Here are some highlights from our January Lampstand Meeting!
*Corporate prayer: overcoming offenses that come as we gather TOGETHER with other people in the place of prayer.
We are so grateful for the opportunity to gather together with others and seek the Lord. The hunger of the worship leaders and all who gather really is what makes this a dynamic time together. Let’s keep pressing in and pressing out oil!
0 Comments
What an incredible time we experienced together at our December Lampstand meeting! Even as we prepared for the gathering that day, Matthew and I both felt so much peace from the Lord (this is not always the case, as there is usually a lot to be done in order to welcome people into our home that is fully lived in by 7 people!).
As we began the meeting, I shared a brief “Christmas reflection” about the word “entrusted.” Reading the verses from 2 Timothy 2 about guarding what has been entrusted to us as well as reading the Christmas story caused me to stop and ponder the beauty of God’s plan in “entrusting” Jesus to earthly parents and the message of His birth to lowly shepherds. He has then entrusted His story to us to share! Following this reflection of Jesus’s great worth and beauty, we entered into a time of worship led by Ian Wilson. We are so grateful for Ian coming and sharing the songs of his heart with us! During worship, God highlighted in a unique way Acts 2 and the outpouring of His power and strength. It was such a powerful experience of uniting as a group to determine what the Lord was speaking, and it was as if He was instructing us in how to corporately discern His word. We had a unique experience during worship. Matthew felt he had a word in tongues. He gave a brief explanation of how this works and shared from 1 Corinthians 12 how this is a valid and biblical way that God communicates to us. He then shared the word and it was somewhat lengthy. At the end of it, I shared what I felt was a direction from the Lord to encourage each person to just be faithful to share any impression the Lord may have given. They didn’t need to feel like they had to have the whole interpretation. If you have ever experienced someone giving a word in tongues, sometimes it can just feel awkward and no one wants to speak out and share an interpretation because they aren’t sure if they have it exactly…they don’t want to get it wrong. But, when we realize that we can just share whatever part the Lord may have stirred in us, it becomes a corporate effort to hear whatever message the Lord would want to highlight. Why would God give a word in tongues when He could speak through a person in plain language? One reason could be that He wants this corporate effort of hearing. It could also be rooted in His nature, that it is His glory to conceal and our glory to search Him out (Proverbs 25:2)! He isn’t trying to be hard to reach, but He is always trying to awaken us and cause us to stretch and reach higher and deeper than we have before. I believe that another reason for tongues and interpretations is that it highlights a message from the Lord in a unique way. Usually this means of communication is not common, so when it happens, it causes us to stop and listen. God communicating with us in our meeting through the word in tongues highlighted that He really wanted us to rise up in HIS strength and receive the outpouring of His Spirit that He alone can accomplish. We are simply obedient to receive and speak with boldness. This unique experience actually seemed to be a highlighting of the message the Lord had stirred in Matthew to speak about that night. He shared about the Miracle of Oil. Our meeting fell during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which is based on a historical event when the Jews had re-taken the temple from an occupying nation, but they only had enough kosher oil to last for one day. Miraculously the oil lasted for a full 8 days! This holiday prompted Matthew to consider this miracle of the oil we receive and the Lord led him to two passages about miraculous oil in the Scripture. 1 Kings 17 tells the story of Elijah and the widow. She was faced with great need and she had to simply obey Elijah’s instruction to bake bread for him and the Lord would provide. She obeyed, and the Lord caused her flour and oil to not run out! The next passage was about Elisha and another widow. In this story found in 2 Kings 4, we see an amazing miracle of oil not running out. Again, this widow had a great need, and the prophet instructed her to take what she had, and again, she had to simply obey to see the promise of provision fulfilled. The Lord completely paid her huge debt with only a little bit of oil. In both stories there was this pattern of need, crying out, simple obedience and seeing provision and answer! God will also provide for us as we do what we know to do and then He multiplies the oil. He is able to take our feeble efforts and do something huge! We are weak and we need His strength—the miracle of oil! Impartation: We always want to allow a response time because so often we hear a message and it truly goes in one ear and out the other because we don’t take time to stop and process what we have heard. So, this is an important part of our meetings, even if it is only a brief time. During this meeting, Matthew felt that we needed to pray impartation prayers for each other. So, we gathered around each one individually and prayed that the Lord would ignite