in Christ: Andrew Fountain's blog

• Presence of the Spirit is of massive importance
  • The manifestation of his presence, not just singing good songs.

Acts 1:8 —they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came.

• When we are helping people to enter into the Baptism of the Spirit, it is very important that they be theological comfortable with it.
  • There is no point in praying for people who don’t believe in it!
  • Never just pray for them. Even if they are blessed at the time, they may experience a backlash of doubt afterwards.
  • the more you are assured from Scripture, the better.
• When Jesus said “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” they had an O.T. background for understanding this.
  • The Spirit coming upon people was not a strange thought for the Jewish mind.
  • David, the 70 elders in the wilderness, Judges.
  • Joel said there would be an end-time outpouring
  • John the Baptist introduces him as the baptizer in the Spirit
• Jesus didn’t immediately talk about this, but said that first he must have his baptism of fire. [read more...]

• The Joy of the Lord is our strength. Why will the trees of the field clap their hands? The whole of creation is waiting for the sons of God to come into their joy, and that is when they clap their hands—they are waiting for us to “get it”!
• Joy always brings noise!
• But all of us have had faith failures. We measure ourselves by some unfair standard when we read the history books about the great men of faith.
• Religious traditions are blockages that hinder our faith.
  • He is the one who anoints us to lift the yokes and burdens from our shoulders.
    • Our people must know that we love pastoring them!
  • Every day we need to get into the anointing. To get our first love back every morning.
  • We need to deal with these issues of the heart, cynicism and skepticism, which is a barrier to the anointing.
  • He is the one who has the burden of the nations, not us!
  • One of the great supernatural signs will be ministers who are not under a burden because his burden is light!
  • Let’s take a moment to all stand and spend a moment asking God to free us from all strongholds of cynicism. [read more...]

Joshua 1:1-9

• I felt very drawn to this passage as I was preparing.
  • We have a sense that God is turning a new page for us
  • He is using many ways of communicating this to us, some of them quite unusual
  • God loves our new initiatives, but when he does something new, it is altogether different.
• We will look at some principles from Joshua 1

2. It requires fresh faith

• Joshua is going to have to start this new era by doing a miracle
• Our God is fundamentally a supernatural God. If we are going to work with him we have to be part of this
• God says “Behold I have given you Jericho” —but they have not taken the city yet!
• Our training programs often focus on providing information, but it is more important to provide a call to faith
• We are called to faith exploits. God wants us to get to know him and to put on show how trustworthy he is.
• Cross the Jordan! Come on a journey of faith! Challenge your people to faith so they have stories of what God has done!
  • (At this point he told some stories of people in his church.)

This evening I preached on The Kingdom and Healing. This wasn't a polemic against cessationists, but an attempt to get a better understanding of how healing worked in the ministry of Jesus and his disciples. It came out of my own desperate study to improve in this area. As I grappled with chapters 9-11 of Luke I found a flow of ideas which was helpful to me. In the (rather short) sermon I simply went through these chapters and pulled out this theme.

My rathier brief notes on the Kingdom and healing as well as the audio are uploaded here.

Newfrontiers Leadership Conference 2006 - Training Track 2-3

How do we obtain a corporate anointing? The manifest presence and power of God in the midst of his people? According to Rob Rufus, exalting Jesus leads to a corporate anointing. The final session from Rob Rufus is on this subject of corporate anointing. It is a shorter session than the others in which he focuses on the person of Jesus Christ and the implication of this theology for us, drawn largely from the book of Hebrews. Once again this is a message not to miss.

Click here for the free download page at Newfrontiers

Newfrontiers Leadership Conference 2006 - Training Track 2-2

There are two topics covered in this address: The importance of teaching in order to build faith for healing, and the biblical teaching on the value of the laying on of hands. There are some fascinating accounts of supernatural healing and I found this an interesting and worthwhile listen.

Click here for the free download page at Newfrontiers

This follows on from Rob Rufus’ main session and explores some of the topics in more detail. His directness and humble honesty are to be commended, and whilst I am sure this is not the last word on the supernatural, he has important things to say on the topic.

Click here for the free download page at Newfrontiers

Newfrontiers Leadership Conference 2006 - Main Session 04

This session is definitely worth listening to. Rob Rufus is coming from a different stream to Newfrontiers—New Covenant Ministries International, a South African based worldwide apostolic group of churches. They share many similarities with Newfrontiers, but he sounds more like a speaker from TACF.

The strength of this message is that it is fresh and challenging in an area we all desperately need to grow—the power of God manifested in our midst. He is an interesting and engaging speaker and his challenge to increased intimacy with God is particularly important. On the negative side I am wary of speakers who tell us that God is about to do something amazing. Bill Jackson in his "must read" history of the Vineyard The Quest for the Radical Middle calls this "prophetic poison" because this kind of message from the Kanasas City Prophets had the effect of paralysing evangelism and church planting by the Vineyard. Why work hard now when there is an amazing harvest just around the corner? That said, this is a session worth hearing.

Today I am working on my message for Sunday on Spiritual Gifts. I am responding to the position that only apostles (or should I say Apostles?) could dispense them. I confess that it is hard to work up enthusiasm to criticize such an idea. It is so full of holes! Anyway, I will try.