NCMI SA Equip (part two)

3 things to bring you up to speed about night one...

1.       It was FULL

-upstairs, downstairs, the side hall, the mom’s rooms and even the floor space at the back was filled with lines and lines of people crowding into Cornerstone Church. And this was only just  Wednesday night!

2.       It was LOUD

-it’s always a great indicator of the temperature of hearts when the band are being drowned out by the passionate voices of the rest of the worshippers. Fresh new original songs were picked up on quickly and belted out with gusto while old favourites stirred hearts once again. The floor and roof was rattling and our souls rejoiced.

 

3.       It was UNIFIED

-agendas, histories, regions, individual church issues were left at the door as from the get go we set our eyes corporately on the object and the subject of our worship, Jesus.

 

“What unites us is not just our purpose, but chiefly it is our captivation with our King”

 

And if you missed last night but want to sound as if you were there, then make it a priority to throw in the phrase “it’s go time” into as many conversations as you can.

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 )

Incoming Calls

There is a certain sense of electricity in the atmosphere as God is on the move in Life Changers like never before. With strong prophetic preaching and ministry over the last month or so, there is a definite acknowledgement that God is taking our moments and stringing them together like only He can do, to put together an exciting revival type feel. But for a community to live in an ongoing and sustainable state of revival, expectation and breakthrough, individuals have to carry it first. 

Realising the season we are in, we as a church leadership have invited three apostolic and prophetic Ephesians 4 gifts to come and add perspective, impetus and guidance into the life of our church over the next few months. To whet your appetite, below is just a brief synopsis of each of these friends of ours and the dates they will be coming:

Mark and Candice Van Pletson

(13th-14th October)

-Been on the eldership team at Glenridge under both Rory Dyer and Ryan Matthews where Mark oversees the worship, the operations and does a large portion of the preaching at their two sites. He carries a strong apostolic gift and speaks into church leaderships around the country.

Ryan and Melissa Matthews

(15th-18th November)

-In 2008 this couple took over the leading of Kingsgate (then London Church International) in London, UK before returning in July 2011 to Durban to take over leadership of the Glenridge eldership team. Ryan is passionate about the presence of God and for the church to live in the full expression of the trinity

Julian Adams

(2 weekends in January 2013)

-Julian is currently based with The Kings Arms in the UK where he ministers from and into many other nations and contexts all around the world. He is recognized as a Prophet and with a strong apostolic edge as his heart is to build prophetic cultures and lifestyles and not just events. He oversees a ministry called Frequentsee. (http://frequentsee.wordpress.com/)

 

A "tear the roof off" kind of faith

 

Yesterday was a good day.

Waking up several times through the early hours of Sunday to give attention to the very loud manifestations of my illness, I eventually decided to give up on any last vestiges of sleep and begin preparing myself for a day of preaching.
 
Smart shirt- check. Hair combed- check. Bible and notes in hand- check.  

Those were the easy things. The hard part was battling bouts of extreme nausea (which necessitated in several “pitstops” along Sunningdale Drive on the way to church), a cough that could wake the dead, as well as the creeping sense of fear and unbelief that I was in no way in the right frame of mind (or health) to be preaching on “A tear the roof off kind of faith” that morning. But the longer I get to walk with God, the more I’m realising the less and less it has anything to do with me. Elementary I know, but God sometimes has to get us to our end so that we can begin to allow him to do only what he can do. Faith is learning how to live by his faithfulness.

 

Someone we can take a few pointers from is Abraham, the father of faith. Way past the age of having children, Abraham and his wife Sarah are given a promise from God that they will have a son. But just like us, the enemies of faith often are given a louder voice of prominence in our lives than the call of abandoning our own resources (or lack of resources) and fully trusting what he has said. Here are the top 3 robbers of faith that we can pick out from Abraham’s journey and take heed of in ours:

 

-Circumstances (either too good or too bad...relying on our 5 senses alone)

*Faith is not a denial of the facts, it’s the acknowledgement of THE fact! In God’s economy, faith trumps reason everytime!

Abraham was told by God to go claim the land of Canaan, but he finds it drought stricken and in famine so he runs to Egypt where to save his own skin he lies about his wife to the Pharaoh there

-Compromise

*the root of all compromise is found in an underlying disbelief that God is good

Abraham promised many children, but at age 85 Abraham stops trusting God and takes matters into his own hands and sleeps with his female servant Hagar

-Critical Spirit

*whether at God or at others, very dangerous as it’s a sin of idolatory. It’s putting my reasoning above God’s by saying, “I will be God unto myself.”

