False Prophets, Acts Chapter 2, and our House Church
[Editor’s Note: This post was written in December of 2009. I post it now because it set’s the stage for some of the posts that will follow. I plan on posting the full text of the dream mentioned here in a separate post. This also will give you a glimpse into what our house church meetings look like.]
We just finished with a marathon house church meeting that was unlike anything we’ve touched as a church in a long time. I think by the end of the meeting a couple of people had significant spiritual healing, a degree of physical healing took place in someone’s back, and a lot of people feeling a lot closer to Jesus than when we started! Praise the Lord!
It all started when someone in our church shared a dream that had some end-time implications. The jist of the dream was that we have to address heresy as soon as possible before it springs up and becomes something more difficult to deal with. We began to discuss and the conversation shifted to the idea of personal responsibility in our church: It’s not one person’s job to look out for heresy, it’s everyone’s job.
It was at this point Sean started talking about Acts 2 and the necessity of living the lifestyle that we find there (eating together, prayer, fellowship, devotion to the apostolic message, etc). As we began to talk about Acts 2 and meeting Jesus in powerful ways, it became obvious that the Holy Spirit was present in a tangible way, so we began to pray for one another. There was continual prayer, proclamation, and teaching for the next two hours! The most fun for me was to watch the whole church spontaneously love and serve each other without prodding from anyone. It’s how church should be.
All in all, Jesus met us. I post this to stir you up wherever you are, no matter what type of church you meet in. Jesus desires to meet you and will rock your world. Stay hungry to meet Him and He will find you.
My Daughter: The Newest Fiery Believer I Know
[Editor’s Note: This post was written in April.]
A couple of weeks ago I walked into my house after a hard day at work and was greeted by my daughter who excitedly announced to me, “Daddy, I prayed the prayer with mommy.” I looked at my wife who excitedly nodded her head. At this point I knew that something different had happened. It wasn’t unusual for my daughter to pray with my wife. This time they hadn’t just prayed, my daughter had actually prayed with Christy to receive Jesus!
I’ll leave the story of how she received Christ for her to tell someday. What caught me off guard though was the change that happened in her life. I had always thought that accepting Christ when you were small was something that had to be repeated time after time throughout your life in order to be real and supernatural. But right from my very first encounter with her after her salvation, she has been different. She’s full of more joy than she was before she accepted Christ. I’m not sure how that is even possible, because she’s just a toddler! But it’s really happened and others have commented on it as well. And she’s way more interested in things of the Kingdom than she used to be.
Yesterday, I got a call from my wife while I was at work. She had just finished spending twenty minutes worshipping and interceding with my daughter for all of her friends, an upcoming missions trip, and the people of Ethiopia. When I got home, we spent another twenty minutes doing the same thing as a family…and here’s the great part—she is pushing us! She’s the one who wants to do it!
Not content to raise a daughter who doesn’t see the Bible acted out before her eyes, we began talking to her about the concept of baptism. Youtube made the whole discussion a ton easier, because I think seeing kids being baptized took a lot of the fear and unknown out of the equation. After watching a few videos, my daughter has decided to follow Jesus in baptism, so she will be our house church’s first baptism this Sunday. We’ll celebrate with a little cake commemorating the day.
All of this is to say, Jesus is moving in my daughter’s life. I’m so excited. It’s been the chief goal of my life that I would lead my children in the Way of Christ and I’m starting to see it really manifest. And while we’re discipling her, she is also discipling us. Her zeal is pushing us not to be so old and unwilling in following Jesus and pursuing His presence. If you know us…pray for us. Pray that we would steward this new disciple well and learn from her. She will be a general in the Lord’s army one day.
[Sweetie, if you ever read this one day, know that this has been the happiest you have ever made me. You are your daddy’s pride and joy. I love you.]
Moving Forward
Milestones are interesting things. They tell you where you are, they tell you a little bit about how far you’ve come, but they tell you very little about where you’re going. The last post for me was a bit of a milestone. For whatever reason, I felt like I had to do something special for the 200th post on the blog. That something special took me a lot longer than I had planned—the better part of six months!
Now the question becomes, where do we go from here? And in a lot of ways, that’s what this period of not posting has been about. It was more than just time spent writing and working…it was reflecting on where this blog has been and where it is going. Moving forward, you’re going to see me focus in on a lot of topics that came to the surface when I wrote Why You Come to Pursuing Glory: The Outpouring of the Spirit, Apostolic Leadership, Organic House Churches, and Night and Day Prayer. But my hope is that the blog goes beyond just me writing about these topics. My hope is that this becomes a gathering point for people who believe these themes were designed to work together. I’m also going to remain true to my commitment to be real and talk about my life here as well, because I still believe it’s crucial to what we’re doing to be open, honest, and real.
For all of this to happen some changes are necessary. The biggest change you will see is I’m going to start posting different blogs in different categories to help people who come here find content that is useful to them. For those of you who come to hear about the happenings of our lives, there will still be plenty of posts on life stuff, reflection, and maybe a picture or two of the kids. You’ll see all of these posted under the category “Blogs.” For those of you that use this blog as a resource or enjoy hearing about what Jesus has been speaking to me, I will continue to post those posts here as well. You’ll find those under the “Articles” category. I’ll also be forcing the most recent “Articles” post to stay at the top of the blog, so that people who are looking more for content can find it quickly and easily.
There will also be several new types of posts coming to the blog. If you liked the last post, my hope is to continue from time to time to produce Christ-exalting writings that are more like poetry and stories than resource manuals. You’ll find these sorts of posts in the “Writings” category. And, in an effort to begin building not just a community, but a community that is building up all of its members, I’m going to start posting in a category I’m calling “Resources.” The goal of this category will be to point you to significant resources I’m finding out on the web, give away free resources that I’m beginning to develop myself, and update the community that is forming here on changes to the blog. This sort of post, for example, would be filed under “Resources.”
But none of this matters much if a community of like-minded individuals doesn’t begin to dig deep and encourage one another in the things that the Lord is doing. To do that I want to suggest a couple of simple steps you could take to help:
- Comment on the posts you like or disagree with. Not everything I write will interest you. But some of it will. And some of it will make you furious. I value discussion, so if you’re moved by a post in a good or bad way or you have something to contribute to what has already been said, leave a comment.
- If you’re a blogger, join with me in this conversation. If you see something here that provokes you to write a blog, let me know about it. I would love to link to what you’ve wrote, and see the conversation go farther than just my little corner of the internet.
- If you haven’t yet, subscribe to Pursuing Glory somehow. If you’re not particularly technologically inclined, hit the “Email Subscription” button on the sidebar of the blog. If you’re more into computers or you’re daring, you could subscribe to this blog using a feed reader. I found a great video explaining the process here. Let’s face it. Life is busy and it’s easy to fall out of the loop. Either of these tricks will help you stay involved in what’s going on.
- Finally, give me suggestions. I’m certainly not the only voice or the only one talking about the things that we cover here. Please point me in the direction of others who are both resources and voices for the sort of things we discuss.
Most of these are simple actions, but they will help all of us begin to move forward in the direction the Lord is taking us. Thanks for listening.
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