I’m unashamedly a blog lurker. I have a number of blogs I have read for years, and have commented on these an average of once… maybe twice each. One that I’ve found particularly provocative is that of Randy Bohlender. I discovered him through another blog of an IHOPer, followed the journey of his family as they adopted 3 girls in addition to their own 4 children, and every now and then he writes pieces that haunt me for weeks.

Recently Randy wrote a piece entitled I wonder. There was this one phrase which he quoted which has become one of my most frequently prayers over recent weeks. I tend to express it along the lines of, “God… whatever you are doing, wherever it is on the earth… take me with you, don’t pass me by.”

It feels like we’re in the middle of something very significant at the moment… that all over the nation the Lord is apprehending us in a way I haven’t seen before.  It’s like a door has been opened, and we’ve been invited up into something higher, and that if we respond this thing could go to a whole new level.

A couple of months ago I passed my four year marker of leaving school to begin ministry. It’s been a good season… but I want more. I have a feeling like my life is about to take a twist… not necessarily by radically redefining what I do, what I’m called to or where I live, but in some ways it feels like an invitation similar to that issued to John in Revelation 4 has been issued to me. There’s something bigger going on… something around the bend… and I’m going to position myself to be ready for it.

There’s something bigger going on… it’s something bigger than me…

“Is the measure of my faith restrained or contained by my knowledge and understanding of that which I put my faith in?” More specifically, is my faith and trust in God dependent upon what I understand of his character and nature, who he says he is, and whether I can trust his self-definition. 

These two levels of faith are loosely termed conscious, and subconscious. Thomas Dubay writes in ‘Fire Within’, his examination of the contemplative writers St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, “The distance between creation and its Author is endless and it is faith alone on earth that can bridge the gap.” Christian anthropology operates on the basis that we are essentially mortal, yet we transcend nature and mortality. We are limited by our finite bodies which suffer from tiredness, sickness and death, yet we are also supernatural beings – we are not divine in any sense of the word, but we transcend the limitations of death, we are immortal spiritual beings. However, the limitations of our humanity mean that we don’t automatically understand why things happen, and our vision is limited, thus we don’t understand exactly what God is accomplishing in the diachronic metanarrative that we find ourselves a part of.

Faith is what Hebrews 11 famously defines as “being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.” It takes faith for us to live as finite beings, subject to the limitations of this world, because faith is what bridges the gap between us and the One who made us. Wayne Grudem talks about faith in his book ‘Systematic Theology.’ He points out that often ‘faith’ is seen as an irrational commitment despite evidence to the contrary, and suggests that ‘trust’ is closer to the biblical idea, writing, “the more we come to know a person, and the more we see in that person a pattern of life that warrants trust, the more we find ourselves able to place trust in that person to do what he or she promises, or to act in ways that we can rely on.” I believe that this is what I have loosely termed conscious faith – we see evidence, and this gives us a fallback position when we have moments of doubt. The more I come to know God – the deeper my relationship with Him, the more I am able to trust Him because he shows himself to have integrity. The issue of faith is that our faith does not shape the reality of God’s character and nature, rather it shapes our interaction with him. I trust God because of what I know of Him. My unshakable confidence comes from the logos, from the Word, from the fact that I believe that Scripture is the inerrant word of God that reveals him as he is – unchanging. Faith is rooted in Him rather than in me.

When I was younger, I had vague assumptions about God and his goodness, that he was able to provide, and that he answered prayer. As I’ve grown older, and simply through walking the Christian journey, I’ve seen evidence of these that has taken my trust from vague assumptions to specific examples. I quote the example of my temp job working at Lower Hutt hospital last year quite frequently – I had 11 weeks to work, and I needed a job that would pay well enough that I could save for my trip to Oregon which was going to last for 9 weeks. I expected to earn $15 an hour, but thought I would have to commute into Wellington City, costing time and money, and probably wouldn’t have one ongoing contract. However, about three hours after the internship I was staffing finished, I was at Starbucks about to start my shift and I got a call telling me that I had a job trial the next day in Lower Hutt. The amazing thing is that this job started the first day I had free and went right through to the last day that I was free. I was paid $18, far more than I expected, and I only had to drive five minutes from home and park for free on the street. In the future, I have faith that God will provide for me because of the way my needs were so specifically met.

Another example, which is a bit more of the ‘cheque in the mail’ story happened when I was doing the Forerunner Internship in Lower Hutt in 2005. Every week one of the interns was prayed for and prophesied over, and the first time it happened for me there was a lot of prophetic words about the nations, and I had an incredibly powerful encounter with God. I remember walking away and saying, hey God if that was really you, can you do something massive in the next couple of days to confirm this? Two days later I got a cheque in the mail for $500 from someone I’d done some ministry with before – and the cheque had been posted the day I prayed that prayer. 

