Revival and normality

I read this comment recently about revival and the Salvation Army.

"We were born in revival but we cannot live in revival. It is not the normal state of the Church."

I agree that it is not the normal state of the church but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be should it?
Does God intend for us to swing from fervour to apostasy, from passion to lukewarmness? It may have been the pattern of history but is that because God wants it that way?

I can't believe that, when the Bible clearly says that God wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the gospel. If he has chosen the church to be his body on earth to deliver this message then why would he only pour out the fullness of his Spirit to some generations and not others, to some lands and not others, to some denominations and not others?

The only reason I can think of that the blessings of revival times are not evident all the time is because God's people have ceased to keep in step with him and have fallen into compromise and sin. If that is true then we need to confess our sin and repent.

But resisting God, allowing a coldness in our relationship with God to come in makes our hearts hard and resistant. We lay ourselves open to the deceitfulness of the evil one who convinces us that low level faith, low level commitment, and low level effectiveness is acceptable.

Yet God is so gracious. He moves by his Holy Spirit to convict and soften hearts, to open eyes and ears to stir us to life again. Sometimes he convicts us through his word, sometimes through prophetic voices, dreams and visions or whatever he chooses. There are times when our hearts are so hard that he has to withdraw his manifest presence so that we will desperately long for intimacy and power.

I believe God does everything, except take away our free will so that Christians can be an effective body of Christ on earth. 2 Peter 1:3 "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness."

It is up to us to respond in repentance and obedience
Revival is only necessary because we refuse total submission to God and fail to receive what he has provided.

God bless

Carol

Life and death decisions

Andrew Bale's prophecy that the future survival of the Salvation Army being decided in the next ten years resonates with me and as others have commented God has been saying similar things to them as well I would like to add what I believe God revealed to me along similar lines.

In February 2005 my husband, Alan and I were at a conference and after a day of teaching and interaction with other people seeking reach our communities with the gospel in the 21st Century I went back to our billet and was praying and reflecting upon all that had gone on that day. All day I had had a sense of urgency and conviction that these days are not days when we can afford to avoid issues concerning the situation the Salvation Army is in, not just for our own survival but for the sake of the lost.

As I prayed back in our room in our billet, the presence of the Holy Spirit seemed to come over me like a wave that almost took my breath away. And I don’t know how to really describe what happened next, except to say that if I hadn’t been so aware of being in someone else’s house the most natural thing for me to do would have been to cry out in the way someone would if they heard the shocking news that a loved was in a critical condition.

I was left questioning the Lord about what all this meant so I continued to pray and a picture came into my mind of conjoined twins, both alive but at a point where if either were to survive there must be a critical decision of separation. And the cry came to my mind, “Don’t let my baby die.”

It seemed to me to be a picture of the struggle between two forms of salvationism. Initially I thought that this picture was about the stuggle between the new and the old ways of doing mission in the 21st century and that one had to give way to the other or both would die. But on reflection I believe the picture is not about methods or structures. Instead it is about there being two kinds of salvationism, the carnal and the holy.

Later I learned more about conjoined twins and discovered that often the larger twin appears to be the healthiest and struggles less. However this can be because it is lazy and rather than fight for life itself, saps the life out of the smaller twin. The smaller twin has to have a passion for life to keep going. Worldly salvationism appears at the moment to be the most dominant.

If there is no separation then both babies will perish. To separate means that a choice has to be made that one of the twins will die. However the one with the greatest chance is the one who has already learned to fight for life in the womb.

All I know from all this is that the cry that came from within me, "Don't let my baby die," felt like it was the cry of the Spirit within me. I believe the Holy Spirit wants the Salvation Army child to live. But it can't live as conjoined twins, one being worldly and one living in the spirit of holiness. Unless the crucial choice is made life, expectancy is short. To submit to surgery is
risky and requires great faith, The choice is as difficult, as crucial and as painful as parents of conjoined twins having to decide to separate them. Knowing that to do nothing might destroy both and to act is to quite literally decide which shall live and which shall die.

Worldliness actually shouldn't live so why is it painful to separate from it? It is because we are often fooled because outwardly it looks attractive, strong, more successful than holiness and we don't want to really believe that we have to choose. We want both the world and holiness but that is impossible. One must die so the other might live.

God bless

Carol

How do you know?

On the back of my blog on conversion I have been asked the following question:

"I would like to know how you know if you have a real conversion."

I will make an attempt at an answer but it would be great to have others give their responses too.
Here we go:

A long time ago a very wise man called Jonathan Edwards said that the main sign of a true conversion was a change in our affections, that is a change in our desires. When we are converted God implants a new love within us for him. One of my favourite verses is Romans 5:5 "And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

We know we are converted when our reason for being is loving God with all our heart, mind and soul. I would say we know we are converted when we start with God and we live the rest of life in relation to him. Our life circles around him. He is not an add on to life but is our life.

