This week, Nick delivered a powerful and timely message, urging us to look beyond the exciting projects and outward appearances of our church to the core purpose of our faith: Jesus himself. With the constant theme of “pour out your presence, Lord, pour out your fire” resonating through worship, Nick laid out a vision for a church that is passionate about God’s presence and not merely its own accomplishments.

Nick started by reflecting on the palpable sense of God’s presence and activity within the church, particularly at Hub Church. He spoke of new people coming to faith and others rediscovering their walk with God, a truly encouraging sign of God’s significant work amongst us. However, he quickly issued a crucial warning: what we see and experience, what God uses us to do, is not the main thing. The challenge, he emphasized, is to keep the main thing the main thing.

He referenced the letter to the church in Revelation, which speaks of a church that had much going on but had “forsaken its first love.” This served as a stark reminder that even a vibrant, active church can miss the mark if its focus shifts from worshiping Jesus above all things. Nick shared a profound prophetic word given to a powerful church he knew, which, despite its impressive mission and worship, was warned that “the seeds of your downfall are already in your heart.” This wasn’t a condemnation, but a gracious challenge to remain undistracted and fully devoted to Jesus. Our calling, Nick stated, is not to be a “successful church with an impressive portfolio of buildings,” but to use those things to become a community that worships only Jesus, knows His power, and trusts Him entirely.

Drawing parallels to the biblical story of Nehemiah, Nick highlighted a man deeply passionate for God’s ways and God’s city. Living a comfortable and privileged life, Nehemiah was stirred when he heard that the walls of Jerusalem were in ruins. His heart was grieved, leading him to mourn, fast, and pray. This grief propelled him to action, seeking permission from King Artaxerxes to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls. Nehemiah’s story serves as an example of being awake to what is on God’s heart and being prepared to step up and take responsibility, not for personal comfort, but for God’s purposes in a society where “the walls are broken down.”

Nick vividly recalled how the sermons he first heard as a teenager about Nehemiah profoundly impacted his life, turning him from a path in the Royal Air Force to a calling for something more. He prayed that the young people present would experience a similar stirring, a yearning for “more than this” – a desire for the Holy Spirit to “breathe, blow, and burn” within them, preventing them from becoming merely “religious people going through the motions of church.”

Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls, accomplished in an astonishing 52 days, was not the end goal, but rather a prelude to a national revival. The physical project provided the context for God to move in the hearts of the nation. Nick connected this to our own significant projects, like the refurbishment of the pub, 146. He stressed that our call is not simply to renovate a building, but for God to bring renewal, restoration, and revival on the back of such endeavors. The challenge remains: keep the main thing the main thing and don’t get distracted.

Nick shared about the recent “Big Bible Read,” where over 30 people spent five hours reading the entire book of Genesis. This event, he explained, was a testament to a stirring and hunger for something beyond mere church organization or project management. It was a hunger for God’s Word, and a powerful demonstration of a deeper yearning. He likened this to the people in Nehemiah’s time who, after the walls were rebuilt, gathered with unified purpose as Ezra read the Law. As they listened, they wept, but Ezra and Nehemiah urged them to celebrate, for “the joy of the Lord is your strength.” This celebration was unprecedented since the days of Joshua, highlighting a revival coming in the hearts of people who had only known ordinariness and struggle.

Ultimately, Nick concluded, the project isn’t what it’s all about; Jesus is what it’s all about. Even the powerful testimonies of lives being rebuilt and rescued from addiction are just a “prelude to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the discovery of what life is all about.” He reminded us that God’s plan A from the beginning was for us to know the fullness of His Holy Spirit. The cross, while central to our faith, is a “gateway to life,” leading us to live “full of the Holy Spirit, in the fullness of the blessing of God, in the freedom of forgiveness.”

Our desire, Nick stated, is not for people to simply know “the Christian fellowship,” but for Jesus to be a household name in this community. He shared a moving story of a man, deeply addicted, who, after hearing God speak to him in a mental health unit, found Jesus at the church and spent the rest of his life directing others to Him. This illustrates the core message: “He [Jesus] must become more, I [we] must become less.”

