??

I turned up at the morning session of THOP this morning… and recognised a number of people, some from previous visits, some from YWAM and some who visited Wellington last week.

I had three people come up and ask me why I am here…

“uh… to pray?”

Helpful, I know. But yes, I came here to pray.

Roadtrip…

I’m heading off to the Tauranga House of Prayer for a few days. It’s a bit of a drive (and I had a number of heart attacks tonight as I drove down High St and kept seeing gas prices for 91 at 200.9c) and will take me about 7 hours either way – figure will vary depending on speed and traffic and breaks – but it’ll be good.

So, I will attempt to blog from Tauranga… otherwise I will be back on Thursday… I have to teach the intern class in the morning so will be driving back Wednesday night. I’m looking forwards to being at the house of prayer… good place to make a roadtrip too. Wish I had someone else coming with me – roadtrips are more fun with friends – but its all good.

Nothing to say

I just spent two hours trying to do tasks online… and I have started responding to one email at least four times, and tried to start a blog entry three times. Nothing to say. And this is one of those really bad blog entries.

Deal with it.

So , I see this cheesy logo occasionally. It really does irritate me some of the time… I remember at one stage thinking it was cool, but that was years ago.

I just had a conversation with a lady as I walked out of morning church – amazing woman, really appreciate her ministry and call and the integrity and anointing that she walks in. She has a lot of wisdom.

However, she asked me if I got ‘drunk’ last Sunday night. Ps Seth (our senior pastor) just returned from the revival meetings in Lakeland, Florida. If anyone can carry an anointing for something that God is doing from one end of the earth to the other, it’s Ps Seth. Incredible, amazing leader who is full on and passionate about revival. So, last Sunday night, Seth prayed for every member of the church, imparting to them what God gave him to carry home to New Zealand from Florida. Everyone lined up and walked past Seth… it soon began to look like a war zone as people went flying and fell over and staggered their way along.

Me? I walked through between two of my friends… and nothing tangible happened. I didn’t fall, I didn’t have any amazing sense of the presence of God, I didn’t laugh or cry or break into spontaneous tongues. So, my answer to this lady today was, “No. nothing happened.” Her response puzzled me a little… she was like, “What are we going to do with undrunk you… I’ll pray that it happens.”

Seems like a bit of a misdirected prayer to me… the manifestations of the Holy Spirit are not actually what change people, it’s when he works on the inside of them. I would far rather that my spirit and nature begins to reflect the character and nature of Jesus through the working of the Holy Spirit in my life, than that I fall down and shake a couple of times.

If God chooses to touch me and my flesh responds like that, okay, I’m not against people getting drunk in the spirit. Just don’t do it for show… don’t do it for attention seeking. I want Jesus on my inside, not manifestations on the outside.

Air NZ…

I just whacked my credit card with a truckload of debt… although its not really debt considering it’ll be paid off within twenty four hours thanks to being reimbursed from church.

Air New Zealand has begun offering ‘carbon credit’ payments… I was informed that the cost of saving the earth from the effects of the first flight that our interns take to Dunedin would be $23.70.

I politely declined (aka eagerly hit the ’skip this step’ button) and wondered how many earth-loving hippies there are out there that would actually pay for that.

Overview: Chapter 1, Introduction to Systematic Theology

Systematic theology answers the question, “What does the whole bible teach us about a particular topic.” Instead of finding an answer with one particular bent, we look at the entire range of scripture, in the context that it was written.

 

We need to study theology for a number of reasons.

1.)    It’s part of the Great Commission. In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus commands us to “Go and make disciples… baptizing them… teaching them…” The task of fulfilling the Great Commission includes teaching the nations about what the Bible says to us.

2.)    It helps us to overcome our wrong ideas – we all study the Word with a particular bias, and seeing the full collection of scriptural reference allows us to overcome this.

3.)    We can make better decisions – “In every area of inquiry, certain theological principles will come to bear, and those who have learned well the theological teachings f the Bible will be much better able to make decisions that are pleasing to God.”

4.)    It helps us grow as Christians – the more fully we understand God, the more mature our responses to him become.

 

We study systematic theology, noting the following:

1.)    We should study it with prayer – head knowledge can make us smart while leaving our lives unchanged. Doctrinal errors will occur where study is not partnered with intimacy with Jesus.

2.)    We should study it with humility – 1 Peter 5:5, God will oppose the proud, but give grace to the humble. We shouldn’t let our knowledge about the things of God cause us to misrepresent the character of Christ.