a spark to cause us to pursue Him even more. This was a precious time. I love seeing the Lord minister, and it is so valuable to take time to lay hands on one another and pray for encouragement together. We had a really special blessing for our November Lampstand meeting: Bethany Pedigo came to lead worship! Bethany is a long-time friend of ours from back in our days at King College (now King University). She lives in KY now with her husband, Josh and their three children. We love and value their friendship a great deal as it has spanned many years and many miles and we are all still pursuing the Lord's heart. What a gift these long-time friendships are! Bethany did a beautiful job of leading us in worship and there were several things that God highlighted through that time. The testimony came to us after the meeting from one friend who attended that the songs that were selected and the prayers and words ministered specifically to emotional and physical needs this person was carrying. Praise to the Lord! Our prayer is that in these times the Lord would receive praise and be lifted up and that people would have opportunity to encounter the Lord and be fueled in His presence. Matthew shared about staying connected to the Holy Spirit and specifically doing that through the process of pray-reading the Scripture. What he was sharing was so simple, yet so critical. Too often we read through the Scriptures as going through a mental exercise, and we fail to bring our hearts near to Jesus as we read. Matthew shared a Scripture from John 5:39 that says, "You search the scriptures for you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life." Jesus was reprimanding the religious leaders of His day, saying that even if you search out the Scriptures day in and day out, if you never COME TO JESUS, you won't find real life in those Scriptures. So how critical for us still today to bring our hearts and minds TO JESUS as we read His word. Matthew exhorted us to stay in conversation with Jesus as we read the Word of God. Begin an ongoing dialogue. Talk to Him as you read! He handed out a couple very helpful worksheets that offer ideas for how to do this. The primary one was about Prayer-reading the Scripture. The idea is to actually pray the Bible passages back to God. There are two broad categories of truth: truths that exhort you to believe and those that exhort you to obey. 1. When you come to truths exhorting you to believe: -Take time to actually thank Jesus for the specific truth you are reading. -Ask Him to reveal His truths to you in a greater way. 2. When you come to truths exhorting you to obey: -Commit yourself to obey what the passage describes. -Ask the Lord to empower you to obey the Scriptures. On the other handout were several Scriptures to use as examples for us; so, we took time to pick and talk to the Lord about it. We then shared some thoughts about these together. I so love and value the interaction time that meeting in a small group like this allows. It is so precious to engage with the Lord and then share from the place of encouraged connection with Him. I am so grateful for those who gather and are willing to share what the Lord is saying to them in the midst of these times! The Blessing of these times together Friends, I can never say enough how much of a blessing these meetings have been to our family and I believe for others who come as well. I am so grateful for the opportunity the Lord has given us to carve out this time to seek Him and find Him as we lift Him up in praise and worship. He is so faithful to encourage us through His presence and His Word through prayer and connection together in these times. We keep pressing on! Here’s a review of our most recent October meeting. We write these reports out so that there will be a record of the way the Lord was moving and speaking in these meetings as well as to be a reminder for those who came who might want to look back at what was said and done. We also pray that for those who weren’t here, you might find some nugget of encouragement that would cause you to press out oil wherever you may be as well! We’d also love to tell the great testimonies to tempt people to come the next time!! Worship Bethany Oakes led worship. The time and energy people have put into preparing for leading worship is so valuable. It is awesome to see how God weaves together these worship times and puts songs together that cause us to lift Him up in praise and adoration, and they draw us near in devotion and worship. He is faithful to highlight some aspect of His character each time. “We believe in you. The God of miracles!” In this worship time, He was particularly emphasizing His power and ability to show off! We need to be reminded of who God is. He is the miracle working God! It is only by a miracle that any of us are followers of Jesus! He want to encourage us in places of need or trial to remember that He has always been, is now, and always will be a miraculous God who wants to put His glory on display! Matthew shared at the end of worship a testimony of how God impacted his early Christian life with some awesome experiences and even seeing or hearing of faith-building signs and wonders. But, many of the people who were with him in those experiences have walked away from the Lord now. He felt like the Lord was emphasizing that we definitely want to see signs and wonders, but even more than that we need a deep knowledge of God. AND, we