Hello - well you wait for ages for a post and then two come along at
once. If you missed the previous post (with the photo of the sleeping
bag incident) then please do check out week 10!
Pneumatology
This week was spent on pneumatology (study of the Holy Spirit). For
those who don't know much about this He's the third one of the Trinity
who lives inside Christians when they are born again, who's job is to
transform their character to become more like Jesus and to give them
power to speak in tongues, heal, prophesy and so on.
So we had three days on the theory and then a scary two days on the practice.
Warning!
I appreciate that this next part of the blog might freak you out if you
think Christianity is just a belief in God and trying to do good deeds.
Please feel free to comment or email me if you want to chat through
some of these issues further. I remember the first time I encountered
this I was freaked out - because it meant that either God was real or
some very freaky things were going on...
Holy Spirit practical
So it was like - "OK who doesn't speak in tongues and would like to?"
and then praying for them. If you're new to this tongues is where you
speak another language - one of your spirit talking direct to God - it's
like an intimate prayer language of the heart. Is it just made up
stuff? I've sometimes wondered - am I just making this up or is it
really a God thing? But I've seen and heard too many times where
someone speaks in a tongue and someone else recognises the language even
though the person speaking in tongues has never learnt it.
Then it was OK let's pray for words of knowledge. This is where God
gives you information about someone else that you would never know
yourself. God does this not to embarrass or freak people out but so
that He can heal people physically and emotionally. Various examples of
this have been Jen suddenly hearing in her head that our daughter
Hannah was out on the road (and she was), I somehow knew that my friend
was just about to leave home without his passport (and he was), Pastor
Mark Driscoll knew that a particular girl had been raped (and she had)
and he was able to pray for her and see healing, etc.
So what happened with us? Well all sorts (in fact so many I can't
remember them all). But someone felt there was someone with lower back
pain, there was, and they were prayed for and it was immediately better
(I have to confess being sceptical about the whole leg lengthening
business but I can't deny that this girl's back was better immediately
after...); we also had someone feel that someone had shoulder pain and
there was and they were prayed for and were immediately better, about
someone looking for their father as a small child and not being able to
find them and seeing that person freed from the trauma that had caused,
words also about isolation and seeing God meet their need (and deliver
one from some nasty satanic bondage - I confess I found the screaming,
spasming and puking when they were being prayed for rather freaky - was
this put on? I know her very well and can tell you that's not who she
is as she's one of the most genuine people there. But I can tell you
that she had been involved in a lot of unwholesome stuff before she
became a Christian and that she is just so much freer than she was
before the prayer).
For me I had two things - one about disappointment which spoke into a
time (which I had forgotten all about) where I felt I was let down and
deserted by God - I feel so much better now after prayer. Also one
about how I had felt a calling on my life for a couple of years now,
hadn't known what it was and had tried various things but they hadn't
seemed right and that it would come into focus by the end of this year.
That was freaky as I had been feeling for the last three years that
there was something else I was supposed to be doing for God but hadn't
known, I tried writing books with various people but it hadn't come to
much and also chasing becoming an IFA but it hadn't come to much either -
so this was like the story of my life - could they have guessed it (as
they didn't know me at all)? Well as a mathematician I know a fair bit
about probabilities and it's got to a point in my life where I've seen
so many things that I either say this is an unbelievable amazing number
of coincidences or take a very short step of faith to say this is just
so unlikely to be chance that there must be something else. So let's
see what the rest of this year brings then...
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