Nick specifically addressed the young people, emphasizing the crucial need to see Jesus, not just the church or its activities. He recounted his own conversion at 16, where he didn’t commit to a church or project, but to Jesus himself. He prayed that our journey, despite wobbles and weaknesses, would always be characterized by that life-transforming encounter with Jesus.

He concluded by challenging everyone, young and old, to seek after Jesus and nothing else. Attending activities and signing up for projects are important for building the “walls,” but they are not the “main thing.” God desires “more than this” for us – a constant hunger for His fire to fall. He spoke of the danger of filling our lives with Christian tasks while our hearts are far from Jesus. This is a call to lay our lives before God, inviting His fire to burn up anything that hinders our full pursuit of Him.

For those who have never encountered Jesus, Nick urged them to reach out to Him today. For those who may feel nostalgic about past moves of God, he emphasized that we are not meant to dwell in the past, but to look forward to what God will do in 2025, 2026, and beyond. Our hope is not just for buildings or church growth, but for the fire of God to fall, stretching our vision and experience of His overwhelming love, leading to a fresh wave of testimonies.

Bible References:

• Revelation (specifically referring to the letter to a church that had “forsaken its first love”)
• Nehemiah Chapter 1 (The story of Nehemiah’s grief and prayer for Jerusalem’s broken walls)
• Nehemiah Chapter 8 (The gathering of the people after the walls were rebuilt, Ezra reading the Law, and the people’s celebration)
• Joshua son of Nun (Referenced in Nehemiah 8:17, concerning a previous time of great celebration)
• John the Baptist (Specifically the phrase “He must become more, I must become less”)

