Have you ever been told some exciting news and then asked not to share it with anyone?

You are bursting with it. Even if you keep your mouth shut, your expression may give it away. You may be distracted, or find it hard to keep still. You search your mind for someone—anyone—you can safely share the happy news with.

Last year my brother called from London, to share the news that he and his wife were expecting their first baby. The Hunk received the call while I was out shopping and couldn’t wait to tell me.

By the time my brother located me—on my mobile phone—my squeal of joyful surprise was not as genuine as it would have been if he had shared it first. My delighted hubby had beaten him to it.

It is a universal law: good news just has to be given away!

The Ultimate Good News

To all who received [Jesus], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. (John 1:12-13)

As Christian believers, we have been entrusted with the ultimate Good News, the story of how:

• Jesus came to earth and died for the forgiveness of our sins, so that we could be restored in relationship to the Father
• He was resurrected that we might share in His life
• We enter into this new birth, not through anything we can do ourselves, but by faith in Him alone.

This is wonderful news, and all of would agree, truly GOOD news

And yet, many of us go through times when we are no longer excited about the good news of the Gospel. We have lost the urge to share it with others.

There have been times in my own Christian life when I have known in my head that the Gospel is good news, but my heart has lost the song.

In these seasons, I can look back and remember what God has done in the past, but I do not have a current testimony of God’s goodness.

When this happens, I am not the only one who is affected—others around me lose the opportunity to hear Good News.

The Power Of A Testimony

Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him. (Luke 8:38-39)

God has designed that the Gospel be expressed through the vehicle of our testimony. When the two are teamed up, extraordinary power is released to lead people to faith in Jesus.

• The word testimony is a legal term and dictionary meanings include ‘an outward sign,’ and ‘evidence in support of a fact or statement, proof.’

Our personal testimony stands as proof of the truth of the Gospel—evidence that it is life-changing Good News.

• The root word of testimony, ‘testi’, comes from a word meaning ‘witness.’

Our testimony provides a witness to others of what Jesus has done for us—and that what Jesus has done for us, He can do for them.

The story of how we first encountered Jesus and how our lives were changed when we accepted Him into our lives powerfully illustrates the Gospel.

But our testimony is not just the story of what took place when we first believed.

The ongoing stories of God’s Divine intervention in our lives have tremendous power to witness to others, as we talk about:

• How God impacts our lives every day
• Answers we have had to prayer
• What God has spoken to us
• How we have seen Him at work in our lives and in those around us.

Through this current testimony of God’s grace, we know, and others see, that Jesus is the only explanation for what is taking place in our lives.

As the Apostle Paul explained,

‘You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God.’

How To Recover Your Testimony

Right now, I can’t wait to share with others all the good things I am seeing happen in my life and in the lives of others around me. However, it hasn’t always been that way.

Have you lost the fire? Here are some things that have helped me to recover a current testimony of God’s goodness:

1. Recognise that Something is Missing

If you can’t come up with an existing reason to be thankful about what God is doing in your life, something is missing.

We can always have a current testimony of God’s goodness in our lives, even if that testimony is of His empowering or His comforting word to us in the trials we are experiencing.

2. Meditate on What Jesus has Done for you

Take some time to meditate on what the Bible says about God’s love for you personally, as well as what Jesus has accomplished through His death on the cross and how it applies personally to you.

Remember your experience of salvation and how encountering God for the first time changed your life. Think about what He has done since, and about all of His faithfulness.

3. Ask God for a Fresh Infilling of His Spirit

Pray and ask God to fill you with His Holy Spirit. It is a prayer He loves to answer.

As you encounter Him in this way, you will fall in love with Jesus again.

Every time I have experienced a significant new infilling with the Holy Spirit, my passion for God and for people has been restored.

4. Take time to Listen—Receive a Word from God

To hear God speak to you is to encounter Him. He wants to speak to you about His love for you, His involvement in your past and present circumstances, and His purpose for your life.

5. Pray—and Watch for what Happens Next

If you are aware that you have lost the fire of your testimony, talk to your Father about it. Ask Him to move in your life, pray and then open your eyes. You will soon see Him at work.

We can’t give away what we do not possess ourselves.

When we recover a fresh and vibrant testimony of God’s goodness to us, the Gospel will be Good News to us once again—and nothing will hold us back from sharing it with others.

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Do you have any more ideas or thoughts on this topic? I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment in the box below. If the comments box is not visible, click on this link and scroll down.

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Related Posts:

How To Be A Supernatural Christian: The Good News

Spiritual Renewal: Cafe Moments With God

The River Returns: How To Be Re-Filled With The Holy Spirit When You Are Dry

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© Helen Calder   Enliven Blog  http://propheticpeople.com/

Now on team with David McCracken Ministries

Recently, I calculated that there are 168 hours in a week.