have to have a “life-time” mentality that we are going to pursue the knowledge of God through His word for our entire lives! We can’t be sustained by power experiences here and there. We have to grow deep roots in the word and love of God. The message: getting oil in the midst of dark times We did something different in this meeting in that we listened to a recorded message (that you can find on our website here) that had impacted both Matthew and I very deeply. I was reminded of Psalm 37 and how the writer of the Psalm is in a difficult place of seeing the wicked prosper, but he “gets oil” in this time by waiting on and trusting in the Lord. One verse actually says, “dwell in the land and feed on faithfulness.” What a great encouragement! I feel like this is the message of stability for us in these times. No matter how dark or difficult things are, we continue pressing out oil! We continue coming to the Lord and being still before Him and allowing Him to refresh and re-stock our supply of “fuel” we need in order to keep going in difficult days. We really wanted to emphasize that we store up oil for “dark” times, but we ALSO must learn to continue getting oil in the midst of difficult/dark times. We felt like Bob Sorge’s message entitled, “You’re still in the Story” (which you can find on our website or on YouTube) highlighted this with a particular emphasis that we could never do. Bob Sorge was a worship leader who suffered a drastic vocal injury that left him barely able to speak and in chronic pain. He shares a powerful experience from the early days of that journey in a video clip at the end of the message. He also shares about Abraham and the Scripture in Romans that says, “Abraham didn’t waver concerning the promise.” In a humorous and powerful way he highlights that God isn’t really measuring our “wavering” by whether or not we have a good moment, day, week or month! He’s looking more at our journey of faith based on years!! Are we being strengthened in faith over the years? Are we setting ourselves on a life-long journey of growing in faith and trusting Him and His Word? Our response: Let go and trust in Him In our response time, Bethany led us in the song “It is well.” This is a new version of the old hymn, “It is well with my soul” and was written by a man who had lost so much: his son, his property, then all his daughters. Yet, he still wrote the words, “It is well with my soul.” Look at some of these lyrics and let the Lord encourage you to trust Him even in the midst of dark times. “Through it all, through it all my eyes are on You Through it all, through it all, it is well Let go my soul and trust in Him The waves and wind still know His name” Prayer together: grab someone and agree We always take time to pray for any needs in the room. We had already agreed together for two specific friends and very challenging situations they are in involving cancer at the beginning of the meeting. We ended the meeting by sharing needs: physical and spiritual. This is an opportunity to ask for people to agree with you for healing, but also to agree for others that we may carry on our hearts. Rather than praying in one large group, we asked everyone to find someone who had shared a need and grab that person and agree together for their expressed need to be met through Jesus’ abundance. I don’t know about you, but I want this reminder in other areas of my life as well, not just in a Lampstand meeting. I want to respond when someone expresses a need by grabbing them and agreeing together. (Ok, maybe don’t really “grab” them, but do agree!!) Will we meet this month? The timing of the September Lampstand meeting left us wondering if we would even be able to have this gathering! Due with our fifth baby on September 22, we just weren’t sure if we would be able to host the gathering on the 17th of September. After my doctor visit on Thursday of that week, I was already showing some progress towards labor! I was excited and ready for this baby to arrive, but in praying about whether or not to have the Lampstand meeting, I felt like the Lord was giving me a choice. It was almost like I could choose to just focus on preparing for the baby and his arrival (which would not have been a bad choice) or I could choose to go for it with this meeting and believe that the Lord wanted to accomplish something in it. We had the meeting! And, I am so thankful we did. Personally, I felt that I received things I needed to prepare me for the labor and delivery of Johnjudah David that was just around the corner. And, corporately it was an encouraging time of equipping for all. Worship and communion Ian Wilson was such a blessing to us in leading worship especially as we took communion together. He facilitated the flow of the whole evening so well. We began with Hebrews 10 as I shared my meditations on verses 19-23. “Therefore brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” In this passage we see that through the blood of Jesus and the body (flesh) of Jesus, we have access to the HOLY PLACES. So through communion, in taking the body and blood of Jesus, we can come near! Jesus has sprinkled our hearts clean and washed our bodies through the waters of baptism. Sometimes it is important to stir ourselves up and remember that when we come to the place of communion we are coming into the HOLY presence of the Lord. Matthew talked more about the connection between the Old Testament tabernacle and