Transcript

Well, this is great. It doesn’t even feel like 9.30, does it? Or 9.45. It feels like
a lot earlier. That is great to see so many people as well. It’s almost like spot the
difference. I don’t know what happened at 11 o’clock. Maybe there will be nobody here.
But it is good to be together and to be setting out together on this new thing that God has
for us, which is a great unknown, as I was saying last week. And I think the theme, as
Jonathan and the team have been leading through, continuously hearing about, you know, pour
out your presence, Lord. Pour out your fire. And the picture in my mind has been like us
as a church coming together and having all that we are laid out before God, whether it’s
our two services, you know, all the things that we do through the week, all that we seek
to be, all that we want to see God establish in our prayer. Continually, Lord, send your
fire. Send your fire onto our offering, that our offering is that’s all it is. It’s an
offering. But what makes sense of it, what makes it work is your fire, is your presence,
Lord, is your, yeah, just the manifestation of who you are. And there’s that theme coming
through the worship this morning and I believe ties into what I want to speak about briefly
this morning. We asked young people also to stay in. They might be thinking, what are we doing here?
But I just felt strongly that there are things that God is doing amongst us. You might not
understand all of how it all relates, but there are things that we need to know, things that God
wants to speak to us, things that God wants to get into our hearts that goes way beyond just
coming to church on a Sunday or just coming to youth or just going through the program
of what we do as a church. There is so much that God wants to do in our lives and there’s so many
things that I could say on a day like today, but God is certainly calling us out of our comfort zone
into something new. Like I said, our minds could be very much on what God wants to do,
and on what part we need to play in it. And the story, as we’ve already alluded to, goes back
over so many years, it brings us to this point. But also the exciting thing is though we also
refer back, we look back, and we’re grateful for the faithfulness of God over so many years.
We’re now standing on a threshold, like I said last week, looking forward into a great unknown,
but accept that that old adage that says we don’t know what the future holds, but we know who holds
the future. And that we walk forward with God into the future and what He’s called us to. One thing
we know is that He’s called us to something great and the center of gravity of what He’s called us
to. Even though we come from many parts of the city, and we come from many parts of the world even,
He’s called us together at this time for something that He wants to do in this place as He pours out
His Spirit. And we are seeing a really significant move of God. I was at Hub Church on Tuesday night.
If you’ve never been to Hub Church, pop in one of these Tuesday nights. There were about 50 people
in Unit 2. It was packed. The presence of God was there. It was just so good to see people worshiping
God freely. There was just a relaxed sort of buzz about the place, and the presence of God
was there. And I reflected as I sat on the floor, because there were no seats,
that it’s about three times bigger than the first church I led in Hub Church. I mean, it’s just like,
and there it is on a Tuesday night, and God is moving amongst us. There are people coming
to faith. People are discovering Him for the first time. People are rediscovering Him for the
hundredth time. There’s something happening in the hearts of people, and that’s so crucial.
There’s one vitally important thing, a warning actually, I believe, that the Holy Spirit wants
to bring to us. That whatever we see, whatever we experience, whatever God uses us to do
here on earth, that’s not the main thing. And our challenge is to keep the main thing
the main thing, because if we end up with a church that celebrates what it does,
that celebrates what it achieves, that celebrates what we look like, then we’ll have missed it.
It’s so exciting to be part of the church. That is growing. It’s so exciting to be a part of
the church. That is making a move for world domination, at least on Jordan Thought Precinct,
like, you know, with the 146, and Unit 2, and all that goes on here, and two services.
It’s so great to have that sense of presence and activity in the life of the church. It’s
not something I’ve personally been used to as life has gone on over the years. You know,
church life is not always full of so much activity, but it’s not the main thing. There was
the letter to the church in Revelation, it says, the gist of it is, you’ve got all this stuff going
on. It’s great, but you’ve forsaken your first love. And the one thing that we have to do is
make sure that we’re never in that position. A church that we were connected with, we weren’t
at that church at the time, but was such a powerful church. There was so much going on
in its life. There were so many things that we looked at and we thought, that’s the sort of
church you want to be in. There was mission going on, there was worship, there was the presence of
God, and yet they had a prophetic word. Now, you know, sometimes our prophecies can be, you know,
I love you, says the Lord, and you’re great, I think you’re fantastic, and you’re the best thing
ever, says the Lord. And we say, oh thank you, Jesus. And that’s when we go away. But sometimes
prophetic words come in and they come in with an edge. And this one said that I see, basically,
it’s a bit like Revelation, I’ve seen all that you are, I’ve seen all that you’ve achieved,
I’ve seen all that you’ve become, but the seeds of your downfall are already in your heart.
I think, wow, thank you, Lord. That’s not what you want to hear, you want to pat on the head, don’t you?