Then I wondered—how many of those hours does the average Christian spend in church activities?

• Maybe 2- 3 for a weekend service
• Another 3 for a small group activity

If you and I are extra busy, we may spend 8 hours of our week in church meetings.

That leaves 160 hours of our lives in every week.

160 hours of sleep time and wake time… between 50 and 60 hours of sleep and at least 100 waking hours.

SHOULDN’T ALL OF THAT TIME BE GOD’S? And, ‘What would it look like if we lived our daily life with Jesus?’

This is a question I ask regularly, and one that I grapple with in my book, ‘How To Be A Supernatural Christian In Your Everyday World.’

Compartmentalised Christianity

I learned early on in my life that Christianity was best kept in compartments, or boxes. Before long, I had my ‘Church-On-Sunday’ compartment, my ‘Christian Friends’ compartment, my ‘School Christian Fellowship’ compartment, my private ‘Devotional Life’ compartment—and so on.

Compartments are safe. They offend few and are acceptable to the world in general.

But compartmentalised Christianity is powerless. It doesn’t transform lives, challenge ungodly mindsets or reach desperate and lonely people with the good news about Jesus.

It’s time to explode the box.

The Undivided Christian Life

Something happened to me when I was around 13 years old that changed my perspective on life and faith.

I met a couple called Bob and Joan Leach. Bob and Joan were grandparents of a school friend. They had encountered the miraculous healing power of Jesus through the ministry of Kathryn Kuhlman and they were saved, on fire and spent their lives telling the story of what Jesus had done for them.

The most remarkable thing about Bob and Joan was that they lived an undivided Christian life.

They simply lived their daily life with Jesus.

Jesus was as present in their home as any one of us who was with them. If there was a need or a problem, it was a natural thing to pause in the moment and address Him in prayer.

Bob and Joan had remarkable spiritual gifts of healing and words of knowledge that they were as comfortable using in their home, street or supermarket as they were in church meetings.

Their example inspired me.

Jesus Lived An Undivided Life

Jesus lived the perfect example of an undivided life. He lived out of His relationship with the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit, every moment of every day.

The Gospels tell us stories of His life and ministry set against the backdrop of homes, roadsides, celebrations and in public places. When people encountered Him, their lives were changed.

I have an old journal with yellowed pages in which I wrote a summary from A.W. Tozer’s wonderful book, ‘The Pursuit of God.’ [1] In it, he wrote:

The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is our perfect example, and He knew no divided life…God accepted the offering of His total life, and made no distinction between act and act. “I do always the things that please him,” was His brief summary of His own life as it related to the Father.

How To Live An Undivided Christian Life

‘So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.’ (Rom 12:1, MSG)

It’s time to break down the divide between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the world, between our spiritual life and the ‘rest of our life.’

How can we do this? How do we explode the box and put a stop to compartmentalised Christian living?

I’m still on the journey, but here are some keys that I have discovered along the way:

1. Stop rating some aspects of your life as ‘more spiritual’ than others.

Tozer reminds us that the divide between sacred and secular, holy and unholy was instituted in the OLD TESTAMENT. Its purpose was to teach Israel of the holiness of God.

However Jesus demonstrated a different way of living, and when He died on the cross, the veil that separated humanity from the holy of holies was torn in two. [1]

The Apostle Paul said, do EVERYTHING, even eating and drinking … to the glory of GOD. (1 Cor 10:31)

2. Include God in your daily conversations.

The Hunk and I are probably like many married couples in that we find it hard to make a set time to sit down and pray together.

But we have started to develop an intentional lifestyle of including God in our everyday life. For example, if we are talking about something that is causing concern, we pause to pray about it—while we’re in the moment.

We want to break down the divide and let God loose in our everyday lives, and amazing things are happening as we do.

Maybe you don’t have a partner you can do this with, but you can do it yourself, or you might have a close friend you are journeying with who can encourage you in this.

3. Reflect on the truth that you are pleasing to the Father

Deal with the hook that keeps you trapped in compartmentalised living: the need to be accepted by people. You don’t have to perform to please people when your confidence is based in your heavenly Father’s complete acceptance.

Here are some more keys on living an undivided Christian life that I will be reflecting upon in the coming weeks as I continue discussions on ‘Paradigm Shifts That Will Rock Your World’:

4. Look for God at work in the lives of people around you every day—and partner with Him in what He is doing.

5. Take your spiritual gifts wherever you go—they are given to you, not just for ministry, but also for mission—to make a difference in your everyday world.

