Tag Archives: Kingdom of God

Telecommuting, Flight Plans and the Kingdom of God

Saturday was the first day of my telecommuting career. Yelp I am now working Tuesday through Saturday with Sunday and Monday off.

It was a bit strange at first working from home. But I liked it.

Telecommuting is peaceful, more productive (in some cases), saves money, and where else can you work in your undies? Tongue out

There are lots of things you have to get in place to be able to successful work from home, but it doesn’t take too much setting up.

Obviously, you need somewhere to work from, so a desk or table is essential as working with a laptop on your lap just isn’t sustainable for every day. You’ll also want to make sure that you have other essential office equipment at home, such as a good filing cabinet like the ones found at Office Monster, as this will help you when it comes to your working day.

Also, you still need to be able to collaborate with colleagues and access shared documents as you would if you were still in the office, but using something like Sharepoint makes this possible. If you aren’t familiar with Sharepoint, it might be worth seeking some Sharepoint consulting services – click here to continue to a website which could help.

But that’s about it. It takes some getting used to, but I personally think the pros far outweigh the cons.


They let me speak on Sunday.

Yelp it was quite amazing. No tomatoes, boos or otherwise un-ethical behavior. What did happen was the Spirit of the Lord descended upon the Church service that evening in an amazing way. It was… how do you say, beautiful? [@more@]

There were not fallen bodies or people jumping up and down it was a sweet, sweet spirit that descended at the end of the service that just touched hearts. It was fun standing up front watching people react some with crying, some with stone faces, still others with a sweet smile upon their face.

Ah. God is good.

Oh I must mention that Sunday was also the first time the Pastor and I team taught. As in, he started the service off with a 10 minute intro and then passed it of to me to flesh out the details. This allows us both to play to our strengths me with the historical background, and him with the personal impact and call to action. We are going to try it a few more times and see how it works. Undecided


Flight plans are tough to make.

Too many choices. However, I may have found the perfect flight or flights. =)

I am going to Colorado Springs in two weeks for the Vineyard National Missions Meeting on behalf of the Paraguay Partnership. Lord willing I will met some folks who want to join with us on supporting the work of the Kingdom in this country.

The Kingdom of God

In a previous post I mentioned that God has been taking me on a journey concerning the Kingdom of God. While I’m not quite ready to write down everything I’m learning (ie. I’m still sorting things out), I did want to highlight an amazing five part lecture series by Derek Morphew about the Kingdom of God

  1. The Prophetic Promise of the Kingdom (Part 1 & 2 combined)
  2. New Testament Coming of the Kingdom
  3. Sons of The Kingdom
  4. Bringing in The Kingdom

Morphew, as you may remember, is the author of the book Breakthrough as well as a theologian and director of the Vineyard Bible Institute in South Africa. In these lectures, he lays out the basics for Kingdom Theology in a very simple but in depth way.

I STRONGY recommend all five of these lectures
– you can download them now and listen to them later if you want. In fact, you can also download the Morphew’s Power Point presentation for each of the lectures.

John Wimber: Kingdom of God

As some of you know, I have been involved in a personal in-depth study into of the Kingdom of God and what that really means. God has been radically changing the way I look at the Bible, life and this world. I’ve been given a new pair of glasses.

The deeper I get into the study of the Kingdom of God, the more the name of John Wimber keeps popping up. To be sure, I’ve heard of John Wimber before – after all he was the founder of the Vineyard Movement, which I’m a part of – but it was usually connected to a quote or phrase such as “the meats in the street” or “doin’ the stuff”.

In an effort to learn more about the Kingdom of God and John Wimber I picked up a book of Wimber’s teachings as well as a seven part CD series by Wimber about the Kingdom of God. Both of these items are amazing – yet that’s not why I’m writing today.

I was browsing online this week trying to locate some additional material about the Kingdom of God from different sources. During this hunt, I discovered two sites that had personal testimonies about the writer’s first meeting with John Wimber. The fact that these testimonies were online wasn’t that odd as both sites where affiliated with the Vineyard in some way. The thing that struck me was WHAT Wimber was doing when they meet him.[@more@]

Let me show you.

The first article I found was on the South Africa Association of Vineyard Churches (AVC) website. It is an excerpt from the book, “Doing Church”, written by Alexander Venter (Area Pastoral Coordinator for the South Africa AVC). This is how he meets Wimber:

I will never forget the first meeting I was in with John Wimber. It was the first morning of the Pastor’s Conference in Johannesburg. When it was time to begin, John strolled up to the piano, sat down, and gently began to play and sing ‘J-e-es-u-s what a wonder you are, you are so gentle, so pure and so kind …’ Slowly we all joined in, but I quickly found myself overcome by the simplicity of the words, the warmth, gentleness and intimacy of the experience, and I began to feel all tender and tearful….Then John stood up and casually opened his Bible and began to talk to the pastors about the Kingdom of God. Again, there was no preacher’s tone or loud voice, no religious jargon or sermonising; just an honesty, openness and clarity that was completely disarming.

