God's sovereignty

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The power of faith

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The power of faith

Sometimes you have to throw caution to the winds and just step out in faith. That was a topic of conversation the other day between a successful young church planter in Toronto and myself.

One of the enemy’s cleverest tricks is to keep our focus on what we can achieve by our own efforts.

I was taught a lot about faith as a young leader. The example of several men I personally knew who had taken extraordinary steps of faith in their walk with God took hold of me and challenged me to the core.

We can do a lot by our own efforts, but the kingdom will only really move ahead when we start doing what can only be accomplished by divine intervention.

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Lost in translation

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Lost in translation

As we entered the British Museum in London, we noticed a large group of people crowded around a display holding up their cameras. We had seen the same phenomenon in the Louvre in Paris. There it was the Venus de Milo, whose one arm was just about visible above the cluster of cameras. Here it was the Rosetta Stone.

I don’t really think many of the onlookers fully understood what it was, and they certainly weren’t taking time to read the carefully written notice beside it.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French in 1799, but repossessed by the British shortly after and carried off to London. It has been in the British Museum since 1802, where it is the most visited display, to which we can indeed bear witness.

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Every square inch

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Every square inch

This afternoon found me in a series of massive barns praying over chickens. Let no one say a pastor’s job is boring.

And yes, I am serious. My friend Mat raises chickens. A lot of them. In fact, he has eight barns with forty thousand chickens in each barn. They run free and look quite content.

The problem was this. A mysterious bacteria had invaded the barns. In spite of every possible precaution being taken and the vet pronouncing the barns to be in outstanding shape, chickens were dying. And antibiotics are not an option for this business.

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The doorway to divine power

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The doorway to divine power

Thirty-seven years ago, with the help of a brave band of a dozen university students, I started a church in the cathedral city of Durham in northern England. At the time, the situation looked totally bleak. Everything was ranged against us. We had no money. Hardly anyone even had a job. I had been falsely accused of being involved in a cult. The university launched an inquiry, and I was nearly thrown out of my PhD programme. All the pastors of the town were upset with me for overturning the ecclesiastical applecart, fearing that my new church would steal their members, which was never my intention.

I had given up my scholarship, funded by the Canadian government, in an act of faith that God would provide. I felt he had called me to do something significant in England, yet I had arrived at a place of desperation where it seemed I had hit a brick wall. There were moments when it looked pretty dark.

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Christmas according to Paul

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Christmas according to Paul

The thing that makes the Christmas story so remarkable, as Reinhard Bonnke pointed out, is not simply that Jesus was born of a virgin, but that for the first and only time in history, someone made the decision to be born. In the eternal counsel of heaven, Jesus submitted to the request of the Father: “Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book’” (Heb. 10:7). Jesus agreed to leave his place of rulership and glory in heaven and enter this fallen world as a servant to rescue us from our sin. This is the Christmas story.