6. Realise that you don’t have to have a special gift to be a supernatural Christian.

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Do you have any more ideas or thoughts on this topic? I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment in the box below. If the comments box is not visible, click on this link and scroll down.

 

[1] A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God.

For the chapter referenced in this discussion, see:

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/tozer/5f00.0888/5f00.0888.10.htm

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Related Posts:

 

Give Yourself (And Your Gifts) Permission To Shine

Pentecost: How God Exploded My Box

How Your Perspective Can Impact Your Destiny

No Longer An Orphan: How I Discovered The Father’s Love

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© Helen Calder  2010   Enliven Publishing

 

Now on team with David McCracken Ministries

My Father Owns The Store

Many years ago I had a vision that has impacted my life more than any other prophetic experience I have received from the Lord.

It came during a prayer time, when I asked God to teach me about faith. As I uttered the prayer, a picture suddenly came to mind.

“I saw a small boy, standing on tiptoe, his face pressed against a shop-front window. It was a candy store and the entire window was filled with all kinds of cakes and goodies that any child would find desirable. Somehow I knew that in his back pocket he had one small coin and oh, how I felt the limitation of that one little coin!

Then the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, “Same boy, same amount of money in his pocket, but his Father owns the store.”

Suddenly, even though no detail of the picture had changed, I had a complete paradigm shift. It was no longer how much money he had in his pocket that would determine what the boy could receive, but how much his Father was willing to share with him.

All he needed to do was ask.”

You see, put a Father in the picture, and the perspective changes.

When we stand in the Presence of God as His sons and daughters, we see life differently. As a result, we will speak, think and act differently.

What is YOUR Promised Land?

Twelve Israelite leaders go in to spy out Canaan—their Promised Land—on a reconnaissance mission. They see the same things, experience the same things and hear the same things.

Upon their return, ten of the spies describe what they have seen like this: “The land is fruitful, but:

• The enemy are GIANTS,
• WE are as small as grasshoppers compared to them
• And we CAN’T attack them because they’re BIGGER and stronger than we are.”

However, two of the men—Joshua and Caleb—come back with a different report. They say:

• “The enemy has no protection and—GOD IS ON OUR SIDE and He is going in front of us.
• We will have the enemy for lunch!
• We CAN take possession of this land.”

Twelve men go to spy out the Promised Land. They see exactly the same things. They experience the same things. They hear exactly the same things. And yet they come to two different conclusions. Why is that?

They had a different perspective on what they saw.

‘…those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” Romans 8:14-15

Joshua and Caleb saw themselves as sons of a living God—a God who is faithful to fulfil His word—and it changed THE WAY they saw everything.

They viewed earth’s circumstances from heaven’s viewpoint and took God at His word.

The hearts of the other 10 leaders, however, still harboured a perspective from their years of slavery in Egypt. ‘We have to look out for ourselves—we do not trust God to protect us.’

What is Perspective?

Another expression for ‘perspective is ‘point of view.’ It is the way we see something.

The word ‘perspective’ comes from two Latin words, meaning ‘see’ and ‘through.’
When we talk about seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, we are talking about looking at life from their perspective, their viewpoint.

Our viewpoint will always come from our standpoint. Today I climbed a hill. From the top, I could see more, and further, than I could from the valley below.

We will always SEE from the position we STAND.

God wants us to see from heaven’s viewpoint—the perspective revealed in His Word.

If our standing is that of sons and daughters of a loving and powerful God, we will view life differently—we will have a Kingdom perspective.

Perspective Affects Attitude & Destiny

The perspective of the 10 spies affected the attitude of all Israel. It says the WHOLE NATION started to grumble. Perspective determines attitude.

We often hear about the importance of our attitude. As Zig Ziglar has said,‘Your attitude will determine your altitude!’

Our perspective—the way we VIEW LIFE—is what determines our attitude. Our attitude, in turn, affects the way that we think, believe, speak, pray and live our lives.

In other words, our perspective has a direct impact upon our destiny, as well as our daily life.

The nation of Israel chose to take the viewpoint of the 10 spies and as a result of their unbelief they spent 40 more years in the wilderness.

Paradigm Shifts that will Rock your World

Seeing from heaven’s viewpoint enabled the youth David to stand in front of Goliath with a sling and a stone; it enabled Paul and Silas to sing praises to God in a dungeon. And it enabled Caleb and Joshua to take cities and nations for God—the promised land of Canaan—in their old age.

Deep down, each of us know that we have a God-given purpose and destiny to fulfil while here on earth. Each of has our own ‘Promised Land.’

It is vital that we examine our perspective, to see whether we are seeing from heaven’s viewpoint. Are we standing in the Presence of God as His sons and daughters, as heirs of the Kingdom?

