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Pastor Ashley preached a really good message on the final morning of the conference. Everyone was struggling with tiredness resulting from late finishes and early starts so the praise and worship was a little more subdued than for other sessions. Pastor Ashley, however, was in fine form, even after staying up till 3am because he felt that God was calling him to rewrite the message he had planned on preaching. Where can I get me some of that anti-tiredness annointing?

He started off following on from his opening night message talking about how Moses, when he came down from the mountain, gave the Israelites structure to contain the presence of God. How will the peoples of this world know we are different unless His presence goes with us?. He talked about how the right structures can turn the things that happen at a moment (the one time experiences) into momentum that continues to sustain us. Pastor Ashley really wanted us to take what we had learned at the conference and build the structures in our lives to sustain God’s presence going forward. He talked about “the nostalgia annointing” where all that people rely on is the way that God moved in days gone by and not how He moves now. He talked about Numbers 13 1-20 where God commands Moses to speak to the rock to see water flow but Moses is disobedient and strikes the rock with his staff as he had done before.

Pastor Ashley made the following points about structures:

• Moments are personal experiences but the right structure can be accessible to everyone
• Moments can be lost when a generation dies but the right structure can carry the presence of God from one generation to the next
• In the New Testament the right structure is the church and the people
• A structure can expand the presence of God further and wider
• We need to build structures to contain our mountain top experiences.
• It takes time to build a structure
• He then talked about the structures of sacrifice and worship referring back to opening night

Pastor Ashley then went on to talk how to build a structure for praying prayers that work built on a foundation of the armour of God from Eph 6:8-10. He talked about only going to pray if we are in the Spirit and how the armour of God enables us to get into the Spirit:

1. Helmet of Salvation: This represents a different mindset. We need to remember that God is with us and what He has done for us in the past.
2. Breastplate of Righteosness: Reminds us that we are right before God and that we can expect god to move in our lives.
3. Belt of Truth: We need to remind ourselves that God’s word is true and tuck in our loose thinking
4. Shoes: We need to say to God “I’m prepared for any assignment that you have for me today”
5. Shield of Faith: We need to remind ourselves about what God has shown us, the things that remind us about how God is real
6. Sword of the Spirit: We need to remember the things that God has promised us and use them to move forward.

Pastor Ashley also made the point that the armour worn on the body was designed to keep you from getting killed but that the shield of faith was designed to keep us from getting injured at all. The shield and the sword were the primary things that helped us to win but that it was easier to wear stuff than to carry the shield and the sword so that we had to expend effort to take these two things up.

Matt and Lori Crouch did the second session on the Friday together talking about their new movie “One Night With the King” and sharing some testimonies of how God has brought them to where they are at. I wrote down a few points but it wasn’t the sort of session that really lent itself to note taking:

• God can give influence to whomever He wants
• Esther had every excuse in the world not to succeed but God chose her to save a nation
• Influence comes from God
• What you believe is what rules you, not your circumstances. God’s deliverence is more powerful than that. It has already been accomplished, all we have to do is believe.

I am in awe of the gift that God has placed on this man’s life and the skill with which he uses it. Jetlagged as he was he still managed to hold the whole place spellbound with the way that he explained the scriptures. By the time he had finished I was ready to sit there for another hour or two and have him keep going. It’s worth getting the DVD or CD if you can get your hands on it, the brief notes I am writing here aren’t going to do the message justice.

He was talking from the passage in 1 Samuel 3:1-11 where God calls Samuel one night. He started out about talking about how God is always a god of transition and movement, that it is no use putting up a monument or a flag to say that here is where God moves because where God is moving and how he moves changes. This is why we need to be listening to the voice of God rather than relying on past revelation. He made the point that the Holy Spirit is always referred to in scripture as something that changes: A fire, a river, a rushing wind. We need to remain flexible and teachable.

He then went on to make the point that we need to maintain and build both our vertical relationships with God and our horizontal relationships with man in order to remain flexible. Eli has lost his vertical relationship: he thinks Hannah is drunk because he is unfamiliar with that sort of crying out to God, he takes a long time to realise that God is talking to Samuel, God isn’t talking to him. Eli’s spiritual sesnses have been dulled throgh lack of use, we need to exercise our spiritual senses by using them. When we praise and worship God we tap into what is already going on in heaven, reestablishing our vertical relationship.

Bishop Jakes then went back to talking about transition. Samuel was nurtured by Hannah, weaned, trained by Eli and now he is in transition to being called by God. He made the point that you don’t want to have people in your ministry who have not been weaned otherwise you are turning the church into a nursery. Samuel is transitioning from relying on the voice of a man to relying on the voice of God. If God is calling us with a new movement we shouldn’t keep on going back to the voices and people of tradition to validate oiur experience, we need to learn to transition to hearing the new move of God.

Samuel has to go back to the right place to hear God. If we go to all the trouble to get to a place where we hear God we cannot let Satan push us out of that place.

T.D. Jakes brought mighty blessing to all who heard him that night.

The second session on Thursday was really really good and it was a shame that more people weren’t there to hear it. I think that it was something to do with a prophet being without honour in their own country.

