-attending day that He wants me to seek to get completely lost in my worship in the same way as this. Not just in an internal way, but externally, to lose all inhibitions about who is around me, and to dance and sing in a way like those people at the gig when I was 16.

Anyway. I shall have to write another blog about the experience thing. In the mean time, for the first time, at the Heaven Touches Earth conference in June at the worship time at the end I found myself in the edge of this place. I have never danced like that. I'm sure it wasn't much to look at, but it was joy bubbling and overflowing, presence of the Glory of God and His Spirit moving me... It was everything that I had hoped it would be. Anyway, these moments have increased in my life, and I AM LOVING IT! seek it! On you're own, at church when no one bares tap their big toe, give yourself over to the love of the Lord your God. He is worth every ounce of our energy! Whoop! Watch this space to see me doing this, I hope to not be held back by Britishness forever!

Prayer...

Sooo... I have just listened to the following sermon: http://vimeo.com/5294550 as Simon Holley had something about it on his facebook and I remembered and saved it for a day off! And WOW would truely recommend it! The things that mainly stuck out to me were:

-Prayer is built on what God has promised to do

-Prayer is the vital pre-requisit for the release of God's power

-We are invited to pray, God has chosen us to ask Him for things... we should be asking in order to get!

We need to get specific in our prayers. We must take hold of things that God has promised to us and ask until we get, with conviction that He will give!

I'm reminded of a recent story, when I was at a conference I bumped into a couple I met at the Rendezvous conference in France last year, and I asked if I would be seeing them again this year.. unfortunately they had not been able to commit as they were unsure of the future of the husbands job. I was convinced that we needed to pray for this, and was certain that it would be fine. So we got around and prayed, and I have since heard that first God provided a way for them to go to the conference anyway, and then he heard that his job was safe. How exciting! I had prayed quite a lot, and of course was glad to hear the news, but it many ways I was confident of this before I even heard from them. I long that this be my experience with prayer more often!

A quote from my book Great Revivals by Colin Whittaker 'Billy Braithwaite... prayed, "Lord, give me souls or I shall die". A farmer who overheard Billy's raised voice left his ploughing to discover who was quarrelling behind the hedge, but found only one man with the tears running down his cheeks. It filled him with wonder and it still rings down the years as a challenge to us all.'

Wow.

My favourite verse.... for now.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I wil say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4v4-7.

Also: 'Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.' Psalm 37v4...

So aware of my constant pride covering self-pity or otherwise self-pity covering pride... I wish I could get it to be in the middle with being happy about myself though not proud. Satisfaction in my relationship with God always brings the greatest fruit, focus and joy! I get so distracted by what God has given me, or what He hasn't, before realising that it's all meaningless anyway. Not to say life is meaningless, just that without God it pretty much seems to be.

Jesus or 'magic'?

Been reading 'Surprised by the Power of the Spirit' on my breaks at work lately, and this quote has to be shared...

We have been saved that we might passionately love a Person. We have been redeemed to serve a Person, not a set of principles. We are called first to please a real Person, not perform a ministry. It's so easy to fall in love with principles and ministry, and fall out of love with a Person.
Here's where the magic comes in. When we fall out of love with God but continue to use the principles of the Bible in order to make our lives successful, we have entered the realm of magic. When we read the Bible morning after morning but don't allow God to search our hearts with his Word, we are practicing magic. It's so easy to fall into the habit of reading the Bible in the morning to get our "God stuff" out of the way, so we can get on with our real lives. At times, I have read the Bible in the morning with absolutely no ense of God's presence, totally bored with the whole experience, my eye on the clock waiting for my scheduled time to lapse, and then actually felt good when I was finished. I don't mean that I felt a sense of relif that the boredom was over--I felt satisfied with myself, with my discipline and perseverance, and I felt God was satisfied with me too. I thought my day would be better because I had read the Bible. That kind of experience is closer to ritualism and religious magic than to New Testament Christianity.

pg 291, Jack Deere, Surprised by the Voice of God.

Hmm, I am worried about where I am on this journey, and concious that it is probably closer to the previous Jack experience of 'ritualism' than the new revelation. A set of prinicples or a relationship. I know which one I'd rather have, I just hope I can learn to remember that each day.

Grace and Faith

Julian Adams said at the conference this weekend that there is a link between a growing understanding of grace and the faith that we have to see God move today. It's the first time I've ever thought about it, but I think that is so true. It was at a conference called Rendezvous in France last summer that I felt like I really got my hands around grace, and what it means for me, and that it is by nothing that I have done but all by what Jesus achieved on the cross... (aside, I love how we always have more to learn about God! We think we've got it and then BAM a whole new revelation)... it really transformed my whole thinking since last summer.

Oddly coincidental, that same conference was where for the first time I thought I'd go for healing prayer for my lower back pain, which had been crippling on occasions for the previous 2 years. I think it was postural, I'm not sure, but by the end of a day sitting down I had to lie on the floor just to straighten it out. I had gone to the physiotherapist and they had given me exercises but these didn't seem effective in the long term...

So when Terry Virgo offered to pray for lower back pain for anyone present I decided, having seen several friends healed of this problem, that this would be my turn. After waiting a while and seeing many french people healed, Julian came to pray with me and held my legs out. My right one was shorter than my left. We started praying, and I felt a change on the left side of my lower back like muscles were adjusting, and felt the legs align together to be the same length. Praise God I was healed. Since this time I have never suffered from regular back pain...

So this weekend, when hearing about the link between understanding grace and raising faith I decided this has proved true so far in my life. I want to keep reminding myself afresh of the grace of God and what it has achieved in my life, and know that the same power that raised Christ from the grave is available for us today when we seek Him for healing. This was demonstrated by some fantastic healings at the conference this weekend, but I intend to get some more recent stories for this blog as the weeks go by... watch this space!!

Good times

It's been a great month. I went to spain with my girls that was pretty amazing. I've worked an awful lot, and then I went to a caravan with people from my small group. Monday morning I was in a horrenous mood, I felt a little like giving up, not because life isn't amazing but because sometimes I wish I could be in heaven where health is certain, happiness normal, relationship tension impossible, and God abundant. Maybe it's only me, but I get really fed up with how this all isn't the case on earth!

Anyhoodle, as ever, prayer answers all so a good sesh with a friend and then a good sesh on my own seemed to adjust perspectives so that I am reminded of my purposes in this place at this time, even if simply to become more intimate with Him. It's not good just to let seasons pass us by as we wish on the new ones, yet we so often do it.

And now I'm attending the Heaven Touches Earth conference and am reminded of God's promise in Philippians 1v6 'And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.' I have so many dreams of ways that God would use me, to see more people healed, to bring joy where there is brokeness, hope where it was lost... and sometimes, ironically, I lose hope that any of this will ever come to pass. BUT GOD has promised to keep on working on my imperfect self until the day of Jesus Christ. Praise God!

I have also seem tremendous freedom where there was previously unbelief. Did you know that God longs for us to have JOY in His presence. Well, you probably did, but I fail to live it, or I used to.

A man with a nose bone problem that meant he couldn't breathe through it since birth got healed today, and a breast lump disappeared, amongst many other things that my silly mind has forgotten. What a good God.

This certainly isn't a boring lifestyle that I have chosen! There is so so soooo much more to come! MORE LORD!!!