Follow the Rabbi – a reference recommended by my mentor – defines the difference between the way that Hebrews and Greeks viewed the area of faith in God. “Hebrews see faith as relational and personal. They express faith in terms of their relationship with God rather than as a rationalisation.” Comparatively, “Greeks see faith as intellectual. They express faith in creeds and doctrine, listing proof texts to support their belief.” Another major distinction is that Hebrews saw truth as unfolding and experiential, while the Hellenistic culture saw truth as static and unchanging.

I think that conscious faith is ongoing – that the more we see God’s faithfulness at work in our lives, the more we trust him. It was designed to come out of relationship with the Lord. Faith comes from relationship, but it also produces relationship… because faith comes from the knowledge of God, and also teaches us more about the character of the God that we set ourselves to follow. Faith is rooted and grounded in the fact that God continues to show himself faithful.

However, I have real issues with the presentation of faith as human-centric. Faith is not something that we can work up through hype – otherwise healing would be far more human-centric than it is God-centric. I’ve had prayer for healing for a number of different issues, my major one being my eyesight. The way that the subject of faith is often preached from the front, it seems like if I can just create enough faith, enough expectancy in my spirit, then God is bound to respond. The problem with faith being presented like this is that it leaves the issue in my hands, and then when I haven’t been healed, without a correct understanding of who God is and how he works, I can be left feeling insecure and disqualified. I trust God because of what I know of Him – but I know of Him because I have trusted Him.

I don’t have any really deep theology on this and in many ways its an area that does well without being torn to shreds and dissected by hours of debate at a hermeneutical hui (yes, theologians in New Zealand do actually have these.) The Bible is my ultimate reference point for faith, reminding me that I can trust in God. Scriptures like 119.168a – ”You are good, and what you do is good,” – remind me that God has not changed, and that he ultimately has my best intentions at heart. Numbers 23.19 points out that, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfil?” Malachi 3:6 begins with the clear (almost doctrinal!) statement that “I the LORD do not change.”

It’d be nice if every Christian could claim that they had ultimate trust in God – but the reality is that we are all at various stages of immaturity and every single one of us goes through a dark night of the soul. I’d suggest that while God doesn’t always cause these periods of confusion and silence, he allows them in order that we are forced to confront the realities of the barrenness and lack of trust that there is in our lives towards him. However, I believe that there is a deeper level of faith that goes beyond the questioning of why God allows bad things to happen. This ‘subconscious faith’ is my unshakable and unbreakable confidence that God is who he has proclaimed himself to be, and that I can trust him with whatever is going on in my world. The terminology is slightly rudimentary, but I think it makes the point.

It’s the reality that even when my world feels like its falling to pieces, God isn’t speaking about the decisions I have to make and my needs don’t seem to be being met, he is still good and I can cling to this faith even when my mind is consciously questioning why I trust in him. In my book assignment – which I’m trying very hard not to cover the same ground in this assignment, although I really talked about this whole area of faith in the last assignment – I highlighted that Reinhard Bonnke in his book ‘Faith’ points out that faith is based on what we know God has already done. We have to have present and future tense faith… but this is based on past tense faith. We trust in the immutability of God, and indeed much of our faith is based on his aseity, the fact that he is the source of his own being, he is ontologically independent. This negates the idea of panentheism, promoted by philosophers like Hegel who define that “without the world, God is not God.”

God is not dependent upon us – and this ‘wholly otherness’ is what gives us faith, because going back to Numbers 23.19, he is not flawed like humanity – he does not lie, or change who he is, or deceive. I trust in him because I know that he is infinitely superior. To summarise: I’d argue that my faith is not necessarily restrained by my incomplete knowledge of God… but that as I know more of him, my fallback position and my ability to remind myself of my experience with his faithfulness increase (which is really saying the same thing in a different way…)

New Zealand appears in twitter trends

New Zealand, right up there alongside Harry Potter and MJ. Good times. We were at the top of the CNN news page too. It’s because we just had a tsunami… note that the tsunami was only 6 inches deep, way down south.

Growing up in YWAM, I have sat through plenty of teaching on the topic of ‘hearing the voice of God.’ Some of it has been excellently presented, some of them were (to be honest) fairly boring to sit through. I can’t think of one specific teaching time when I suddenly ‘got it’ and was able to hear the voice of God – but today I live with an incredible legacy that I inherited from my parents, from the King’s Kids staff, and that was brought into maturity through the tender grace of the Lord, and leaders around my life who have inspired me to go after some form of prophetic anointing.

Every now and then, I have days where I get frustrated… where I want to throw a hissy fit and give up the pursuit of hearing Him more clearly. Today was one of those days… there have been a few major things in recent months that I thought I’d heard the Lord clearly on which haven’t worked out the way I thought they would… and its felt like I hit a brick wall and I’m not hearing clearly.