Jane Evans was talking about the disciples missing the point during the feeding of the 5000 from Mark 6. The disciples had just been sent out by Jesus and seen many miraculous things happen (the sick healed, demons driven out) and yet when the feeding of the 5000 happened they missed the point of what Jesus was doing and the miracle he had done. This goes to show that you can be involved in the miraculous and still get a calloused and insensitive heart.
Jesus gave them 3 instructions when they went out to help their hearts stay soft:

1. Take Nothing With You: Rely only on God
2. Stay in Only One House: Don’t get caught up in people’s politics and stay focussed.
3. Shake the Dust Off Your Feet: Get rid of bad experiences as they happen.

Then they get back and Jesus ignores their needs, teaches all day and then asks them to feed 5000 people. The first question he asks them is how much food do they have? These are the resources that God has given us to accomplish the task that is at hand. What they didn’t realise is that everything that they needed to do the miracle was already there - God had already been doing the miraculous through them. All that the disciples were doing was handing out food, did they even appreciate what was happening?
God does supernatural stuff in our lives every day and we need learn to understand and appreciate what God is doing in order to keep our hearts soft.

2 chapters later Jesus did the miracle again and they still didn’t get it - more proof that they missed it the first time. This was an exact repeat so you think that the disciples would have figured out what was going on but they didn’t. We need to remember the great things that God has done in the past. Then Jesus does Q and A with the disciples to try and drive home the point, going over the deatils trying to make the point and get them to see what happened (and they think that he is chastising them for forgetting the bread, the disciples crack me up sometimes). Jesus needed the disciples to know that they had received power and authority to be able to deal with the situation.

Pastor Jane made 3 final points:

1. Jesus always leaves enough to give us what he promised
2. Jesus also meets our needs although not necessarily in the way we would expect
3. Jesus cares about us, he wants us to get that and remember that fact.

Jentezen Franklin Preached a really cool message on Thursday Morning comparing sporting fans with Christians. He made the point that real fans do some crazy things that are acceptable in society and that what the church needs are some real fans of Jesus. Here are his 8 things that real fans do:

1. Real fans arrive early
2. Real fans don’t care what time they get home
3. Real fans endure any kind of weather
4. Real fans want the best seat in the house
5. Real fans never miss a game
6. Real fans memorise statistics
7. Real fans are preapred to pay
8. Real fans are vocal

This post marks the first of a series wrapping up the last couple of days of Influencers.

Jentezen Franklin preached on Wednesday night on “Touching the Old Bones” from 2nd Kings 13:14-21. Joash, by not striking the ground more times, failed to fulfil the transfer of God’s annointing to a new generation from Elijah to Elisha to Joash and also meant that Elisha did not fulfil God’s promise of a double annointing. The bible records 7 major miracles for Elijah and up to that point 13 for Elisha. When the man comes to life in V21 it fulfils the double blessing. The point was that we need to get in touch with the old bones of the things and the people that have gone before in order to combine the annointing of the old generation with that of a new generation.
This was one of those meetings where you sort of had to be there to get it, short on teaching (I only have 1/2 a page of notes) but big on atmosphere. It finished off with a huge altar call for the youth that was very powerful, I know of at least one person in my small group whose daughter was touched by God in a big way.

Simply Strategic Show: Focus On Five

A really good brief podcast on how to focus on the spiritual development of people you are leading. Well worth a listen.

Man this guy can preach!

He talked a lot about his “Monster”, the thing inside him that is never satisfied when things appear to be going well to everyone around him because it doesn’t measure up to the vision that God has placed on his heart. The A in DNA was the alienation that leaders feel because of this, that they don’t quite fit in, not really belonging. When God pulls people out they never fit in again.

The N was for national leaders and the point was that deliverers need exposure to national leaders that are also looking at the much bigger picture because if we are always limited to talking to people who think small we will only ever end up achieving small things.

The D in DNA (he was doing them in reverse order) was for Divine Disappointment, being unhappy with the status quo and wanting to do something about it, the latter being really important rathe than just whining.

He then went on to talk about the deliverer Moses from Exodus 15:22-25a:

• Moses went from hero to zero in 3 days, don’t trust in human adulation
• The people thought that this was the solution to their problems until they tasted the water
• The solution was there all the time, Moses just had to see it
• All we have to do is cry out to God - “Show Me!”

The 9am session this morning was Jentezen Franklin talking about God having faith in us even as we have faith in God. A few points he made:

• There are many instances in the Bible, notably David and Abraham, where God sent increasing challenges preparing people for their eventual role
• Wouldn’t it be grat if God testified about us in heaven like Job “Have you observed my servant …” (scary!, look what happened to Job!)
• God’s faith in us comes from seeing our reaction under pressure.
• You don’t have to be perfect for God to use you.
• God wants to bless people where His reputation is safe
• God’s faith in us needs to be tested, especially at 2 danger times: When we have nothing and when we have everything
• Getting everything we dream of is the biggest test of our faith
• Can God trust us under temptation, especially where there is no danger of being caught?