Discovering the Real Jesus in Monroe

(Monroe)

400 people gathered at Redeemer Fellowship Church here in Monroe last evening for worship and then Chris Overstreet from Bethel Redding Church in Redding, California spoke. I saw some people healed physically and emotionally. I attribute these things to a loving God who wants to reach out to His children and display His love and His power.

Are you in need of healing? Why not come tonight to Redeemer. I had one local businessman tell me this after last night’s gathering. He said: “I wasn’t going to come to this thing. But now, after what God just did to me, and after what I saw God doing with others, I will never be the same again.

This is not about my church. A lot of people from a lot of different churches were there, to include people from Ohio. We’ll be gathering tonight at 7 PM. I would love to see you there.

(Monroe)

Tomorrow through Sunday - May 9-10-11 - Chris Overstreet, Outreach Pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, comes to speak at our church in Monroe (Redeemer Fellowship). (7 PM each night. Free.)

I am very impressed with the stuff that God does through the people at Bethel Redding. And Chris is a very on-fire 28-year-old who loves Jesus passionately. So, I’m expecting God to do a lot of good things this weekend.

Our focus is what I call PDI.
- Proclamation (of the Real Jesus message, which is the Kingdom of God)
- Demonstration (of the power of God in healings and deliverances)
- Impartation (of the fiery power of God in the hearts of all who come)

I believe in this stuff. I’ve seen God move in power and love. I mean, if God is real (which I believe) then one might expect that the Maker of the universe is loving and powerful enough as well as personal enough to reach out to us.

For anyone wanting a more “rational” and “intellectual” approach to this kind of thing read philosopher J.P. Moreland’s excellent book Kingdom Triangle.

(Monroe)

Chris Overstreet, Outreach Pastor at Bill John ’s Bethel Redding Church in Redding, California, will speak and minister at Redeemer Fellowship Church this weekend.

Fri night, May 9 - 7 PM

Sat morning, May 10 - 11 AM - workshop

Sat night, May 10 - 7 PM

Sun morning, May 11 - 10:30 AM

Sun night, May 11 - 7 PM

(Monroe)

Tomorrow morning I’m flying to Lakeland, Florida, with 20 people from our church to check out the thing God is doing there - reports of healings and deliverances. Be back Wednesday!

I not only believe God can and does heal people today, I have seen this happen. One of the great joys I have as a pastor is to pray for people to be healed and see God heal them.

(Monroe)

The video game “Grand Theft Auto IV” just came out and is and is going to be a huge seller. All real followers of Jesus should protest and not buy it. Why?

Here’s one reason and, I think, it should be enough. In the game you can hire a prostitute, have sex with her, then instead of giving her a tip beat her with a baseball bat. See here and here to verify this. Now listen to this. “You don’t have to do that to advance in the game.” Gee… it’s just like real life. You don’t have to kill and rape people to advance in life. How profound.

“Some gamers have also reported playing the game with the intention of doing the minimum amount of violence possible - hanging out, making friends, watching the game’s TV shows or going online with the in-game internet. For some, the game’s realism has a sobering effect. “The physics of death feel shockingly real. Bodies can’t be blown apart or torn to pieces, but they react convincingly to explosions and severe impacts. Each death is a decision,” wrote one reviewer.”

Are we supposed to stand up and applaud GTA-IV for giving us a game that, just like in real life, we could choose to rape and kill but don’t have to? If so, then surely GTA-IV is unnecessary since we have real life situations. We don’t need a game like this to train us to make moral choices. One could learn the horror of the Holocaust by slaugthering another 6 million Jews, but I suggest figure this out in an other way.

“”It’s going to be the biggest game of the year,” says Simon Barton from Gameplanet, New Zealand’s largest on-line games retailer. “It’s blown away Halo 3. We sold out of the Xbox version the day before release with pre-orders.” In four days he’s sold around 1500 copies of the game, including about 800 of the special edition package which Gameplanet sells for $150 (compared to $120 for the standard edition). “We’ve just got some new stock of the Xbox version in today (Friday) - that probably won’t last the weekend.”"