But what a challenge, because, and there’s, it’s a gracious challenge, it’s not like a,
you know, well you’re a terrible church or anything, it’s saying that I want you to be
the best that you can possibly be, but I want you to experience the fullest that you can,
but yet you can so easily get distracted, and our hearts can so easily get distracted from what the
main thing is, which is lifting Jesus above all things. So our calling is not to be a successful
church on Jordan, Thorpe and Baitmore, with an impressive portfolio of buildings.
It’s to use those things to become a community that worships only Jesus, that knows his power,
that trusts him entirely, and we use our buildings and our resources and our everything that we’ve
got in our pursuit of those aims. God forbid that we ever become a church so absorbed in our own
work and projects that we obscure the vision of Jesus, that we, our hearts get distracted and we
think, oh we’ve, we’ve got something here. And briefly this morning I want to touch on the story
of Nehemiah. I mentioned it last week. Nehemiah was a man passionate for the things of God. He
lived in Persia roughly 500 years before Christ was born, and he was an official
of King Artaxerxes. That’s a name to conjure with. King Artaxerxes. He was cupbearer to the king.
He was comfortable, he was privileged, and he had no reason to think beyond that life. Everything
was good for him, but there was something stirring in his heart that was, that wouldn’t stay quiet,
and it was all to do with his passion for God and for God’s ways and God’s kingdom and God’s city.
And he heard, he got a message, I’m paraphrasing it, you can look it up in Nehemiah. He heard that
the walls of Jerusalem, his beloved city, were in ruins, and his heart was grieved about it.
Even the king noticed, why are you so sad? He said, but how, you know, my, my heart said here,
he got a message that said in Nehemiah chapter one, things are not going well for those who
return to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has
been torn down and the gates have been destroyed by fire. When I heard this, I sat down and wept.
In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. I sat down and wept.
And so in that grief, he took it upon himself to do something. He actually sought permission
from the king to step away from his duties and go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild the walls,
because there was a passion for that city and a passion for God’s ways and a passion for
for all that had been lost. And he said, I want to do something to put it right. I want to do
something to rebuild those walls. And our challenge is to be awake to what is on God’s
heart, just as he was. More than that, to be prepared to step up and take responsibility,
to take action, to serve the purpose of God, not just, not just pursue our own comfort,
but to actually give ourselves, because individuals give ourselves as a church,
give ourselves as a community, to what is on God’s heart for a community and a society where
the walls are broken down. And there was a pain in his heart. He said, I’ve got to do something.
The first sermons I ever heard in my life were around the book of Nehemiah. It was at spring
harvest, 1980 something, and it was spring fever. All these old geezers that you see
preaching and now they were young chaps then. It was the same guys, but they were, but anyway,
yeah, they stories of Nehemiah, how God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things
when moved by his spirit and motivated by what’s on his heart. And it was those, and I think that’s
probably part of the year I have for the, you know, I can’t do anything to connect
God’s word to your heart, but we pray that God’s spirit opens it up. And I pray for our young
people as well that they begin to see the sort of things that I began to see in those days when I
was 16, 17 years old, and my life was set on joining the Royal Air Force. I had signed my life
away. I’d got a contract until I was 37. There was, there was, everything was set and yet
something broke into my heart on that day and in those days to say actually there’s more to it
than this. What will you do? A stirring, a bit like Nehemiah had a stirring to say I want to do
something more. There must be more than this. We sang it this morning. There was that yearning like
there must be more than this. Come breath of life. Come breathe within. And that was my prayer then
and it’s my prayer today that for we, for us as individuals and as a church and as a community
that our prayer would become Holy Spirit. Breathe within us again. Don’t let us just become religious
people going through the motions of church. Oh we’ve got two services, great. And you, you know,
we can enjoy ourselves and we can enjoy our worship and we can enjoy being together, but
there’s more, there must be more than this. Come breath of life. Come fire of God. Breathe and blow
and burn in this place. And so he set about, he went to Jerusalem and he set about rebuilding
the walls. He gathered people. He inspired people. He organized them. He managed them. There was
opposition, fierce opposition and he handled it. It was a master class of leadership and in 52 days
the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt.
But what we see then as we go on through the book of Nehemiah is that the, that was just the
beginning. The purpose God had was not for Nehemiah to be a builder. That was an expression of the,
the passion and the drive that Nehemiah had to say there must be more than this. We want to see
God. I don’t want to see the walls of God’s city broken down and in ruins and the people scattered.
I want to see revival and renewal in the national life of Israel. And so he, there was that drive
for him. But the walls, once they were there, the walls only became a prelude to a national revival.