Dr E Stanley Jones whom I quoted in my original blog wrote, "The Way (of Christ) is not negative. You are not a Christian because you don't do this that or the other. You are a Christian when life is centred in Christ and not in yourself. You are emptying your hands to grasp a whole Christ."

What religious but unconverted people often do is add God into the various aspects of their lives but actually life really circles around gratification of their needs. God is part of life because they recognise that there is a gap that needs filling. God is part of their life because there is a fear of the consequence of not acknowledging his reality. God is part of their life because they want what the church offers.

The Bible shows us that the ability to put Christ at the centre rather than our ego is the result of the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, to whom we have submitted our hearts. We are not converted through trying to work up love for God or supressing our love for lesser things, like ourselves, other people, or physical and emotional gratification.
We are converted by surrendering our lives into his hands for him to make the change.

In Romans 8:16 Paul says that if we do that the Holy Spirit will give us an assurance within that we are made new and that we are converted. It is extremely difficult to explain such an assurance to someone who has not experienced it. It is a bit like trying to explain what something tastes like to someone who has never tried it. You can make comparisons but the only way someone is going to know the assurance of the Spirit is as the Bible says, "taste and see that the Lord is good."

To sum up: You know when you are converted because

a) God is not a hobby or a duty but the love of your life

b) The Holy Spirit has revealed it to you


I've gone on long enough and I hope this helps to answer the question.

God bless

Carol

Classic Gowans

"Worship without obedience is a bad smell in the nostrils of God."


God bless
Carol

Army on parade but not on the battlefield

Andrew B has blogged a timely prophecy on beyondthebrook, based on Isaiah 1. It resonated with me given two recent experiences.

I went on an officers discussion page, where someone had asked for advice about dealing with the demonic. The answers he got in the main were leave this alone and ask a priest to come in and deal with it. Now I wouldn' want anyone wading into to something ill-equipped and without adequate prayer cover and with a blase attitude but what kind of army are we if we have to ask others to fight the battles that God raised us up to fight? What right have we to call ourselves a Salvation Army, sing about tearing down the devils kingdom if we run at the first hint of a tiny demon! We are an army on parade but absent from the battlefield.

The second thing was watching a vintage clip of a SA open air meeting and the 1904 Congress on www.sermonindex.net It made me cry and my heart ache for that pioneer spirit to be restored.

On my knees

Carol

More on Conversion

I just went on the http://www.sermonindex.net/ as recommended by Andrew on his Beyond the brook blog and lo and behold the first sermon on the list by Leonard Ravenhill was on the very subject I'd just blogged about. So I just had to download the following quote:

"I am convinced that many evangelicals are not truly and soundly converted. Among the evangelicals it is entirely possible to come into membership, to ooze in by osmosis, to leak through the cells of the church and never know what it means to be born of the Spirit and washed in the blood. A great deal that passes for the deeper life is nothing more or less than basic Christianity. There is nothing deeper about it, and it is where we should have been from the start. We should have been happy, joyous, victorious Christians walking in the Holy Spirit and not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh. Instead we have been chasing each other around the perpetual mountain.What we need is what the old Methodists called a sound conversion. There is a difference between conversion and a sound conversion. People who have never been soundly converted do not have the Spirit to enlighten them. When they read the Sermon on the Mount or the teaching passages of the epistles that tell them how to live or the doctrinal passages that tell how they can live, they are unaffected. The Spirit who wrote them is not witnessing in their hearts because they have not been born of the Spirit."

God bless


Carol

Conversion

I am reading a book by Dr E Stanley Jones on Conversion. The reason I was attracted to the book is because I have always liked his stuff ever since as a kid I picked up his book The Way from my Mum's bookshelf. It was also because I think the word "conversion" is hardly heard these days to describe the work of God in a person's life. We talk about people "coming to faith" or making a committment or giving their lives to Christ. They are not bad phrases but we are surely missing a vital thing if we forget that being a Christian involves to quote Dr Stanley "a change in character and life followed by an outer change of allegiance corresponding to that inner change."


God bless

Carol

Self-Denial

We recently received the publicity for Self-Denial Missionary Appeal

The slogan this year is “Stick up for people in need! Stick your money in here, please! Give it up for the Lord!

Be warned this is a bit of a ramble but this raises for me again the whole subject of how we handle our material wealth. I have to admit I am more than a little uncomfortable with some of the things that are suggested we give up, a week’s wages, chocolate biscuits, tea, newspapers or whatever else we can think of. It’s not that I am unwilling to give any of those things up. It’s rather that whilst I can choose which luxury to give up, many of my fellow Salvationists around the world will be wondering about which basic necessity they will have to do without this week. And let’s face it might be more realistic for some Salvationists to replace items like chocolate, newspapers and tea with the villa in Spain, the second car, the widescreen TV and the dishwasher, for there to be any real sacrifice involved.