what Jesus did in the upper room in establishing communion with his disciples. So we took time in repentance and asking God to stir expectation that He wants to meet with us when we come to Him in communion. Teaching time: embracing weakness to get oil Following the worship and communion time, Matthew shared about getting oil in the place of weakness. He described the difference between involuntary and voluntary weakness and explained that both of these are opportunity to see God’s power and strength at work, which fuels us in a unique way. We are promised trials and tribulations, and yet we tend to want to insulate ourselves from pain or discomfort. We do many things that are ultimately rooted in the desire to eliminate feelings of discomfort or any semblance of weakness in our lives. Involuntary weakness would be times of trial, sickness, persecution, trouble, or loss. Seasons or experiences that we cannot handle in our own strength, but that we really have no control over. These are things that cause us to feel weak that we didn’t ask for or cause. We can’t control these circumstances, but we can control our response. Our response is critical in the midst of involuntary weakness. We can respond in bitterness and anger or despair. Or, we can see this type of weakness as a catalyst to cause us to grow in the Lord. Voluntary weakness---is part of basic Christianity because we see it in the NT church! This type of weakness is something that we choose; we choose to put ourselves in a place of weakness in order to see God’s strength. Some examples of this type of weakness are seen in the following list: Prayer – fasting our time Watching – fasting sleep/time to seek the Lord Serving – fasting time, giving time to others, which is limiting ourselves Giving – limiting our resources Putting ourselves in place of weakness so we can receive His strength Exercise: The way of weakness Part of the response time was an exercise Matthew created using the following questions: 1. Where are you feeling weak (as far as involuntary weakness)? 2. Where are you embracing voluntary weakness? 3. Where do you need for the Lord to show His strength in your life? 4. Recall in the past where you have seen His strength in your weakness. 5. Pray and ask God to help you pursue Him in weakness. 6. Commit yourself to believe Him to meet you in your weakness. We took some time of stillness to reflect on these questions to give the Lord time to speak to our hearts. We would offer this here for anyone reading to take time to use this resource as w We met together with an awesome group of folks on July 23, with Ginny Wall leading worship. Ginny did a beautiful job of selecting and leading us in songs that reflected the heart of our identity in Christ. There was a sweetness and quietness and in the midst of one of those still times I felt like the Lord was inviting us to set our hearts, our eyes, our gaze on Him.
Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10 As we sang, “I want to be your resting place,” there was a sense of the Lord’s presence with us. I was impacted by Revelation 4 and Colossians 3. It was like the Lord was reminding us of John’s experience with the invitation to get up to the throne and fix our eyes on Him and see all things from His perspective. Personally, I can never express enough gratitude to the Lord for leading in these worship times. And, I feel such gratitude for the people who have come to pour out their hearts in worship, whether leading or participating. These times have truly been “fueling” for me and I pray that they have been an encouragement to the others who have gathered as well. Matthew did an excellent job sharing about “Pressing out Oil, the Truth of our Identity in Christ.” He shared that if we don’t know who we are, we will be tossed to and fro and explained that a critical aspect of our “fuel reserve” is in knowing who we are in Christ and how He truly feels about us. Our core identity is found in being Servants, Sons, and the Bride of Christ. We function in many roles, but these things are crucial to our identity. As servants: we give our lives in loving service to our King. As Sons: we are no longer slaves, but heirs, co-heirs with Christ. As the Bride: we are invited into intimacy and partnership with the Lord. Have you ever wondered what God really feels about you personally? Have you wondered how you could even know that for sure? Do you just guess or assume that He’s probably mad at you for failures, or maybe sad about all of your wrong choices, or that He is probably too big and busy to care much about you at all? The Scriptures are full of references that give us a glimpse into the pure emotions of the Lord towards His people. Our emotions are tainted by sin, but God’s are perfect and pure. Four key emotions of God that we should know: 1. Tender mercies (Psalm 103:14, 69:16, Isaiah 63:7) 2. Delight / Gladness (Psalm 18:19) 3. Burning desire 4. Fiery zeal, jealous anger (Ephesians 3:17) Matthew ended with an exhortation to make this a lifelong part of our diet in our journey with the Lord. What we eat in the natural matters, and so also what we feed on spiritually matters to our health. It is crucial that we KNOW and understand the amazing love God has for us and the way He thinks and feels about us in order to walk with stability in a time that is increasingly unstable. |
AuthorMatthew or Julie Wine Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|