The physical project became just the foundation, just provided a context, just provided a shape
for God to then move in the heart of the nation. And as we, we’ve got so many wonderful projects.
We’ve got 146 is a project to end all projects as far as we’re concerned, but you know there’s so
much there, but ultimately we won’t sort of get it all done, get it all built, get it all post signed
off, have a ribbon cutting ceremony and say we’ve done it now. We’ve, we’ve refurbished a pub.
That’s not the call of God on our life, to refurbish a pub. But what God wants to do is to bring a sense
of renewal and restoration and revival on the back of the restoration of a pub and all the other
things that we’ve got going on. And our challenge is to keep the main thing the main thing and not
to get distracted by all of those things. Nehemiah could have been distracted, but yet at the end of
it all in chapter 8 we’re told that the people gathered after the completion of the walls and
they gathered with a unified purpose and a priest named Ezra read the book of the law and all the
people worshiped. I don’t know if you picked up, I’m sure you did, we’ve been mentioning for some
weeks we had the big Bible read yesterday and that was just such a great event. Sheila did a wonderful
job of organizing it. It went like clockwork. If you thought that we couldn’t run meetings
by the clock, you should have come to the big Bible read. We read the entire book of Genesis
in five hours and every section finished on the dot by the grace of God. Anyway, that’s not what
I’m celebrating. What I’m celebrating is the fact that we had nothing else on the agenda. We had 30
plus people here, nothing else on the agenda for five hours except just reading the Word. And when
we got to the end it was quite emotional. It was like, oh my goodness, this is powerful. And
the only reason I bring that up is because there is something stirring in our heart that is bigger
than just what we do, just how we function, just the organization of the church, just the management
of projects. There is something that God is stirring. Why would we advertise, oh let’s all
get together and read the Bible out loud for five hours and 35 people turn up? You know that you’d
think they wouldn’t come, but they did. And there’s a stirring and there’s a hunger for
something that’s beyond. There must be more than this, we’re crying. Anyway, that’s a bit of an
aside. They went through the instructions of the law of God and explained it to the people and some
of these people began to see for the first time what they were understanding. You know they had,
they just had, people had been born, this generation had been born into a situation
where the walls of Jerusalem were broken down. Things weren’t going well for the nation
and these people knew nothing and they all they knew was the stories of the past,
but they knew nothing of what was going on and here they were for the first time perhaps
beginning to see the the law come to life in their time and Ezra and Nehemiah, they gathered
the people with a unified purpose and they read the law and it says as they listened the people
began to weep and then the priest said, don’t weep, don’t mourn, but celebrate, this is a good
day. And then one of the things that I prayed this morning as we came into this new arrangement is
that there’s a lot to think about, there’s a lot to be anxious about. No there isn’t, you can’t be
anxious about anything because we cast all our burdens onto Jesus, but there are things that
sometimes cause us a little bit of anxiety aren’t there? Things that worry us, things that give us
cause for a sleepless night and yet there was that sense of don’t weep, don’t mourn,
don’t take yourself too seriously, enjoy the fact that God is on the move, let there be joy
in the house, let there be joy in the presence of God. And as Ezra and Nehemiah said to the people,
the joy of the Lord is your strength and so they understood for the first time a lot of what they
were hearing. And it says in chapter 8 in verse 17 that the Israelites had not celebrated like
this since the days of Joshua son of Nun, since the days when they crossed the Jordan river and
experienced the most amazing miracles, they’ve never celebrated like this and these people
weren’t even born then, this was hundreds of years gone and so they had been born into fairly humdrum
drab existence, they’re just going through the motions of their life and suddenly they were
beginning to see their eyes were open, their hearts were open to begin to see the reality
of what God was doing and what he was doing amongst them and they had not celebrated
like they celebrated on that day since the days of Joshua. And so there was a real revival coming
in the hearts of people, they’ve never known anything except the ordinariness and the struggle
of life and then they’ve been caught up in this great project to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem
and then by surprise on the back of that rebuilding project, God visited them and renewed them and
restored them and empowered them by his Holy Spirit. And that in a nutshell is really what I
want to say today, that the project is not what it’s all about, but Jesus is what it’s all about.
Even the restoration of our lives, it’s great to hear testimonies and we’ve heard many recently
powerful testimonies of people who have been baptized and it’s so wonderful to see how God
is rebuilding lives and rescuing people from addiction and rescuing people from terrible
situations and struggle and difficulty and all of that. But ultimately even the rebuilding of
our lives is just a prelude to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the discovery of what life
is all about. I think it was Ali last week was saying, this isn’t plan B, this was plan A.
God’s plan from the beginning was that we would know the fullness of his Holy Spirit
in our lives and so the steps that we take towards it, even the cross,
