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Promoting a passion for Jesus, intimacy with the Father, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, renewal in the church and revival in the land. E-MAIL EDITION, Published by Keith Allen, keithanliz@patash.com.au
Hello readers of the Prayer Journal,
I visited a different church to the one I normally attend recently. At the front and to one side of the platform was a long white pennant bearing the words, JESUS HEALS BROKEN HEARTS! The thought burrowed itself into my mind. Jesus heals broken hearts, broken lives! Here is a place where no one is left in any doubt about the reason for being in church! Itıs to find healing in Jesus!
HURT
There is a lot of hurt about. It is said, that to get to know anyone deeply, is to get to know the tragedy of their life journey. We hear a lot about ³abuse². What we hear, however, is only the tip of the ice berg. We are all abused in varied and subtle ways by life. We live in a world were the original harmony of things has been twisted into crowns of thorns by Satan, the great abuser. This is why Jesus the Great healer wore one. In his wounds we are healed.
Jesus heals broken hearts. This is a simple fact that can be obscured in church cultures that have lost sight of the living presence of Jesus. Let me explain. Once in the Jewish temple, Jesus became very angry. He explained the reason for his fury like this ³My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.² (Matt. 21:13)
How can we rob God today? By allowing custom and tradition to rob us of spontaneity and passion in the House of God. Now I donıt mean that church folks desire to worship God is being ripped offı to the same extent as it was in Jerusalem. But we could well ask ourselves if we have not robbed ourselves of an encounter with God in church. How? Through too great a faith in intellectualism. That is, worshiping the words of God rather than God himself. It is very easy to analyse the word, cut it up into little pieces and go away untouched and unchanged by the Holy Spirit.
Is it possible that we have placed so much emphasis on knowledge aboutı God that many of us have forgotten to go to church to be withı God and make a sacrifice of praise toı him? Worship is submission, obedience and surrender to a God who is present and waiting to heal in real ways in our lives!
NET 99
Itıs very easy to go to a Net 99ı seminar, mentally tick off all the beliefıs weıve got right and come away more lost that those who know nothing about Christianity. Have you ever wondered why some of those who are so expert in the Second Coming are so panicked by it? A relationship with facts does nothing for any oneıs security. Only intimacy with a healing saviour does that! In his book, On A Hill Too Far Away, John Fischer tells what happened when he gave a concert first for alcoholics and then for a g roup of average church folks. He writes, ³When I got to the last song, I did what I always do. I called out, Sinners only in the chorus!ı The reaction of the two groups was like night and day. The church folks squirmed and snickered as if it was a clever way to get them to think about themselves in a certain light. The alcoholics joined in as if to say, Hey, thatıs us! Come on guys, sing it out!ı and sing they did with all their might.²
HEARTS THAT ARE BROKEN
Jesus heals broken hearts. To put it another way, he heals hearts that are broken, hearts that have put away their self sufficiency, hearts that humbly recognise their need of the deep healing of God. Fischer believes that the reason for the difference between the two groups was quite simple. The alcoholics had an acute sense of sin and the others didnıt. He writes, ³The church group saw themselves as good people who sin sometimes, but who never commit any really bad sins and who donıt believe that there i s anything deeply and fundamentally wrong with them .² Sad, isnıt it that what is fundamentally wrong is invisible in the clubs of conformity.ı
LIFE FOR DEAD SPIRITS
Fischerıs observation is worth reflecting on. Churchianity can anaesthetise us against the reality of sin that lies conveniently outside our legalistic definitions. God told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed they would surely die. Churchianity can blind us to the fact that in this world we continually need to be healed of our deadness of spirit by the Holy Spirit. We need repeated infillings of his Spirit because we leak. Our humanity needs healing by the life of Jesus! Jesus is waiting to be recognised a s the Healer and the Source of our community life. He is waiting to act in our lives. He is ready and able to give us healing of the blindness that obscures our need for radical healing. Jesus heals broken hearts. Pray this prayer with me.
Lord Jesus, wash us in your blood. Heal us with your wounds. Restore us with your life. Saturate us with the freshness of your resurrection vitality. Pour out your Holy Spirit into our lives. Fortify us with your peace and energise us with your passion for living. We receive your living water into our thirsty souls, amen.
