Shacking Up…With Papa

Ever noticed how God seems to weave our lives in a complex tapestry? Something happens that dovetails with another event that finally makes the penny drop with something else that happened a month ago, etc., etc… Makes me want to fly way up high and see how the tapestry’s coming along!

A particularly bright thread in the last two weeks has been reading The Shack. Just to get it out of the way as to where I stand on this book (unfortunately, anything that is wildly popular/successful in the Christian world brings out the heresy hunters en masse), go read this book! (After you read the book, take a look at the author’s personal profile here.)

Ok, there, I said it.

If you’ve not heard of the book, it’s a wonderfully written and engrossing novel that reveals, in fresh and incredibly creative ways, who God is, the relationship of the Trinity and His love for us and His Creation.

All I can say to those who don’t like the theology, I wish you the best and deepest relationship you can have with your Heavenly Papa.

What, for me, is so wonderful, is not the book by itself but how the Lord has weaved it into what He’s already been saying to me the last 3 months and how He prepared my heart before I read it.

The book actually was lent to us from a South African friend of ours (it’s huge in South Africa apparently…can’t wait for the French translation!) and Angela read it a while back. The premise of the story scared me away at first simply because, as a parent, I thought it would be too hard to read. It will open up your heart with difficult situations, but it’s not brutal. It’s hard at times to read (many tears possible…be warned), but in my opinion, it’s safe. No nightmares.

Anyway, in the mean time, God was working on my heart:

• This summer, as you can read here, I went on a 1-week personal retreat to break through my fatigue and re-center my heart.
• Then at the beginning of the school year, I purposed to change my weekly schedule to make the use of my time more effective, to carve out more time with the Lord most every day, and to work at keeping a real weekly sabbath (no, Sunday doesn’t work for me…too much work to be done then!).
• Then I heard an aside in an audio teaching by NT Wright that plunged me back into one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, Romans 8. As I dug in there, I began to have some gradual revelation about the Spirit of Adoption (Romans 8:15), among other things.
• Finally, I went with a few others from our church to a conference in Germany recently where the Lord broke through to me about my real freedom in Him via a time of meditation on Romans 8:2 and some of the teaching in the conference.

This is the context in which I finally picked up The Shack. My heart was already prepared and actively enjoying my “sonship” with my Abba Father. This makes for very fertile “heart ground” into which God can plant all sorts of wonderful seeds!

So, while I do recommend this book, I realize that a prepared heart will go a long way to making this book a real window into the heart of God and not simply an occasion to painfully sprain your theology…I’d tell you more, but I don’t want to ruin the story!

Technorati : Abba, Father, God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Papa, The Shack, Trinity
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Entry Posted on: 30 November 2008 at: 9:42 pm Comments (2)  PermaLink Reflection

Martin Scott – Generational Anointings, Stewardship, Partnership

This last weekend, I went to a conference in Germany with some others from our church here in France. In order to get my German ear stimulated again (one of the teachings was actually in Spanish, translated into German…fun to see how much I understood!), I revisited the fabulous site online-predigt.de where one can find a huge deposit of downloadable teachings in MP3 format. Most are all in German but a fairly large percentage are from English-language speakers translated into German. Some of my favorite teachers can be found there so I get a good teaching and it’s translated into German as well. Highly recommended!

Anyway, I listened to this teaching by Martin Scott from the Gideon’s Army/Target Europe conference in Hanover in 2001. Very timely for what we experienced this weekend in our conference in Germany. His primary topic was intergenerational anointings and before he spoke about that he also had a preamble about partnership and how we, who are rooted in a given locality can partner with those who have been called and sent from somewhere else and how this partnership accelerates God’s purposes in a given geographic location. The two topics are related as well…an excellent and strategic teaching that is not stale seven years later.

Here’s the link from that site for the teaching.

MP3 file download link from online-predigt.de (18Mb)

Technorati : Acceleration, Anointing, Europe, Generation, Geography, Martin Scott, Orphans, Parents, Partnership, Stewardship
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Entry Posted on: 11 November 2008 at: 12:38 pm Comments (0)  PermaLink Audio Teachings, Reflection