One ministry that has been active during the awakenings of Fisherman’s Robe has been a time for friends and fellow believers to join together in our home to pray and worship God. As the title suggests, this meeting normally happens on the fourth Sunday of each month.
As we gather together, our hope is to encourage one another as a community, to build each other up in Christ, to join our hearts together in worship and prayer, to continue always growing together as believers in community, and to "send out" each one who comes in, to take what they have come to understand by prayer, worship, or teaching, back to their homes, their lives, their churches, and to anyone who is hungry for more of God.
We are not attempting to be or to start a church through this fellowship. Our hearts are focused on helping people to grow in their faith, to accept the challenge of living radical Christian lives, to learn what radical Christian community is, and to exist as that community. It will be the greatest blessing for us, if, through our times together, most everyone who joins with us will be refreshed and restored in a way that causes them to practice and spread that radical Christian lifestyle.
This page is dedicated to reporting what God is doing during those meetings.
It has been a constant source of irritation for me (at me) that this page is the most neglected of those in the web site. I don't have all that much to say about Fourth Sunday meetings, and the testimonies stemming from that time have been fairly mundane and non-sensational. It is NOT that the things are not happening during those times, and it is certainly an event that is growing and changing lives, but the changes are happening according to a calendar, not a stopwatch, and the work that is going on is mainly on the inside of the believers, which is really hard to report on.
So, the point is that while there is a
tangible excitement from the crowd who come, and while the time with the
Lord is getting sweeter, the things that I could try to report on are not
press-worthy, and therefore get no "page time."
I will say that we are growing as a community,
and as worshipping friends. Out of this crowd, God has seemingly chosen
several people to gather weekly and pray for my ministry. That all
by itself is a great blessing, and since that formation, things are happening.
One of the most amazing happenings, from my perspective, is that I
have been getting more and more organized and intentional about preparation
for the worship time, because I feel a definite leading. We have made
some organizational changes in the format for the actual time. One
thing that has become apparent is that people, even serious Christian people,
have troubles and things that weigh on their minds and hearts. Because
of that, and for the purpose of being better stewards of people's worship
time, we are formatting a couple of songs at the beginning that generally
deal with repentance, spiritual warfare, and confession, and then we have
a time of prayer for the things that we come in with that weigh us down.
Then we continue with musical worship, usually some sort
of teaching/discussion, and then a more intercessory prayer time. This
last month, we tried something different for our prayer time. We split
the large group in to two smaller groups, and instead of taking prayer requests,
we prayed for wisdom and direction from God first, and used that information
to pray for the person. It was a wonderful time to hear God speak through
so many of us, and in doing that, He was speaking to each of us words of
edification, exhortation, and comfort. I don't know how much you have
experienced, but to have the Creator God of the Universe, speak though
a caring family member in visions (pictures) and prophecy (words) that
usually either describe struggles that we are going through, or ways
that He wants us to recognize that we have value in the Kingdom is an amazing
experience.
God has a wonderful way of communicating
with us, and no matter how many times I have been involved with things prophetic,
I am always amazed that God is so immanent (near to us). I know that
there are liars and people who love to use God to manipulate others, and
they will pay for the destruction that they have caused, but in general,
when the believers hearts are right and their motives pure, prophecy (God
communicating with his children) is remarkable. I believe that there
are very few believers who today are called to the office of the prophet,
and that their role is different in a great degree from the Old and New Testament
prophets who were speaking the Logos (word) of God into existence. Today,
I believe God uses his prophets to give the global church direction, and
to warn and offer direction to Governmental leaders. Their words are
not newly inspired revelation of God, but they do reveal God's heart and
His mind in a powerful way.
So then, what is all this prophecy talk about, if it's
not about prophets? I'm glad you asked. In brief, a great deal
of the book of 1 Corinthians is devoted to telling that church many, many
things about how the church should be. Too often, in these days, we
hear many disconnected passages from this book used for various purposes.
For example, most orthodox (correct theology, not the Orthodox
denomination) churches who serve Communion, quote from 1 Cor 11, Paul's words
of Institution which are actually an instruction on proper Communion to a
church that had missed the point of Communion. None of these sections
is actually being mis-used, per say, but put together as a complete thought,
they speak volumes to us. Another oft disconnected segment of that
discourse is 1 Cor 13, the Love Chapter. On it's own, it seems to be
an ethereal treatise on the unreachable kind of perfect love, but in it's
fuller context, it is not stated as unreachable, but as a required mode of
bahavior for the church. I have not yet discovered the full boundaries
of this segment, but I am convinced that 1 Cor, chapters 1-4 roughly lay
out the issues, and possibly beginning at chapter 5 and going (so far) through
chapter 14 is a continual thought process, maybe a sermon on paper,
that gives us great insight into how we are to live, act, behave, and fit
together.
It seems that chapter 14 is what I have been pointing
to in regards to prophecy for the body. The preliminary understanding
HAS to come from chapters 12 and 13 (the body, gifts, and the proper operating
atmosphere for the body and the gifts). So, in chapter 14, Paul takes
on two concepts from worship that were misunderstood in the church at Corinth,
and are still being misunderstood and mistreated today, prophecy and
tongues in worship.
As I understand it, Paul is letting us in on the truth
of God that God still wants to communicate with us in a personal way, yet
in worship through prophecy. And, Paul is trying to let us understand
that God can and will communicate through anyone who is ready and willing,
to people in the congregation who need to be encouraged, built up, or comforted.
Just because Christians misuse the gift, doesn't mean that it is no
good. That would be as absurd as saying that because some people drive
reclessly, that no one should drive, or because some evil people use guns
to kill people, that no one should be allowed to use a gun as the tool that
it was meant to be. It seems too easy, in these days of instant mass
communication, that we take ultimate stands on topics that need to be dealt
with as they occur.
I will stop before I kill again. (Your
attention with my ranting).
May God give us balance and reason where we thrive in passion
and zeal. Thanks for listening.
To read former testimonies or accounts of Fourth Sunday meetings, follow this link.