By Keith Allen
BREATHE ON ME
Breathe on me breath of God Love and life that makes me free Breathe on me breathe of God Fan the flame within me Take my heart and heal my soul Speak the mind that in Christ we know Take me to your sanctuary Breathe on me Speak to me voice of God Soft and still inside my heart Speak to me word of God Comfort, heal, restore with love Breathe on me.. Lucy Fisher, Hillsongs, Australia, 1998.
The Musician and The Anointing and Music and the Prophetic I and II below come from notes I made at seminars heard at the ONE HOUSE IN WORSHIP praise and worship conference held at Crossway Baptist Church, Melbourne, Victoria, 15-17 April, 1999. David Holmes and Jeff Crabtree minister at Christian City Church, Oxford Falls, Sydney, Australia. Diane and Brom Manasuma minister at Westside Christian Centre, Melbourne, Australia. This praise and worship conference was organised by Christian City Church, Box Hill, Oakleigh Christian Centre and Crossway Baptist Church.
Itıs interesting that some are put-off by praise and worship music. An acquaintance of mind, now a passionate worshipper of the Lord through song revealed that there was a time when he found praise and worship an irritation. This was before he came to relate to Jesus personally rather than relating to a set of beliefs. A purely intellectual religion does little do instil a desire to adore and praise Jesus. As a friend said to me a few days ago. The thing that I dislike about some of the songs they sing tod ay is that they sound like love songs.ı Thatıs why I like them,ı I replied.
Letıs face it. There is nothing to get excited about over a bunch of moral principles and a set of beliefs. Neither is there any thing to be joyous about in some conceptions of God. Scripture clearly states that no one comes to the Father but by Jesus. It also says that if you have seen me (Jesus), you have seen the Father. Although Jesus is God, he was and is an ordinary Person whom kids loved to be with. He represents a passionate God and a passionate man. The pagan Greeks had a philosophical view of God as THE UNMOVED MOVER. That is to say he was seen as a being who is untouched and unmoved by anything. Atheistic mathematicians have a similar view of the Mind of Godı that inhabits the universe - but there is nothing personal about it. Some Christians have a view of God that is little different. God, to them is rather cold, removed, untouched and untouchable - a deistic version of Queen Victoria.
This is not the view the Bible presents of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is portrayed as in touch, reaching out to man, vulnerable and passionate. His jealousy at manıs spiritual adultery is the kind of outrage we feel when we are betrayed. We feel this because we are made in his image. We are like him. God loved us so much that he gave us his only son, Jesus to restore us to intimacy with him. Jesus revealed himself as one who loved people, who put up with slow-learning disciples and whose pa ssion for re-claiming us to fellowship he likened to eating. It is clear from Jesusı prayer recorded in the book of John that he desired union with God for himself and that he wanted it for us too. The Holy Spirit is one who is gentle and can be grieved. The Holy Trinity is all powerful, awesome, yet loving, vulnerable and passionate. If you are a parent, you will know that you want your children to love you from their hearts. God is the same. Paul says, Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritua l songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christı (Eph. 5:19,20).
Recently I [Keith] was talking to an Adventist young woman who had exhibited considerable freedom and passion in her leading of a congregation during praise and worship time. I mentioned that I had noticed that when one returned from a worship service that had consisted of un-abashed praise and adoration, one felt filled with the presence of God for a couple of days afterwards and this effected the flowı of your life in the hurly-burly of ordinary activities. She replied that she though that this was so be cause in charismatic expressions of worship, you give yourself mind, body and spirit to God as a living sacrifice. I agree. In adoring God we become more the usı that we desire to be.
Unfruitfulness in a church is often the result of quenching the Holy Spirit. That is to say, deadness results from a consistent attitude of resistance to change and a refusal to follow the Spirits leading into greater intimacy with Jesus and more passionate affirmation of who he is. No matter how much effort is put into teaching our kids Bible stories or running health programs, the life, power and dynamism of any church flows from the intimacy with God that occurs as we seek his face through a personal en counter and corporate prayer and praise. When we show that we would rather remain captive to cultural traditions of head knowledge relationshipı than move where the Spirit is leading, the result is inevitable. In rejecting life, we are accepting spiritual death.