One gamer wrote that ”It consistently portrays women as disposable sex objects and it is inexcusable.” One could begin to think that the creators of Grand Theft Auto IV (David Jones and others) themselves view women this way. The game becomes a projection of their own decadence. Purchase it and you’re voting for the degradation of women and filling the pockets of the game’s amoral creators.

Jesus-followers will rightly consider GTA-IV as ensconced in the kingdom of darkness and as advancing the dark kingdom. This game may sell more than Halo 3. Since we can learn a lot about this world we’re living in by just watching what sells, we should pray that a move of God would counter such darkness with light.

(MCCC)

I just received this press release from Monroe County Community College.

WJR-AM (760) radio anchor and Monroe County Community College alum Paul W. Smith will broadcast a special edition of his morning show live from the college’s La-Z-Boy Center from 6-9 a.m. on Monday, May 5.

The special broadcast of The Paul W. Smith Show – which is being sponsored by Monroe County Community College, the Monroe County Historical Society, Mercy Memorial Hospital System, La-Z-Boy Inc. and Eastern Michigan University – will focus on summer travel and tourism opportunities in Monroe County. It is free and open to the public.

As of the issuing of this press release, the college has confirmed that Smith will interview the following individuals live on the show from MCCC:

· 6:20 a.m.: MCCC President Dr. David Nixon

· 7:20 a.m.: La-Z-Boy President and CEO Kurt Darrow, Mercy Memorial Hospital System Board Chairman John Zarb and Cabela’s Events Coordinator Steve Zollars

In addition, Smith will conduct phone interviews at 8:20 a.m. with U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Dearborn) and Dr. William Anderson, director of the Michigan Department History, Arts and Libraries.

AND…  The WJR jetcopter will be landing on the main campus at 9 a.m. Monday to pick up Paul W. Smith after his show, which he is doing live from the La-Z-Boy Atrium that morning from 5:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.

The jetcopter will be landing in the large square area directly between the Life Sciences Building and the Welch Health Education Building.

 (I took this picture of the Negev Desert while in Israel in February.)

There’s a nice little article on christianitytoday.com on desert spirituality. I was introduced to this in the early 1980s by reading Richard Foster’s brilliant Celebration of Discipline. Then I discovered Henri Nouwen. Nouwen’s works have influenced me greatly, as have Thomas Merton’s. Nouwen’s little book The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry, is an excellent book to begin with. Read slowly and listen.

I had, as a student in my Personal Transformation class at Palmer Theological Seminary, Father Bishoy El-Antony. Father Bishoy is a Coptic monk from the monastery of St. Antony of the Fourth Century in Egypt. He’s a modern desert father, who sometimes sleeps in the desert and spends time praying for days in a cave. He came to class every day dressed up in full Coptic garments. One day I taught a lesson on St Antony of Egypt, the original desert father. After my presentation Father Bishoy told me, “You did a good job. I learned something.” He then said, “We would like you to come to Egypt and teach us more about prayer.” I responded, “Father Bishoy, I’m not sure that I would have much to teach you about prayer.” Father Bishoy said, with a twinkle in his eye, “We are so humble that we can even learn from a person like you.”

Any serious follower of Jesus would do well to spend some time immersed in the wisdom-from-God that was dispensed into the hearts of these early Christian desert fathers, who left a culture they viewed as decadent for the sake of finding God in a non-corrupted environment, for the sake of bringing God’s truths back into their culture.

Here’s our updated website for Redeemer Ministry School in Monroe.

(Monroe)

The Real Jesus’ words are subversive. Like what Jesus says in Luke 12: 13-21. Jesus is speaking in front of several thousand people when a man interrupts and tells Jesus to side with him against his brother in an inheritance dispute. Jesus tells the man that He’ll have nothing to do with such things. But Jesus does use the man as an example of what NOT to do.

In Luke 12: 15 Jesus says, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” These words are phenomenally un-American. Because here, in America, a man’s life (and a woman’s life as well) does consist of stuff, possessions, things, and money. In America today clothing does “make the man.” People get defined and hierarchized in relatiion to the carrs they drive, the homes they live in, their physical appearances, the jobs they have, their accomplishments and trophies and degrees, and so on. Here in Monroe, when I moved here 17 years ago, I heard about the “East Side” like it was the place where lesser people lived.