we celebrate, of course we celebrate the cross. The cross is our gateway to life, but that’s what
it is, a gateway to life. It’s an opportunity that we come back, we remind ourselves of what
Jesus went through, we remind ourselves of how he suffered, we remind ourselves of how he paid
the price, but now because he’s paid the price we live, we live full of the Holy Spirit, we live in
the fullness of the blessing of God, we live in the freedom of forgiveness and all that that means
for us rather than continually going round and round in circles. And so all these things are part
of the story, they pave the way to where God has taken us, but he wants to glorify himself and
exalt himself, that people wouldn’t know MCF here but they would know Jesus, that Jesus would be a
household name in this community because that would be our legacy. Not that when a message
goes up on Facebook, do you know when you know where you can get a cup of coffee on a Thursday
morning? Yeah, the Christian fellowship. People know about the Christian fellowship,
but our prayer and our desire is that fire of God would fall so that people would know Jesus
is in this place. Remember one man who came to our first church after a few weeks of us being there
and he sat at the back of the church and he just stared at the floor, he didn’t have any
life about him at all and it turned out that he was a very seriously addicted alcoholic and he
told me himself, he said he used to drink a bottle of vodka every night and his daughter used to have
to carry him to bed. He was in such a state and he ended, he’d been at a Billy Graham meeting many,
many years before in the 1960s and he’d given his life to Christ and he’d forgotten all about that
and he’d walked away and he’d got, his whole life was in a mess and he ended up in a mental health
unit in the local hospital section and he said while he was in there, he said he heard God speak
to him, say why don’t you come back to me and so he didn’t know what to do, how to come back to God
so he looked up the church, so he came to the church and he just, life transformed, nobody did
anything to him or for him, God just touched his life and he became one of our premier worship
leader in the church and he was just like so exciting to see his life transformed in that way
but yeah and then, not but, that sounds like a negative doesn’t it, but what I got from him was
he said, I came back, he said and then people asked me how do you find Jesus, how do you find,
so I just told him come with me, I met him at the church, come with me and you’ll find him there
and so he spent his whole, the whole of the rest of his life, he’s still alive, directing people to
Jesus because he said I found him, he came to me, he met me in the mental health unit and he called
me to himself and now I just tell people to go and find him, you know, and if you can’t, if you don’t
know where to find him go and look in the church. John the Baptist said he must become more, I must
become less. Jesus must become more in our experience and in our ministry and in our,
in our activity. Jesus must be magnified and glorified and that’s why I want to ask the young
people to be here today rather than be at specific activities because this is absolutely crucial
for you to understand. You might actually think I’m only here because my parents want me to be here
or because, you know, because this is, this is what’s expected and at our extent Andy said
earlier on our vision of God can be like this, shaped like the church, shaped like the youth
activity, shaped like whatever we do and yet God is wanting to stretch our understanding and stretch
our vision of who he is and what he can do and what he can be in our lives and my prayer for
you is that he would open your eyes to see Jesus, not the church, not anything else but to see Jesus.
He did it for me when I was 16. I didn’t commit myself to a church or a project, I didn’t know
anything about church, but Jesus called me to himself and when they said do you want to, want
to give your life to Christ, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to go and find Jesus. I wanted to
be filled with the spirit of Jesus. I wanted to understand who Jesus was. I wanted to follow Jesus.
I wanted to, to, for other people to understand who Jesus was. That’s all that mattered and that’s
what our prayer is, that that would be the hallmark of our revival and our renewal that goes on,
that Jesus would change our life forever and I can say though I’ve had 30 plus years in leadership,
I’m not a model believer or a champion prayer. From years back people bought me a booklet,
this is how you learn to pray. I’ve never felt like an expert in anything to do with that,
my faith has often been weak, struggles have been real, but something changed in my heart
40 years ago that’s never changed back. The shape of my heart changed, the shape of my life,
my outlook, my perspective, my understanding, my belief, my trust, everything changed and
in the meantime it’s been wobbly and it’s been weak at times and there’s been challenges and
there’s been issues and still there’s so much for me to learn at my young age, but
Jesus makes all the difference and it’s our prayer that we don’t just introduce people to
what we do. It’s great we’ve got our welcome packs and this is what we do through the week,
but all of that are just walls, all of that is just shape, all of that is just a context in
which we can meet God and so I would encourage you in your hearts, whether you’re young, whether
you’re old, whether you get it, whether you don’t, to be seeking after Jesus and going after Him
and nothing else. You don’t get points for how many activities you go to in a week or how many
names you put on the sign-up sheet, you don’t get points for that. It’s great if you do it because
we need it, it’s the walls, but in actual fact that’s not the point, it’s not the main thing.
