Message Notes: A “Church Without Walls”

House Keeping:

• True North Conference & Lou Engle this coming week
• Faith Fuel Video Devotionals this week – how to hear the voice of God
• Testimonies

A) Tips Coming Out of 12 Days of Relentless Love

• Establish “new norms”
• Obey immediately
• Keep going deeper in love (bind it to our hearts all year long)
• This week is key!

Question: Where do we go from here?

B) God wants the G.T.A. to experience His RELENTLESS LOVE!

• Acts 19 – the church in Ephesus
• Harvest
• Healing, Signs & Wonders
• Transformation
• Example of the Welsh Revival

As revival fire spread across Wales in late 1904 and early 1905, although no official records were kept of the actual number converted, 150,000 is considered a very conservative estimate, during the first six months! People’s lives were transformed by the thousands. This was indeed, a sovereign move of God’s Holy Spirit!

Whole communities were turned upside down, and were radically changed from depravity to glorious goodness. The crime rate dropped, often to nothing. The police force reported that they had little more to do than supervise the coming and going of the people to the chapel prayer meetings, while magistrates turned up at courts to discover no cases to try. The alcohol trade was decimated, as people were caught up more by what happened in the local chapels than the local public houses and bars. Families experienced amazing renewal, where the money earning husband and father, the bread winner, had wasted away the income and sowed discord, but now under the moving power of the Holy Spirit, following the conversion to be a follower of Jesus Christ, he not only provided correctly for family needs, but was now with the family, rather than wasting his time, and wages, in the public houses of the village or town. Souls were saved, individual lives were changed and Society itself was changed. Countless numbers were converted to Christ.

There are men and women still in churches today whose parents or grandparents’ testimonies were that they were converted in the Revival in 1904 or 1905. Not only were individual lives changed by the power of the Holy Spirit, but whole communities were changed, indeed society itself was changed. Wales again was a God-fearing nation! Public houses were now almost empty. Men and women who used to waste their money getting drunk were saving it, giving it to help their churches, buying clothes and food for their families. And not only drunkenness, but stealing and other offences grew less and less, so that often a magistrate came to court, and found there were no cases for him.

Men whose language had been filthy before, learnt to talk purely. It is related that not only did the colliers put in a better day’s work, but also that the pit ponies were so used to being cursed and sworn at, that they just couldn’t understand orders being given in kind, clean words! Yet, still the work output increased. The dark tunnels underground in the mines echoed with the sounds of prayer and hymns, instead of oaths and nasty jokes and gossip.

People who had been careless about paying their bills, or paying back money they had borrowed, paid up all they owed. People who had fallen out became friends again

[Source]

C) Key: God is looking for men/women who will work with Him

• Mark 16:15-20 – The Lord working with them
• 1 Cor 12:27 – We are His body
• Ez 22:30 – I looked for a man who would stand in the gap
• Isaiah 6:8 – Who will go for us?
• God is raising a missionary movement in Church Without Limits… we will release missionaries to the nations but right now we need to be missionaries to the Greater Toronto Area
• Ex: John Leonard Dober and David Nitschman – Moravian Missionaries who sold themselves into slavery… “May the lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering”

D) So what do we need to do?

• Dream BIG, start small
• Goal: in 2012 we would believe God and set our faith to double (2 X Vision)
• How? That we would commit to:
  • Love
  • Pray, Pray, Pray – “I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach” – Spurgeon
  • Operation 2X – Each one, reach one (John 1:42, Acts 8:26, Acts 9:10)

It is time for Church Without Limits to be a “Church without walls”