The second testimony is vaguely similar – just on a different continent.

This article was written by Don Williams who was a Presbyterian pastor at the time. He is now a member of the Vineyard movement as a theologian, author and former-pastor. He recalls his first introduction to Wimber as such:

As I entered the parking lot of Canyon High School for the evening service, people were literally running toward the gym. Clearly they weren’t drifting in for church as usual. Once inside, I was greeted by an auditorium filled with about 2,000 people, informally dressed. I slipped into the bleachers. A group of musicians mounted the platform at one end of the basketball court and began to play simple songs….After worship, the large man at the keyboards, who I identified as John Wimber, got his Bible and began to speak. From my days in the “Jesus Movement” of the ‘60’s, I expected a pop sermon from Revelation on the end of the world. I got a thoughtful sermon on the kingdom of God, come and coming and our place in it “between the times.”

Did you catch the similarities? There were two of them. The first was the simple worship that started each meeting. The second was that John Wimber talked to each group about the Kingdom of God. It is the second similarity that really hit me…

Pause there for a minute.

A few years ago I butchered a sermon in Chile (granted I had five minutes to prepare), afterwards my mentor told me to prepare my heart message so that I would and could be ready to preach at any time. Honestly – I had a tough time coming up with such a message – in fact, I couldn’t... I mean, most of my heart was caught up with the “missions bug” and the missional heart of God – yet somehow that didn’t seem right….

Enter the Kingdom of God.

This was THE central message of Jesus Christ as well as John the Baptist, the Apostles, Isaiah, Moses, Paul and a pretty much everyone else (granted they all didn’t use those words). Now I find that it was also the central message of John Wimber – a man whom God used to change the course of the church. I say that not just because I’m a member of the Vineyard Movement – but because the influence of John Wimber transcended denominations.

What does this have to do with me?
I’m not sure right now. But God is taking me on an incredible journey into His word. I’m just hanging on and yelling like a mad man on a roller coaster.

Come Lord, Come.

The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity: A Book Review

This was an interesting book – to say the least. There was some great information in the first half where Albert Schweitzer focused on the Old Testament prophets. When he started focusing on the New Testament and Primitive Christianity (read early first century), he started getting off on a the whole critical search for a historical Jesus deal. The deal being that the Jesus of the Gospels is not the “real” Jesus, but a mixture of “real” information and “added” information. Schweitzer really liked Mark and Matthew – as they are the two oldest Gospel accounts – and, as such, focused his writings around those two books.

Summary:

It’s a good read – however, I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. As I mentioned above, Schweitzer gets pretty critical when dealing with the New Testament – especial the Gospels. The problem being that you really can’t throw out parts of the Bible as “false” just because you don’t like it or think that it’s not true. The Gospels, for the most part, when eye witness accounts. The writers wrote what they saw – who are we, two thousand years later, to say that they did not see what they said they saw?

Schweitzer falls prey to the modern logical mind of discounting anything supernatural… we must remember that God is not to be contained within our little box. He is much bigger – and we will never, ever fully understand Him on this side of the mirror. One day perhaps, but for now, we must learn to live with the mystery. [@more@]

Like:

Schweitzer does a great job at explaining the Kingdom of God in the Old Testament – especial in the pre-exilic prophets (Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah). As the book progresses through the prophets, Schweitzer brings in some of the beliefs and thoughts of the Iranian Religion around 650 to 600 BC. The main focus being on Zarathustra and on how his views on the Kingdom of God influenced the Jewish people.

At first, I was quite put off on the fact that Schweitzer was suggesting that Biblical prophets where influenced by non-Biblical religions and leaders. Then I stopped myself – is God limited to only what is recorded in the Bible? No. He is bigger then the Bible – most likely He was working in and through Zarathustra to show the world His glory.

Schweitzer also made me question the dating of the book of Daniel. While I’ve been through Bible school, I didn’t remember that the date that Daniel was written was questioned… but it is. The two main schools of thought place the Book of Daniel either during the time of Nebuchadnezzar (ie. 605 BC – 562 BC) or some time after Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the altar (176 BC).

