Ashley Evans - Structure and the Armour of God
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:
- 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.
- Breastplate of Righteosness: Reminds us that we are right before God and that we can expect god to move in our lives.
- Belt of Truth: We need to remind ourselves that God’s word is true and tuck in our loose thinking
- Shoes: We need to say to God “I’m prepared for any assignment that you have for me today”
- Shield of Faith: We need to remind ourselves about what God has shown us, the things that remind us about how God is real
- 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.