3.)    We should study it with reasoning – God gave us logic, and so we can make deductions from scripture with a clear conscience, as long as they do not contradict anything else in Scripture.

4.)    We study it with help from others – community allows us to learn and grow together, because our collective experience causes individual growth.

5.)    We study it holistically – we need to collect and understand all of the relevant passages of scripture on a topic, so that we get the whole view.

6.)    We study it with happy hearts – “We must love all that God is, all that he says, and all that he does.” Our studies of intellectual matters shouldn’t kill our passion!

It just gets better.

* The flight was late home: so we got stuck in traffic, meaning that I was late for work.

* I lost my wallet somewhere between getting out of the car at the lights… and getting into work… praying it turns up.

* My phone had a calling bar applied for 4 hours tonight! That was NOT helpful, especially since it took five calls to Telecom to sort it out.

* Came home to do my washing… to find that the lovely cat, Oscar, had bought in a dead rat. or mouse. I’m not sure which… got the blood out of the carpet at least, and tempted to banish him to the den forever.

Down in Nelson without a flight…

I spent the last couple of days out at Kaiteriteri… went on a walk, enjoyed the fact that there was really no one else around, and exploited the fact that I could somehow get on my gmail without buying a wireless connection card. 

Tasha picked me up from Kaiteriteri yesterday morning… and we came back to her house for a bit… then went to the airport at 3.15 for my 3.45pm flight. Walked inside, and used the automatic checkin machines… except that the only flight around that time was for 3.20pm, not 3.45pm. Puzzled, I talked to the lady at the checkin counter, telling her that someone from AirNZ had called and told me that my flight was changed to 3.45pm.

She looked at my ticket… rather more closely than I had… and informed me that my flight was for tomorrow, not today.

So, a little embarrassed… I spent another night here in Nelson, and will return this afternoon, although I’ll be late for work so will have to go straight there. 

Off to Kaiteriteri

I borrowed this photo from the Golden Bay Connections website… but this is where I’m going to spend a couple of days in a cabin.

All. By. Myself.

Hope I don’t go stircrazy from having no one to talk to … if it comes to the worst I’ll go visit the shop or something… praying for nice weather… it’s cloudy this morning but is meant to fine up later, and tomorrow is meant to be frosty which will mean nice weather. Here in Nelson it does anyway, I don’t know what the weather does back in Wellington.

So, not that you’ll really notice my blogging gap, but I’ll be back in a few days.

on vacation…finally

This is posted (somewhat belatedly) on the third evening of my first holiday in a long time. Our two American interns frequently point out different words that we use – ‘holiday’ is kiwispeak for ‘vacation’ and that is currently what I am on.

I am visiting Nelson, New Zealand. While Nelson is in the South Island, it’s actually equal with Wellington in terms of latitude – so I came ‘across’ not ‘down’, despite the fact that it is referred to as ‘down’ because I supposedly came south. I have friends that moved here a few months ago – and some friends that I will meet up with that I haven’t seen in a while – so it’s been nice to leave the Starbucks and the internships behind, and take a little while to breathe.

I’m not really used to holiday mode – in the last three years, I went on a four day trip with my parents during my internship, a three day weekend trip to visit some friends in Christchurch, and we had two weeks in Sydney en route to Perth. I tend to feel that a holiday isn’t really a holiday if it is just a stopover – it’s very hard to destress and relax when you’ve come from a fairly fullon environment, and you’re on your way to start something like a DTS.

This has been good though. I flew down early Thursday morning to spend the day at the Annesbrook Leadership College – I sat in on some of their classes, and also went for a walk in the country and at the Monaco estuary. Neither was particularly clean – I leant on a slimy pole in the country, ruining my jeans and sweater, and splashed muddy water all over my three quarters at Monaco. I had dinner with my mentor’s family (they moved down here in January) and came to Rachel’s house where I’m staying.

Friday morning I headed out to the bach with the Williams family… went walking along the beach (despite the rain – so much for Nelson’s perfect weather? ) and read God on Mute by Pete Greig and stayed the night… Saturday was much of the same, sleeping in, going for a couple of walks, cleaning up and heading back to Nelson. Rachel and I just finished watching Pirates3… and now its off to bed before church in the morning.

Apart from having temporarily misplaced my laptop… I like Nelson, and I like holidays. I like that I had my cellphone turned off for a full 24 hours. It’s a good thing to stop, think, and breathe.

Selah.