JOEL 2 GENERATION

Biblically, there are many reasons that people fasted. And one of those reasons was that fasting was believed to be a "means of grace", and grace (Gk. charis) is God's divine enablement. 
 One well-known Christian leader calls it, "the grace of fasting".  We of our own free will take on voluntary weakness with the expectation that we will be clothed in greater power. 
 Fasting has been misused, abused and misunderstood. But its misuse should not result in its disuse, which is exactly what has happened for most Evangelicals and Charismatics.   
 All sorts of "excuses" are given for why we don't fast - but Jesus said that when He left the planet that His disciples WOULD FAST (Matt 9:5).   
 The Church fasted in the Book of Acts (13:2-3 and 14:23) 
 The Church in the 2nd Century fasted (and the 3rd and the 4th). 
 But today, many who name the Name of Christ do not fast.  
 Jesus knew that fasting increased God's pow...

I have recently heard some of the most recent stories coming out of Yemen about the growing church there.  It is so much different today than when we lived there briefly back in the 90's and even when we made several ministry trips in the early 2000s. Today Yemen is a war-torn nation where all of the missionaries had to leave several years ago.  A small, struggling underground church existed when the Christian missionaries were forced to leave as Yemen descended into a cruel civil war.  Tens of thousands have died, countless more have suffered, but in the midst of all of the chaos and evil, a move of God has begun that is nothing short of a miracle of miracles.  I heard from several sources who are closely connected with what is happening in Yemen that today there are several thousand believers and that that number is growing.  It is all Yemenis reaching Yemenis!  The most conservative estimates are that there are 2...

While I visited a community center for Syrian refugees near the Syrian border in Lebanon we were asked by our host to deliver a wheelchair to a Syrian muslim family whose 17 year-old son had been paralyzed from the waist down for 6 years.  The Syrian refugee who took us to the house was the boy's cousin.  On the way, he told me that he had begun reading and memorizing the Bible in Arabic for a week and that every night since he began reading he had been having spiritual dreams about following Jesus.   A team of 3 were with me for this visit.  One of them had been healed of paralysis himself so we thought it would be great to have him share his miraculous testimony and to help us pray with the teenager.  When we walked into the home, the boy was lying in a corner looking almost comatose.  So we explained to his muslim mother what we wanted to do.  He shared his testimony and I translated as the only Ar...

WHO WAS THE "REAL" ST. PATRICK? Most people are unaware of the incredible life and legacy of Saint Patrick. The following summary is taken from two books about Patrick's life and ministry – one is a biography entitled Let Me Die in Ireland , by David Bercot (Scroll Publishing) and the other, The Celtic Way of Evangelism – How Christianity Can Reach the West Again " (George G. Hunter III, Abingdon Press, 2000). Many Christians today "claim" Patrick as their own – most are surprised that he doesn't really fit any modern labels that we might try to put on him or the movement he birthed. Patrick was NOT a Roman Catholic (and neither was he a modern-day Protestant Evangelical and/or Charismatic!), but rather a British Roman citizen born in the late 4th century (AD386) on the West Coast of Britain. He was a part of the independent British or Celtic Church which did not come under Roman control until the 6-8th centuries. His father was an ordained Deac...

Once one begins to read their Bible with a "Divine Council Worldview", interestingly the way Second Temple Judaism and the Early Christians read their Bibles, you begin 'to see' things you missed. According to Dr. Michael Heiser, "The term divine council is used by Hebrew and Semitics scholars to refer to the heavenly host, the pantheon of divine beings who administer the affairs of the cosmos. All ancient Mediterranean cultures had some conception of a divine council. The divine council of Israelite religion, known primarily through the psalms, was distinct in important ways." And once we have this 'worldview' as our background, NT verses that seemed nonsensical at worst and redundant at best, now become clear. Let¹s look at Colossians 1 where this becomes apparent. I had ALWAYS assumed that 'the saints' that Paul addresses in verses 2, 4 and 12 and 26 were a reference to Christian believers in the Church. BUT we need to take another lo...

Like many of you, I was told that Jesus did NOT include "fasting" in his answer to His disciples' question as to why they could not cast out the demon. And like many of you, I didn't question the commentators, the Bible scholars, the seminary professors, etc.   But I think we clearly have another case of "fake news".  In other words, "AND FASTING" were the original words of Jesus.  Incredibly, the reason the shorter rendering was argued as being the "preferred" reading was that, since the Early Church had such an emphasis on fasting, the argument was that "and fasting" was a biased or "motivated" reading.  And that modern NT textual critics simply concluded that it wasn't in the original. Could it be that the earliest Church fasted actually IN OBEDIENCE to Jesus' clear teaching?  Incredible the conclusions that such scholars have reached! Why do I think so? What changed my mind? (In additio...

I hear Christians here in the U.S. say things like, "I understand that where you live in the Middle East, healing miracles are needed because they are Muslims and that more is needed".   I view that as an excuse.  The ministry of Jesus, that we are all called to partake in, is a ministry of the supernatural.  Whether we are in the "Christian West", the Middle East or anywhere else in the World. Today at lunch, the Lord highlighted through a word of knowledge an injury that our server had -  a shoulder issue.  He let us pray – we prayed twice.  Then we got a word for someone who worked there with a neck problem.  Our server who had his shoulder prayed for, tried to find someone but didn't have any success.  BUT, then another server came up to our table and we asked her about her neck – and it was her!  She had a neck issue that we prayed for.  While praying, the Lord gave us another word of knowledge for her – about her right kn...