in Christ: Andrew Fountain's blog

• 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.)