God wants more for us, there must be more than this
and so there is a challenge for all of us, whether we’re young or whether we’re old,
we can’t just bypass, you know this is a challenge for leadership, it’s a challenge for me
because in a way I have a full-time framework for what I do and I can and I can fill my diary
with meetings, with projects, with things to do, with people to visit, with spreadsheets to fill
in, I can do all of that. I think, wow, I’m a full-time Christian worker. I can do all of that
and my heart can be far from where God wants it to be, my heart can be far from Jesus,
and my prayer for myself as we respond to this is, is that God let your fire fall on me,
that in this, you know there’s a lot that I’ve seen in life, there’s a lot that we’ve experienced,
there’s a lot to go back over, but yet looking forward that’s what I want it to be, that’s where
I want to be, going forward, that’s where we want to see the fire of God. I want to just tell
stories of the past, stories of the past are important because they remind us of what God
has done and how, how far we’ve come, but if we don’t have anything, don’t have any vision or
hope or expectation for the future that the fire of God will fall, then we’re going to, we’re going
to fail, we’re going to, we’re going to lose energy, we’re going to run out of steam. When it
comes to the nine o’clock meeting on the 13th of November or whatever it is, we’re going to think,
oh again, there needs to be that. And there’s two categories of people,
maybe you’ve never known what it is to give your heart to Jesus, maybe you’ve known,
maybe no church, maybe you know, maybe you’re trying your best, you’re trying your best to
to work it out, you’re trying your best to, to give yourself, to build some religious walls
around your life so that you can feel like a better person and you can feel like you’ve
got things in order, but you’ve never known what it is to give your heart to the Lord completely.
You’ve never encountered Jesus and the power of His love and that is crucial for you today,
and if that is you today, don’t leave this place without reaching out to Him.
And there are those of us who do know, but we feel maybe it’s all behind us,
we knew that once, we’re nostalgic. One of the things that was brought up at the conference last
week that we were at was the issue of nostalgia, how easy it is to be nostalgic. For those of us
of a certain age, there were exciting times in the 1980s, 1990s, the things that happened in the
church. It’s very easy to think, oh let’s go back to that, but the whole point is not going back to
that. It’s about looking forward, about looking forward to what God can do in 2025, 2026, 2030.
What stories are we going to tell then? Cornelius was praying this morning, don’t mind me mentioning
you, we were praying and he was saying, you know we’ve seen moves of God, we’ve seen Pensacola,
we’ve seen Toronto, we’ve seen what God did in Mozambique, and yet there’s a sense, there’s a
hunger for God to do something new and fresh here now. That’s what we want. We need the stories
of Pensacola and Toronto and Mozambique and all of that to encourage us and strengthen our faith
and to focus our minds, but we’re not just going to celebrate what that was. We’re going to step
into what God has for us, and it’s much, much more than a building project. It’s much, much more than
a church with two services. It’s much, much more than planting a church or whatever we do
in the future. It’s more than all of that. It’s that the fire of God will fall,
and so maybe you’re not sure about what it all means for you now. We can be pleased about it.
We can be pleased about what God is doing, but we don’t know how we fit in. God is wanting to touch
you with fire. God wants to touch your heart with fire, for you to see things, and His Word is
absolutely relevant. We’re like this. We’ve got God. We love Him. He’s powerful. He’s faithful to
us. He does good things for us, but there’s so much more, and He wants to stretch our vision,
stretch our understanding, stretch our experience. Sometimes we’re nervous of that word, experience.
God wants to stretch our experience of Him, our experience of His love. Some of us can think back
many, many years to times when we’ve really encountered the presence and power of God and
the overwhelming love of Jesus, and yet it feels like it’s all the way past. God wants to touch
you again with those things, that you would have a testimony that we wouldn’t be able to just say,
does anybody have a 60-second testimony? Because it would throw the whole program out because
of our experience of God, so we need to be hungry for Him. And so as we
return, maybe the worship team could come back.
Think about what this is.
Lord, we’re thankful, thankful, so thankful for what you’re doing in our midst, so thankful for
the shape of the church, thankful that we can have two services, thankful that we’ve got a
building project, thank you that those things are coming together, but Lord, there must be more,
there is more. Lord, let your fire fall, and what I want you to do is not just
broaden this response, but look into your own heart. Like I said, young or old, whatever your
circumstances, whatever the hang-ups, whatever the issues, whatever the things that are making
you hesitate, bring it all to God. Lay it all out before Him and say, Lord, burn it up.
Let your fire fall on the offering of my life. May I know you. Maybe you don’t
feel like you know Him. There’s not a million miles, He’s not a million miles away. Just reach
out to Him, reach out to Him now as we respond. And if you want to come here, come forward,
someone to pray with you, someone to help you, someone to encourage you, do that because we’d
be more than happy and the space is here. Just come as we worship as Jonathan leads us and the
team. Come and we will pray together and God’s fire will fall upon us. Amen.