At age 99 Abraham laughs in God’s face when God confirms the original promise (Sarah pregnant at 90?)

a moment's ease at the expense of a miserable eternity!

After spending a weekend coughing and spluttering, running a high fever and becoming very familiar with how many steps it is from my bed to the bathroom (eight, if anyone else is counting), it was very tempting to become very sorry for myself, close the curtains tight and refuse to emerge till God took me home in the rapture.

But after refusing to yield to the soft option, I coughed and spluttered my way through a healthy diet of Puritan theology, large passages of Job and of course a dose of Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

To quote Esau, the biblical king of hyperbole, “I was about to die!” and so I turned to the comfort of those who have gone before (in both senses of the phrase) and find solace from the similar hardships that they had to endure.

 Here are just three examples that caught my attention:

1. Peter, a young man, (who lived in AD 249 under the reign of Decius) amiable for the superior qualities of his body and mind, was beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to Venus. He said,

"I am astonished you should sacrifice to an infamous woman, whose debaucheries even your own historians record, and whose life consisted of such actions as your laws would punish. No, I shall offer the true God the acceptable sacrifice of praises and prayers."

Optimus, the proconsul of Asia, on hearing this, ordered the prisoner to be stretched upon a wheel, by which all his bones were broken, and then he was sent to be beheaded.

2. Chrysostom, was seized upon for being a Christian. He was put into a leather bag, together with a number of serpents and scorpions, and in that condition thrown into the sea.

 

3. Denisa, a young woman of only sixteen years of age, who beheld this terrible judgment, suddenly exclaimed,

"O unhappy wretch, why would you buy a moment's ease at the expense of a miserable eternity!"

 Optimus, hearing this, called to her, and Denisa avowing herself to be a Christian, she was beheaded, by his order, soon after.

 

 

After reading these and other accounts of Hebrew 11 type heroes of the faith, even in my sickly state I felt ashamed at how quickly I can lose sight of the joy set before me. Weak and momentary afflictions when not measured against things of eternal value and pleasure can very quickly consume and devour us as we become "martyrs" at our own hand.

 

How often in the majority of christian circles, our "joy" just tracks our circumstances?

 

O God, give me eyes that see past the temporal and to our Man in glory, Jesus! Scarred but not defeated in the slightest. My home is with Him in eternity!

No room?

 

“In the middle of the square at Wittenberg stood an ancient wooden chapel, thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, whose walls, propped up on all sides, were falling into ruin. An old pulpit made of planks, and three feet high, received the preacher. It was in this wretched place that the preaching of the Reformation began. It was God’s will that that which was to restore His glory should have the humblest surroundings. It was in this wretched enclosure that God willed, so to speak, that His well-beloved Son should be born a second time. Among those thousands of cathedrals and parish churches with which the world is filled, there was not one at that time that God chose for the glorious preaching of eternal life”

-D’Aubigne

The preaching of the Reformation was begun by Martin Luther in a dilapidated building in the midst of the public square in Wittenberg in the 16th century while all other parishes and public religious figures raised their fists in angry dissension. Jesus himself was birthed in a dirty and crowded barn amongst animals, straw and slop, because all other rooms had quite literally closed their doors to his pleading mother and father.

30 years after his manger birth, Jesus went on to say to some hard of heart Pharisees in John.8:37 “you have no room for my Word.”

The flame of revival is flickering again. God is not looking for a grand building, the cleverest church strategy or even the most eloquent tongue. He’s looking for humble hearts that will hear what He is saying and who will act obediently upon it.

Reformation for the world begins with revival of the Church.

“The real thing is appearing among us. The Almighty will again measure swords with Pharaoh’s magicians. But many will reject Him and blaspheme. Many will fail to recognize Him, even among His professed followers. We have been praying and believing for a Pentecost. Will we receive it when it comes?”

-Frank Bartleman

9941 The Event Highlights

Here's some highlights of the 9941 The Event, the conference we were involved with in Harare a couple weeks back. People responded to the Gospel, the Church in the city was commissioned and we had ALOT of fun. The Gospel can not be contained!