The first fire school term is now done,

prayer, teaching, fasting and fun,

we’ve sought God’s face,

not with justice but grace,

peace is here as He’s ’ready won!

What is God to you? So much of our striving and struggle comes from an incorrect understanding of who we are in realtion to God and who God is in relation to us.

A few thoughts on the latter:

God is love…That is he is the centre and furthest extent of love, the creator and perfecter of love, the definition and fullness of Love and He is limitless God. But what does he love? its us!! The full force of the emotions of an infinite God are poured out on us. There is nothing else out there on which God places his love and so we do not get a proportion of that but the full force of it.

Now we know this in our heads but just think what it means. God was not satisfied to love us from the place of his greatness and omnipotence in a distant way but he devised a plan which risked everything but opened up a possibility of intimate relationship. When he offered his son as a ransom The Holy God made himself vunerable to the rejection of sinful man. In this he was putting off his rightful place of superiority and making himself, although still superior, father in the most tangible and relevant way to us. He scorned the position of devine dictator so that he could become our dearest daddy. he risked it all for love! Wow!

Im pretty big on the whole connecting with the heart of God thing. For me this is real praying - where you find the desires of the heart of God and begin to pray out of an emotion which is not your own. This i learnt on my first year of fireschool but im now begining to see what its really about. Obviously there is great value in the intercession but its not just about the most effewctive way to pray its about relationship. its about the connection. Imagine a child with his/ her father. They want to spend time with Him, helping in whatever way they can. For them helping is not about the end result or the success of the task its about the ‘helping dad’. So a dad may be fixing the car or painting the fence and the child wants to hold the paint pot or pass the spanner. the help is not really very helpful but they feel a part of what daddy is doing. Likewise for the father the help is most often not necessary to get the job done but its so precious to him because of the sentiment. Rather than trying to do things for God and be great, trying to get better at praying of or whatever it is in order to achieve and all that sort of thing, im now begining to enjoy relationship of it.

For God the value of my inclusion is not what i can do for him but that i am doing it with him.

 as Jason upton puts it:

The simple desire to help You means more to You than whether i really can.

So now instead of doggedly picking up a cause and thrashing determinedly away at it, i come to meet with my daddy and just help him with whatever he is doing that day. The beauty of it is that its not sectioned into sections of doing or recieving etc but its all about meeting With your father. What an incredible priviledge to be able to find the heart of God and know what he is feeling. Ultimately when we encounter the emotions of the heart of a limitless God his heart will become ours. this is why someone like Praying Hyde who could spend so many hours in deep travail and intercession and yet come out with  his face radiant. It was not a chore for he was meeting in the deepest and most intimate way with his Father and Saviour.

So no sweat! - whether its warfare or worship, intimacy or intercession its all about one thing- connecting with the heart of God and hanging out with your Daddy!

God is always taking humanity back to the issue of the heart.

Pastor Ken has had a vision of the heart being like a huge dam with sluice gates that we can open as we get healed to allow Gods grace to flow through.  So often though we don’t know how to, or don’t want to get healed and so the sluice gates remain shut, and Gods grace only trickles from our lives… Peter was just like us, and God kept gently working on him.  Peter was certain that he needn’t deal with his heart until the vision when God said ‘kill and eat’… God changed his religious heart that day and consequently he moved from living according to rules and laws to grace.  Suddenly the proud Peter, apostle to the Jews became humble Peter telling Cornelius to ‘get up I’m just a man like you’… We need to move every day from the justice level to the grace level.  We have to ask ourselves are we satisfied with the great grace that’s upon our lives, or do we need to deal with the issues of our hearts?  It is a life’s work, a daily searching and healing and forgiving.  The day that you stop is the day that pride enters your heart. 

Why not deal with this issue?  Why let it remain in your heart?  Why stop the grace of God flowing through you to others?  Because if you deal with it you will be like Peter and will be released to go to Cornelius and see whole groups of people saved….

Start today, write a list of those you need to forgive and work through it…

We did a night of prayer for this HFE Bill being debated in the UK Government at the moment.  I was not really looking forward to it that much to tell the truth! However, we started with some worship and there was such a real sense of the presence of God there. I found that when we began to pray out of this tenderness of heart found through worship it was so real and no feeling of needing to perform to keep up the image of a true fireschool student! Only 3 or 4 times previous in my life do I remember such a reality of prayer starting in the heart of God, being prayed through me back before the LORD!

Im up for more LORD but thank you for putting that spirit of prayer back in my life and again renewing a desire so see a youth movement of holiness and national restoration of the family unit! Thank you God, JM