I believe that in this next season, the Holy Spirit is highlighting this area. We must have a Kingdom perspective if we are going to impact the earth for God’s Kingdom.

Over the next few weeks I am going to be examining some paradigm shifts that I believe the Holy Spirit is bringing to the attention of the church at this time.

• It is going to take a different kind of Christian living to reach this generation with the good news of Jesus.
• It is going to take courage to allow the Holy Spirit to test and shake our perspective, the traditional way that we have seen things.

I’m willing to go on the journey. Will you join me?

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Related Posts:

 

No Longer An Orphan: How I Discovered The Father’s Love

Breaking Free From An Orphan Mindset

The Gift of Prophetic Vision: See What Heaven Sees

Counterfeit Prophetic Vision: Don’t Settle For Less Than God’s Best

© Helen Calder 2010 Enliven Publishing

Now on team with David McCracken Ministries

Prophetic Training Update

This week I am going to share with you a lesson from the prophetic training that I’ve recently launched. This particular session is on the topic of ‘Prophetic Prayer.’

Overall, the course is more than just how to’s on prophecy, it is about developing a prophetic lifestyle, starting with our personal relationship with God, and progressing through topics about personal prophecy, prophetic dreams and prophetic evangelism–sharing the good news about Jesus using prophetic gifts and guidance.

Before I started developing the online prophetic training, I felt that the Father was encouraging me to do something creative and different, something that had never been done before.

Recognising that we all learn in different ways, I have included a number of different expressions and media in the training, including:

• Reading – providing insightful articles and links on the topics
• Writing – personal journal and forum
• Listening – a new podcast for every lesson
• Sharing the journey – relationally with others on the forum
• Coaching and mentoring – on the forum
• Activation – in daily life

It has been a thrill for me to see participants already engaging on the forum, sharing testimonies and needs, praying for each other as well as working through the topics.

I am about two-thirds through developing this training and expect it to be completed by the end of November. Here is a bonus preview of Topic 2: Prophetic Prayer:

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Topic 2: Prophetic Prayer


Hi everyone, and a warm welcome back to Enliven Prophetic Training.
A special thanks to those who have been engaging on the forum. I love hearing what others have to say about the revelations that they are receiving and what they believe God is saying. We can learn from each other as we share different interpretations.
Please don’t hold back and feel free to challenge, chew over and add your opinions to my own ideas and insights. I’m on here to learn, too!

(Note to visitors: most of the forum is only accessible to registrants, so you will only be able to view a few topics. The privacy settings are there to provide a safe place for trainees)

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Please listen the following 16 minute message which has teaching, along with information on activities for the week and some pointers for contributing to the forum:

Click on the message title below to listen to the podcast in MP3 format. To save the file to your computer right click on the link and select “Save Link As …” (Firefox) or “Save Target As…” (Internet Explorer).

Topic 2: Prophetic Prayer

Note you may have to wait a few moments for this message to load.

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Activities To Do

This week we are continuing our focus on prophetic ministry as it relates to our personal relationship with God. Last week, our context was receiving a prophetic message (hearing His voice) for ourselves personally. This week, our focus is prophetic prayer.

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My simple definition is:
Prophetic prayer is when we pray using information that has been supernaturally revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. **Note, this can be revelation we have received ourselves, or we can pray using a prophecy given to us by another person.

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Here is a list of some things that will help you grow in the area of receiving revelation from God and participate in discussions on the forum:

1.   Listen to the explanations of the different types of prophetic prayer in the podcast. In brief, these are: Receiving, Interceding, Warfaring, Ministering, Proclaiming.

Think about which type of prophetic prayer you could personally benefit from becoming stronger in, or could help you in a current situation you are facing.

For more encouragement to help get you started, read the following blog post:
Need A Breakthrough? Uncover The Mysteries Of Heaven

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2.   This week, use your journal to write out a prophetic prayer, or make bullet-point notes to use as you pray.

You may like to use a prophecy given to you by someone else. If so, here is an article that can help:
Is it Time to Birth Your Prophetic Word in Prayer?

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ON THE FORUM:

3. Tell us which type of prophetic prayer you would like to work on and (if you feel comfortable doing so), share why.

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4. Do you have a story about prophetic prayer from your past (or present) that you would like to share? Or a question you would like to ask? We’d love to hear from you!

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5. Some optional related reading:

The Power of Prophetic Prayer

Your Prophetic Word and Spiritual Warfare

*Do you have any experiences or responses to share with us on this topic? I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment in the box below. If the comment box is not visible, click on this link and scroll down.

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For more information on the Enliven Prophetic Training, check out the Prophetic Training page.

© Helen Calder 2010    Enliven Publishing

Now on team with David McCracken Ministries