I’m not just having a go at others. In 2000 we inherited a moderate amount of money that we have committed to be used mainly for the education of our daughters to prevent them getting into student debt, but it still feels like a luxury to have that cushion of security in the bank. Even though we don’t touch it to live on day to day I can still see areas of my life where I should live more simply and sacrificially.

And before anyone asks I’m sorting it. But there are all kinds of dilemmas you face like how to buy a simple thing like a skirt, or my weekly groceries ethically. What’s the difference between being responsible and being mean? When are material blessings something we should accept as a gift from God and enjoy them and when should we deny ourselves?
How do we stop ourselves getting so wound up with it all that we become sour faced, pious and boring?

So, what about Self Denial Appeal? Is it wrong to still have it? No I don’t think so but we surely have to close the wideness of the gap between our luxury and the majority of the world’s poverty by taking a hard look at how we live our lives every day. So that when we do come to the annual focus on missionary giving what we actually give is a sacrifice not what is at present for many of us the cream off the top of a very rich pie.

Wouldn’t the Self-Denial Missionary Appeal be the place to begin living differently all the year round.

God bless

Carol

Saints

There are times when the saints drive you loopy but other times when you are just so encouraged and stirred up by their example. So thanks Lord for all the saints I met this week who helped and encouraged me by living for Jesus.

Monday:
Went to listen to the Archbishop of York in All Saints Church Northallerton. It was packed out. He preached the gospel, and to every difficult question he was asked he just kept bringing everything back to Jesus and having Jesus in you. This guy is having real impact.

Tuesday:
North Yorks team meeting. All of us face huge challenges in mission but able to pray with passion, authority and honesty for one another. Also a meeting at DHQ where we were given time, were listened to and received with graciousness. I'm putting that on record because people are often so quick to criticise but not so quick to acknowledge when they are trying to discern what God wants.

Wednesday:
Cell group at our house. Just so good to see this group expressing by word and action the values upon which Northallerton Outreach is built
Always evangelising
Becoming disciples
Creating true community
Demonstrating Christ's love
Engaging in ministry
Focussing on Jesus

Thursday
I don't say it often enough but it's really great being in ministry with my husband. God forbid that the army should ever lose this precious model of shared ministry.

Friday
It's Friday so it's my friend Becky and I in prison. Subject for the group today, "What do I believe?" At the end one of the lads it very genuinely had had his faith in Jesus re-ignited! Hallelujah! Then our usual good humoured debate with the Imam about the state of the world and the madness of political correctness, followed by Tesco's. In Tesco's cafe, Becky and I get stuck into bacon sandwiches, and deep theology. Becky is God's gift to me and a true Christian friend. We're both excited that next month we're travelling to Ethiopia together, to support chaplaincy work in prisons over there. I'm praying my visa comes OK.

Saturday
Geraldine Latte leading an evening of worship at the Baptist church. Inspired. Our God is an awesome God.

Sunday
Preached on Ph 1:12-26. I want to be like Paul, who even in chains was able to encourage others to speak the word of God.

"Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly." v 14

God bless

Carol

Hearing God

To be honest we have been through a time of uncertainty and questioning about whether our original vision for Northallerton was from God, given some of the stuff that was happening or not happening here.

There are many times when God has spoken very clearly into my life and times when he has graciously used me to communicate prophetically into the lives of others. This was not one of those times!! Despite regularly bending God's ear (if that is possible) it seemed that he was not going to give me a "word" on the situation so that I could know what to do and what to fight for.

Instead my times in his word always seemed to lead to verses that focussed on his character and that is all. And of course that is more than enough. That is all I really needed.
So for example I was able to write in my prayer diary, "Read Psalm 89 Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. It is a rock in a sea of uncertainty."

I have also re-discovered the truth that one of the ways of God is to take you to the wire, to what seems like the last possible moment before he steps in, speaks and provides. The story of Abraham laying Isaac, the child of promise on the altar of sacrifice has been very real to us.

I would also want to say we are very humbled and thankful for the mature and godly way our people are responding to some big challenges. They are all stars.

God bless

Carol

31st December

Christ our Friend

"The soul needs to know Christ, not merely as a master but as a Friend (John 15:13-15) Most Christians seem not to have apprehended the condescension of Christ sufficiently to appreciate fully, not to say at all, his most sincere regard for them. They seem afraid to regard him in the light of a friend, one whom they may approach on all occasions with the utmost confidence and holy familiarity, one who takes a lively interest in all their trials and feels more tenderly for them than they do for their nearest earthly friends." (Finney)

1st January

Christ our elder brother

Mt 28:10 Romans 8:29 Hebrews 11:10-18

Christ is not merely a friend but a brother. He is a brother possessing the attributes of God. He is not ashamed to call us brethren and shall we refuse or neglect to embrace him in this relation and avail ourselves of all that is implied in it? He says to the desponding and tempted soul, "Am I not a man and a brother?" He is the first born among manhy brethren and yet we are heirs with him, heirs of God and joint heirs with him of all the infinite riches of the Godhead." (Finney)



Happy New Year

God bless

Carol