Jesus rejects all of this. Your life and my life, Jesus says, does not “consist” of things we wear and drive and live in and hang on the walls of our home. Can you see how radical this idea is? Can you see how, if people in America who say they are Christians actually bought into what Jesus is saying, then our consumer economy would go down the tubes? All we’d have left to trust in, since we’re not trusting in possessions any more, would be God and one another. And that would be very interesting. Would it be worse then what we have now?

Not according to Jesus. The idea that in money and possessions we have “security” is false, as well as idolatrous. And it forms the breeding ground for worry and anxiety. Who can doubt that in America today, and across the globe, these are very anxious times? And that the anxiety level is directly related to a pseudo-security that is umbilically connected to money and possessions and, to use the Jesus-word, greed?

Are you worried about your future today? Why not begin by finally rejecting the idea that your worry will diminish when you have more money. The truth is that no one in the history of our planet has ever had “more” than you and I have. So, logically, if the solution was “more,” then we should be the least anxious people who have ever lived. Unfortunately, the daily news says the opposite.

In the Kingdom Jesus talked about there’s not words like “worry” and “anxiety.” Because it’s all about trust in a God who loves and cares for you more than He cares for sparrows. And there’s phenomenal freedom in the Kingdom of God. Because God does not evaluate you by what you wear, earn, drive, or eat. To God, your life does not in any way “consist” of such things. Receive this and live free.

(Sterling State Park)

I grew up in a church that never talked about the power of God as it relates to things like miracles happening today. Yes, Jesus healed people 2000 years ago. We all believed that. But it’s not happening today. This began to strike me as absurd, in a certain way. If God did stuff like this a long, long time ago, but does not do such things today, why not? What kind of God is that? For me, that’s the kind of thinking that makes me begin to doubt that God ever actually healed people.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to avoid embarrassment, certain Christian theologians invented elaborate theories called “cessationism” and “dispensationalism.” “Cessationism” is from the verb “to cease.” Miraculous things like healings have ceased. They don’t happen anymore. We don’t need them, because now we have the Bible. The idea goes like this: healings and miracles were needed long ago to demonstrate that God is real and that Jesus is God’s Son. But once the Bible was put together there was no more need for the healings. “Dispensationalism” says there are different “dispensations” of God or chapters in divine history. The time for God to dispense gifts of healing are now over. On the non-blbical theory of dispensationalsim, there are no more gifts of healing. (Please note that the actual Bible never, ever says that. Read 1 Corinthians 12 for starters.)

I’ve got to tell you that, as a Christian and as a theologian, I don’t buy Cessationism or Dispensationalism. As I read the Bible it tells me that God has given spiritual gifts to the people of God (the “church”). One of those gifts is healing. In the Book of Acts the early Christians were at times used by God to demonstrate His reality through physical healing.

James 5:14-15 states: “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.” It doesn’t add, “But after a few hundred years you won’t need to do this any more.

Are you sick today, either physically or emotionally? I have personally seen people like you made well. I have seen cancer healed. I’ve personally seen more God-healings of people in the last few years then in all of my life. Here is what I believe. There is a God who is more than able to physically and emotionally heal people. This God is still doing these kind of things today. And this never ceases to blow me away with wonder and joy, because my academic studies immersed me in logic and analytic philosophy and the reductionistic philosophies of David Hume et. al.

Are you sick? Struggling? Find someone who believes James 5:14-15 and have them pray for you. If you don’t know someone like this, then I invite you to Redeemer Fellowship Church this Sunday. I would love to pray for you and see what God does. Or come this Sunday evening at 6 PM when we are going to teach on the restoration of the gift of healing in the 21st century. If you get healed, it won’t be us. Only God can do that. And we won’t embarrass you or get weird on you. Some of the stuff you see on TV is not how the real Jesus did it. I love it when I get to pray for a person and simply say, “In Jesus’ name, be healed.” And then, to find out they are healed! And to see them give thanks, not so much to me, but to God, who alone is able to do that kind of thing.