Jul 22, 2009

INSPIRE 09 is All Go!!!

Our Inspire Conference is all go! The Countdown is on!

It is powerful when a team of people gather together for a united cause... the expectancy rises, faith rises and adrenalin gets pumping!

When the church unite and rise with faith and expectancy – watch out!... You can be sure that God will show up!

Ps Jordan Smith preached a great message last weekend about Zacchaeus (Luke 19). God responds to people who are wanting to see more of Him.

This incredible passage of Scripture inspires me... I hope you too will be inspired!...

Ephesians 1:18-23 I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people. I pray that you will begin to understand the incredible greatness of his power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honour at God's right hand in the heavenly realms. Now he is far above any ruler or authority or power or leader or anything else in this world or in the world to come. And God has put all things under the authority of Christ, and he gave him this authority for the benefit of the church. And the church is his body; it is filled by Christ, who fills everything everywhere with his presence.

May you know His power and presence today!

Jan

Jul 21, 2009

The Absence Of Father Figures

I was writing a Happy B-day message to Harley Couper and found the following extract on his facebook page:

“I learned a great deal about myself while watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a wildlife trust in Africa. There were twenty-five elephants, all of them orphans, and they had been brought to the trust twenty years before. They were becoming teenagers– in elephant years.

The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle beings in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But among these orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. An elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino, then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino, holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers followed these orphan elephants who were always on their own, staggering about the wildlife refuge, fueled by a pent-up aggression they couldn’t understand. They weren’t acting like elephants– they didn’t know what an elephant was supposed to do with all his energy, all his muscle.

I have never killed a rhino, or much of anything for that matter, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t know exactly how to be. I mean, there were feelings, sometimes anger, sometimes depression, sometimes raging lust, and I was never sure what any of it was about. I just felt like killing somebody, or sleeping with some girl, or decking a guy in a bar, and I didn’t know what to do with any of these feelings. Life was a confusing series of emotions rubbing against events. I wasn’t sure how to manage myself, how to talk to a woman, how to build a career, how to– well, be a man.

To me, life was something you had to stumble through alone. It wasn’t something you enjoyed or conquered, it was something that happened to you, and you didn’t have a whole lot of say about the way it turned out. You just acted out your feelings and hoped you never got caught.

Watching television that night, however, the narrator began to speak of a kind of hope for these elephants. Elephant development, apparently, begins very early. Female elephants are only capable of having children once every two years, and during those two years between babies, the young are cared for obsessively by their mothers. They are fed, sheltered, loved, and guided in their learning of basic survival.

It is only at the first musth cycle that a young male elephant leaves his mother and enters into the African wild, searching for a mentor, a guide. The green pus running down his hind leg and his smell like fresh-cut grass alerts an older, fully mature male, that this is a young elephant in need of guidance. Upon finding a mentor, the young elephant’s musth cycle ends. The older and younger begin to travel together, to find food together, to protect each other– the older one teaching the younger what elephant strength is for, and how to use it for the benefit of himself and the tribe.

Watching television that night, I wondered if humans aren’t like that, too. I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy.

You have to wonder, don’t you? Some statistics state as many as 85 percent of the guys in prison grew up without a dad. This is sobering to me.

And so watching the documentary, I began to wonder if those of us without dads aren’t making mistakes in our lives we wouldn’t make if we had a father to guide us. I wondered if there isn’t a better paradigm for our existence– a way of being men, a way each of us could truly embrace if it were instilled in us by a man who spoke with altruism and authority. I wondered if people who grow up with great fathers don’t walk around with a subconscious sense they are wanted on this planet, that they belong, and the world needs them. And I wondered this: Is there practical information we are supposed to know about work, women, decisions, authority, leadership, marriage, and family that we would have learned if there were a guide around to help us navigate our journey? I wondered if some of the confusing emotions I was feeling weren’t a kind of suspended adolescence from which the presence of an older man might have delivered me.

– Excerpt from To Own A Dragon, by Donald Miller (pp 31-34)

Leave a comment and let us know what your thoughts are on this topic.
Godspeed & Kaizan
Clive

Jul 9, 2009

Is There Hope?




Will you be apart of the change?

Leave a comment and be apart of the conversation.
Clive

Jul 6, 2009

Thoughts On Worship


Photo By Maessive (Flickr)


I’ve been thinking lately about the thought that worship is ALL about Jesus and that it’s not to do with us.

I’ve been thinking that in this day and age we’ve actually lost something of worship in this thought and understanding that we need to bring to light.


When we’re in relationship with someone, we bring part of who we are to the relationship, part of ourselves that we offer.

In worship when we come to God he says, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind & strength”….so why is it that we take ourselves out of the picture and say it’s all about Jesus, it’s not about our emotions and it’s not about how we are feeling, we just need to focus on God.


However as I’ve been thinking about this - our emotions, our free will, our passion and our freedom is what sets us apart from the rest of creation. It’s what God has given us as a gift. Therefore when we worship it is about us to a point. We need to bring ourselves into the picture….we need to bring our HEARTS, our MINDS, our THOUGHTS, our EMOTION, our PASSION …..all of who we are….the good the bad and the ugly and bring it before him in worship.


God wants us, not our songs, not our money, not our works HE JUST WANTS US –(don’t get me wrong those things come with it) – but it’s all about God getting us – who we are! So next time you worship God – don’t pay him lip service cause you think you should – bring you into the picture….he wants you.


No I don’t think that our worship should be based around how we’re feeling or based on the situation that we’re facing – however I do think we need to bring the genuine reality of who you are into this relationship and let HIM change us and transform us!

Just a thought….i’ve been thinking...

Naomi