NCMI SA Equip (Part One)

 

I remember it just as if it was yesterday.

 

 Every year the announcement would go out at church for leaders to register for “Bloem”. The fact that a city was being referred to in its shortened state as a simile for a 5 day leadership conference was not lost on anyone. As the announcements became more frequent in the lead up to the September school holidays, so too did the increasing rate of the church’s excitement. The 7 hour drive in convoy from Durban on the early Monday morning, the bets being placed on who would “open the batting” in the first session, counting down the times someone said the words “in our togetherness”, Dudley Daniel’s insistence to “avoid fame like the plague”, massive choirs, Mimosa Mall hangouts with our best mates from around the country who we saw only once a year and all the way through to the inevitable and yet heart stirring culmination with “Be thou my vision”, “Bloem” never failed to leave an impression as we all left determined to change the world.

Now years later, the journey continues after many mountain top highs and valley lows. The venue has changed, fresh voices have appeared, new songs have been written and we even have had to become used to new terminology (“Equip”). But the mission and very heart-beat of the motley group of men and women who come together in friendship and mission from all over the globe under the name of NCMI remains the same. For the King and His Kingdom, we still believe that the local church is the hope of the world, the nations are our inheritance and He will not return until every tribe, tongue and people group have heard.

 

This is what courses through our veins!

So once again we gather “in our togetherness” in the third term holidays. But this is no mere conference or inspirational get together. We gather to be scattered afresh with the Gospel at our centre and with the nations in our line of sight.

As Alan Frow year in and year out fearlessly declared all those years ago, “we will go for the sake of the cross, we will go for the sake of the lost”

(NCMI SA Equip 2012 - 3rd -5th October at Cornerstone Church in Joburg)

(Follow me on twitter for live tweets - https://twitter.com/GabePhillips23 )

FAITH THAT WORKS (part one)

Too often, our Christian lives have been defined exclusively from a perspective of what once was and what currently is in our lives. The life of faith that Christ is calling us to though is one that celebrates the past (What God has done), that steps out in the here and now (recognizing what God is doing) but also believes God for the greater things yet to come! (responding to who God is!)

Faith is less something we have to have and is more a response to the revelation of God’s character! He is faithful! We have been called to have faith in the faithful One who has rescued us from sin and death, who is loving, changing and shaping us but who is also inviting us to partner with Him in establishing what is yet to come!

 Two phrases that I believe are helpful in us coming to grips with this life of faith we are called to are below.

IT IS MORE IMPORTANT WHAT GOD HAS SAVED US INTO THAN WHAT GOD HAS SAVED US OUT OF!

-The incredible account found in Exodus of the miraculous rescue of the Israelite people out of slavery and Egypt (what with plagues, a reluctant Pharoah, the angel of death and an entire sea parting as if mere curtains being drawn back to name just a small portion of it) is only just the beginning of what God had intended for His chosen people. God rescued them OUT OF Egypt and then took them on a journey INTO the Promise Land and the very same is for us!

IT’S LESS A QUESTION OF WHAT GOD HAS SAVED ME FROM AND MORE OF WHAT GOD HAS SAVED ME FOR!

-We are not merely just sinners saved by grace but we have now been called sons and daughters! Slaves can never dream much further than the end of the day, possibly the end of the week. But it is sons and daughters who are given the privilege and provision to dream as widely and as far into the future as possible. And that is what we have been called for! Not merely just to survive the world, but to change it! The life of faith is one concerned with the unseen and not yet realities, and believing God for them.

What is your vision of your future? Is it one where you are still battling with the same old sin, the same sickness, a similar financial situation, a still unresolved relational tension, an unchanged level of influence? Faith is allowing the God of the impossible to take our pasts and our present realities, and letting Him shape them into a glorious future.

Faith is calling out to us today to say boldly and believe without fear that, “I’M JUST GETTING STARTED!”