Of course, if it was written in the second century BC, that means that Daniel didn’t write it. The later date would also cause the “prophecies” contained therein to be commentary instead of future visions. After thinking and praying about, I decided it really didn’t matter. The book still tells us about the Lord and His working in the world through different means. The Kingdom of Heaven still wins – either way.

I also enjoyed the way Schweitzer brought some of the writings of late Judaism – mainly Enoch and the Apocalypses of Ezra and Baruch. For years I have been meaning to read the Apocryphal – now I have a greater desire to do so. (G – I borrowed your old Oxford Bible with the Apocryphal….)

Dislike:

Schweitzer denies the physical resurrection of Jesus – claiming instead that what the apostle’s saw was only a vision. He disregards the Biblical passages of Jesus eating and drinking with the apostles and disciples saying that they were added later to help ‘prove’ the myth of Jesus’ physical resurrection.

In addition, Schweitzer also places an almost unhealthy stress on the humanness of Jesus. Part of this was a reaction to the times when he lived as most theologians in the late 1800 to early 1900’s focused on the divine part of Jesus. This stress comes to light in Schweitzer’s comments about how Jesus did not knew who he was – but instead considered himself nothing more then an man who was following God. This view leaves out the claims of Jesus to BE God – of course, Schweitzer would say that those passages where added later. You can see how Schweitzer went from one extreme to the other.

God Showed Up!!

We serve an Awesome Lord!! This weekend I had the pleasure to co-teach a prayer / ministry seminary designed to help folks live the Holy Spirit filled life Jesus promised us that we could live.

Co-teaching this class was quite a stretch for me – I mean, I know the information, but to teach it… that’s a different level… But it was good. No one threw any tomatoes, the pastor who was mentoring me on the class didn’t banish me as a heretic, and folks where still talking to me afterwards… By all counts – it was a good class. =)

grin * With that said, it did start a little rocky… The class was to start at 7 pm Friday evening – at 6:45, I received a call from the pastor informing me that he was suck at a middle school track meet (he’s a coach during the “day”) and would not be able to attend that night. Luckily, we had already planned for me to teach the first part of the seminary… however, I must admit that I was a pretty nervous starting everything off by myself… =/

That first evening, I gave my testimony as it pertained to walking in the Kingdom. Then I dived into an overview of the Kingdom of God: What is it? How does it apply to us?  The elements of Jesus’ ministry. The ministry style of Jesus. Being naturally supernatural.

The Set-Up:

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus only commanded us to do seven (7) things. Sounds simple enough…

  • Love God with all our being
  • Love one another
  • Heal the sick
  • Cleanse the lepers
  • Cast out demons
  • Raise the dead
  • Preach the good news

[@more@]At the end of the evening we practiced “doing the stuff” as Wimber used to say. Walking timidly, we asked the Spirit to come – and boy did He! God showed us some hurts and pains that people needed healed…

The next morning, we all gathered again (about 12 of us – including the pastor) for the next part of the class. To keep this post from getting too long, I will simply state that over the course of the next nine hours we covered the following topics:

  • The mind of Christ – an altered worldview
  • The gifts of the Holy Spirit
  • Common errors
  • Interpretive keys
  • Defining the gifts
  • The Gifts in action (Biblically and practically)
  • Emotional Healing
  • Divine Appointments
  • Power Encounters

The best part(s) of the whole weekend was Friday and Saturday evenings when we put into practice what we learned. We invited the Spirit to come and show us what He wanted to do. He gave us some direction – so pastor started praying for an attendee while I described what was happening as the pastor went through the Five Step Prayer Model.

Afterwards, we turned all the attendees lose to pray for one another.

This was the best part – equipping and teaching normal, everyday people that they can go out and do the same things Jesus did. The ministry is not reserved for those ‘spiritual’ people on TV or in big ministries. The work of the Kingdom is for everyone – no matter where you live or how old you are!

Five Step Prayer Model
  1. The Interview
    • The hear form the person being prayed for
    • Listen with love and compassion
  2. The Diagnostic Decision
    • What is God doing?
    • How does He want you to pray?
  3. The Prayer Selection
    • Physical
    • Emotional
    • Spiritual
  4. The Ministry Time
    • Do what the Father is doing at that time
    • Keep one ear tuned to 77.7 K-GOD
  5. The Post-Prayer Directions
    • Not counseling, just general counsel – Scripture reading, come back for more prayer if needed, ect

As I end this post, I want to say that God showed up in amazing ways this weekend. Tears and snot where flowing as the Lord worked on emotions, hearts and spirits. I will not mention specifics as they belong to the people whom God worked with and are not for me to tell, but I will say that there are some restored folks walking around – physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? -Jesus