These hissy fit moments don’t last long though… they’re usually birthed out of frustration, and the tension between the anointing and clarity that I have now… and where I want it to be. In the middle of my workday, as I was making coffees and contemplating some of these recent areas that so far haven’t worked out as I thought they would, I felt the Lord point out that the prophetic without relationship is simply fortune telling. It reduces it to being a know-the-future vending machine. As usually happens, my thought process was ‘hey, that’s a good way to put it… wait… ouch.’

I am unashamed about the fact that I want to hear the Holy Spirit and know what he is saying at a whole other level to what I do now. Sometimes I second guess myself and my ability to be sure that I’m catching His heart, not just superimposing my thoughts onto what I feel is His communication. I literally want to have the whole names-faces-addresses deal… to be able to speak to individuals, groups and communities with the clear Word of the Lord.

However, more than any of the ‘stuff’, I want to know Him. It’s a beautiful cliché, but today has reminded me to be more jealous over my secret place… the prayer closet… sometimes people use weird terms and have strange ideas about this, but in reality it boils down to three words. “You and me.” Earlier in the week one of our ALC lectures was on ‘devotional pathways’, exploring the concept that everyone has a different way of connecting with God. I was what our speaker called a ‘contemplative intellectual.’ I love searching the Word… primarily in the context of being alone with Jesus (with my commentaries and Greek dictionaries.)

So in the morning, I’ve said I’ll be awake and praying while a friend is speaking at a meeting. It’s in a different time zone, so that means an early start for me… but once that’s done, I’m going to take my bible and laptop and head to the secret meeting place, and get to know God just that little bit better.

Upon the recommendation of a blog-friend – ie one of those people that you meet by starting to read their blog, then suddenly you’re 15,000km across the earth and you get to meet them in person – I downloaded the Forerunner Music compilation album, Majestic. It’s one of the newer releases from IHOP-KC and it’s been playing on repeat on my computer for the last three days. That’s due to the fact I have no CD player that works in my car, and I don’t own any form of portable music player.

There are two songs in particular which I really like – I’ve had ‘84′ by Justin Rizzo playing in my head all day, in particular the line, “This is but a picture, only a glimpse, of what I will be doing forever.” The other one I really like is called ‘The Entry’ by Matt Gilman – and I like it because there is a chorus on there that I first heard played on the webstream this one time seven months ago on a nightwatch set, it stuck in my head, and I’ve been singing it continously ever since, without knowing where to find it.

That line ‘only a glimpse…’ resonates within my spirit… because I know the truth that this is what I was built for. Along the lines of Psalm 27:4, where David writes the famous words, “One thing I have desired… that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,” and Psalm 84 where he writes, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere,” along the lines of the famous Augustinian quote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” and along the lines of the insatiable longing for something that’s deep within my spirit that won’t go away… I know that I was made to be fascinated by Jesus… that he has set eternity in my heart… that somehow, deep within my DNA, there is a residual longing for God that can only be answered by Himself.

“Explore and explain the nature of Revelation and the different approaches adopted to its interpretation. In summary form, show how your chosen persepctive is worked out in the struture of Revelation. Briefly explain the implication your preferred approach might have for our understanding of eschatology?”

Right. 2500 words or less.

“Splagchnizomai” – according to my textbook, this means literally ‘to be moved in one’s bowels’ – and is that word that was used in the gospels to be the word describing Jesus’ miracles in their role as ‘acts of compassion.’

So when Jesus was moved with compassion… his guts were torn up… I understand that form of compassion somewhat.

Today at ALC I had my first ‘communications class’ assignment due – I had to do a 12-15 minute message on anything I wanted to do, but it was assessed. Fun times.

I didn’t feel that nervous but when I got up front – atmosphere really not helping because was trying to speak to 6 people in the big auditorium – I was fully like shaking, and it was AWKWARD because I’ve done that kind of thing before. Not sure why I freaked out today.

So at the end, the guy assessing asks me, “What CDs of preaching would you be most likely to pick up and listen to.” Had a quick think, being honest that I haven’t listened to much taped preaching lately… pulled out Mike Bickle… and the IHOP Podcasts. I was then informed that I should ‘widen’ my preaching listening (and I agree)… suggesting Bill Johnson, or someone who doesn’t pack quite so much content into their message. I’m pretty solid with content… but need to learn to present it well.

One of the nice things about living in New Zealand – and being in a different timezone – is that I can listen to the nightwatch prayer sessions at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City without having to be awake all night… give or take an hour because of daylight saving, but its usually 6pm-12pm my time.

Lately though, every time I listen, something in me stirs… I can’t listen to this stuff without engaging with it (not that I’d want to) but the Spirit is on it. Somehow a prayer meeting in Kansas City, MO, USA is affecting me in Stoke, Nelson, New Zealand. It’s pretty cool… and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day my life tracks closer to this movement again.

… by the fact that this week I learnt new words including synergism, epistemology, eastern pantheistic monism and normative.