Where Praise Is - An Interim Musing...

Hey there, bro's!

In advance of my new series of postings entitled "Where Praise Is...", I thought I'd post a quick thought on something that's dropped into my email account this weekend...

To start with, I'll let Joel Osteen's "Today's Word" take it from here: -

Notice this verse says that strength and joy are found in His sanctuary. One translation says they are found “where He is.” Do you know “where He is?” His Spirit is alive in every believer. It also says that He inhabits, or manifests, in the praises of His people. That means when you begin to praise and worship God, either corporately in a church setting or privately in your personal time, God’s presence is there. You are His sanctuary, and when we worship together, God shows up in a special way.

Yesterday it was our long-awaited vision offering at !Audacious Church and I came with an expectation that God was going to do the miraculous as people sowed into an amazing vision of "...a church numerically so large that it stops the traffic..." by affecting the seven gateways we're called to be a part of!

It was amazing because I'll admit, I did not come with the intention of giving per se, just an air of expectancy that God was going to do massive things!

And how!!!

I felt so challenged by it because !Audacious is my home away from home and I wanted to do something about it instead of just turning up week on week.

Over £100,000 was raised for the house proving that the heart for not just our house, but our city was beating alive and well!

So I guess they were wrong when they said "faith is dead", or "generosity is gone" huh?

Sowing into a vision like this was somehow inevitable as I was challenged, by God, to not only give but also make a faith promise to give for the next six months too. This is something I didn't plan for, I didn't even budget for it, I just thought, like Elisha did having seen Elijah ascend in a fiery chariot to Heaven, "what now of the God of Elijah?".

Before I go any further, let me take this from both on-the-day and also our emails: -

Remember all our offerings are free-will only!
Give because you want to and you can, and never because you feel pressured.

So as you can see I was under no compulsion to give (like all churches should be professing, but not enough do!), yet I did because I fully believe in what Ps. Glyn Barrett said yesterday "the world is not called to go to church, the church is called to go into the world"!

How can we do that unless we're showing our generosity as Christians by not backing down to peer-pressure and folding when asked to give toward a special cause???

It's not about how much you give, but what motive you give with, which again comes back to something that occurred to me earlier this summer and that is whether you've got to get or live to give.

So that about brings to an end this interim posting whilst I get together what I'm going to be writing about for my new series of postings.

#IamAudacioushearmeroar
  Peace out!