Frank Damazio observes that bareness is assured when we despise what God loves. Second Samuel 6:12-23 tells the story of the return of the Ark. King David danced with all his might before the Lord with shouting and trumpets. But his wife, Michal, seeing him despised him in her heart. This despising resulted in Michal being barren from that day until her death.
Damazio writes, We are not to despise the expression of Biblical or Davidic Worship. God has asked his worshipers to worship him with their whole hearts, with full strength and with selfless abandonment. We must be very careful when being exposed to the Davidic kind of worship, that we do not despise or lightly esteem what God has called sacred, blessed and holy. Davidic worship was given in zeal and shameless emotion before the presence of God with God as the focus.
The whole personı approach to worship involves verbal acclamations, singing, praising, shouting, the use of hands in lifting,, bodily postures and movements such as bowing, standing and dancing. These are the expressions of worship that a Michal attitude despises.ı In summary Damazio writes,
The kingdom of God was inaugurated when Jesus the word of God became flesh and dwelt among us almost 2000 years ago. It has been advancing in fits and starts ever since. At least two thirds of the gospel record consists of Christ's struggle with the religionists of the day. Why? Because Jesus came to liberate people from religionı and give them life. But many folks wanted none of it. Thus began his exhausting battle with religious culture, which culminated in his death.
Jesus was not only opposed by wicked people. The immoderate, exuberant, extravagant life he offered was opposed by good people who were against change. There were more people who wanted to be saved by religious culture than there were who wished to accept the hazardous prospect of entrusting their salvation to Jesus Christ alone. In fact Peter had to learn that Christ could not only be denied personally. Jesus could also be denied when people clung to religious culture which retards the spread of the kingdom of God. God did not want the spread of his Kingdom held up by the presence of innumerable sacred cows. So God had to send him a dream with a clear message. Do not call unclean that which God has made clean.
Paul addressed the same issue. Some in the church were upset that new converts were eating food that had been sacrificed to idols and to the associations involved. Paul argued that such fears were groundless. However he also noted that Christians should be sensitive to weaker and less able persons who were not able to distinguish good from evil in the manner of their more enlightened brothers and sisters in Christ.
However Paul did not go on to promote the view that people should remain ignorant of their freedom in Christ and be left to drag along a heavy ball and chain of false guilt arising from cultural associations. Yet the enlargement of the Kingdom of God is often hampered by the fact that whole denominations sometimes appear to act like as an enormous chain gang manacled together by prohibitions, phobias, misunderstandings and just plain bigotry. The Australian novelist Tim Winton described this phenomenon well when he wrote,
The established church has always been the biggest stumbling block to my faith. It took me a long time to see the difference between the visible church and Jesus Christ. The kind of Christian culture I was brought up in involved a lot of conservatism that had more to do with the kind of [middle class] culture they were from than their faith and beliefs in Christ.
These qualities explain why many churches have difficulty ministering to themselves, let alone anyone else. In an excellent book devoted to overcoming the problems Winton alludes to, another writer uses a phrase that is relevant to church growth in general and worship in particular. He uses the phrase, the "tyranny of the weaker brother." He refers to a state in which the immature and weak in faith; the legalists and concrete thinkers who have constructed a cultural despotism within the churches who have made conventional Christianity taste like flat lemonade. This tyranny of the weaker brother has resulted in a shrunken version of Christianity.
Aspects of spontaneous Godliness have often been seen as undesirable. When the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple area, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they were indignant. (Matt. 21:15 ) "Do you hear what these children are saying?" they asked him. Some might have expected him to commend them for their sophistication and reserve in the presence of the most high. However Jesus said, "Yes, have you never read, 'From the lips of chi ldren and infants you have ordained praise' ?" (Matt. 21:16) Perhaps if we have a conception of worship that is very "adult" and very serious, we have a conception worship that is different to that of our Lord.
Keith Allen
Keith Allen
In this selection Phil Pringle, the Pastor of Christian City Church, Oxford Falls in Sydney, explains how and why the Holy Spirit brings fruitfulness to you and your church.
From the book by Phil Pringle, Pax Ministries, 1994.