Dr. Jonathan Forester is a medical doctor in Pineville, Louisiana. He has been in medical practice for over 30 years. But more than being an outstanding physician he is a great Bible teacher. He travels the world for doing Christian missions. But his passion is revival in an historic way. You will hear his passion through his teaching. He specializes in deliverance ministry. He has done over 1,000 deliverances from demonic bondages.
Click the links below to listen to these teachings!
Be Filled With the Holy Spirit
Brokenness: The Way To Blessing
The Common Cause of Death, Job 5:2
Doyle Hales is a Baptist pastor in Northern Louisiana. He was a sergeant major (E-9) in the Special Forces, U.S. Army before retiring. His ministry is primarily to deliverance and miracle healing. For the last 15 years he ministered among the Navajo Indians in New Mexico, before coming to Louisiana. He moves in tremendous spiritual authority.
Click the link below to listen to his teaching!
A 21st Century Reformation: Recover the Supernatural
Years ago I read a book called, Christianity with Power by Dr. Charles Kraft, professor of Spiritual Dynamics at Fuller Seminary. Dr. Kraft got his PhD. in cultural anthropology. He spent his first years in ministry in Nigeria. Being from a mainline protestant denomination he became frustrated with a huge limitation he had in reaching people for Christ there. In Africa he was having to deal with people that believed in the supernatural. The spiritual leaders in Africa were the witchdoctors. Their worldview was completely different than his (western) worldview. His Christian worldview allowed for the supernatural, but only in a limited rationalistic sense. Our western culture has been strongly dominated by the Enlightenment and this influence, through a “mechanistic” view of the universe, still permeates the Evangelical Church. The rest of the world has a supernatural view of the universe. Also in Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church he revolted against Catholic abuses in church practice that played on certain superstitions. As Dr. Kraft started to study scripture he came to realize that there would be no way to reach people in Nigeria for Christ without engaging the power of the Holy Spirit to set people free of demonic bondages, and also to heal people physically. There are presently abundant displays of God’s supernatural power (signs, wonders and miracles) throughout the non-Western world. We tend to think this power is needed there but not here. We have our nicely packaged theologies that will get the job done. How wrong can we be? Again I want to highlight the ministry of Heidi and Rolland Baker and what they are doing in Mozambique. Dr. Kraft would whole heartedly agree with Hwa Yung in the article below. Also there are four powerful short messages by Paris Reidhead, Leonard Ravenhill, and two by John Piper. Also three worship songs, Awesome God, and Agnus Dei by Michael W. Smith, and How Great is Our God by Chris Tomlin.
FROM CHRISTIANITY TODAY: September 2010
By Hwa Yung
One big surprise of the 20th century was the dramatic growth of churches in the non-Western world. A bigger surprise was that the fastest-growing churches were strongly supernaturally oriented. “In this thought world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith healing, exorcism, and dream visions are all basic components of religious sensibility,” religion historian Philip Jenkins has noted. This is true of African Initiated Churches, Pentecostal churches in Latin America, house churches in China and India, and numerous others.
I grew up in a thought world where ancestral spirits, demonic powers, “gods,” and miracles of all kinds abounded. Modern education, the most powerful force behind secularization, almost succeeded in getting me to toss out everything as superstition. Some of these supernatural elements clearly are, but not all. A careful reading of the Bible and the sheer weight of empirical evidence eventually brought me back to a supernatural Christianity. In this, I found myself out of sync with much of Western theology. Here liberals were at least consistent, but not evangelicals. Most liberals denied the supernatural both in the Bible and in the present; evangelicals fought tooth and nail to defend the miraculous in the Bible, but rarely could cope with it in real life.
It is now recognized that much of Western thought has been domesticated by modernity, with its roots in Enlightenment thought. The autonomous rationalism initiated by Descartes and the narrow empiricism pioneered by Hume have so emasculated the modern worldview that a mechanistic universe is all that remains. The resultant denial of the supernatural has crippled much of theology, leading to at least two serious consequences.
First, most present-day Western systematic and pastoral theologies fail to address the demonic at both the personal and cosmic levels. Many scholars deny or ignore the whole subject, explaining away numerous related biblical passages: Paul’s references to “principalities and powers” are reduced to sociological structures; sin and evil are discussed without reference to the demonic. Such theologies sit well with modernity, but they provide no help for evangelists and pastors ministering to people who are under spiritual bondage. If these issues are not properly addressed, many non-Westerners will find the gospel impotent and irrelevant.
The other consequence is that Western Christians often fail to fit the “signs and wonders” of the Holy Spirit into their theological framework. Up until recently, they have treated classic Pentecostalism as some form of aberrant religion, along with various versions of non-Western indigenous Christianity that also take the New Testament teaching on spiritual gifts and miracles seriously. But today, with Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement increasingly accepted in the West, and most of the dynamic non-Western churches taking the miraculous seriously, it increasingly looks as if the real aberration is “mainline” Western Christianity.
A 21st-century reformation will demand reinserting the supernatural into the heart of Christianity. This will result not only in a sounder biblical theology but also a more powerful missional church. The world will then understand what Jesus meant when he said, “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28, ESV).
Hwa Yung is a bishop of the Methodist Church of Malaysia and a member of the management team for Cape Town 2010. He wrote Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology.
GEORGE WHITEFIELD AND AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT AWAKENING
Glenn Beck is now popularizing George Whitefield. He has seen through the preaching of George Whitefield that our founding fathers were impacted and shaped by the ministry of George Whitefield for three decades. Whitefield was English, but encouraged an independent America. From his perspective somehow God’s hand was on the colonies and he knew they were blessed with a unique destiny. Even as surly and cynical a man as Benjamin Franklin was “taken” by and enjoyed Whitefield. What Whitefield preached was an unadulterated gospel. He was not a “feel good” preacher. He did not preach a “civil religion.”(A civil religion is what Beck preaches. It does not matter what your religion is or the god you worship, just return to God. Maybe somehow in Beck’s study of Whitefield he will get the gospel and embrace it for all that it is.
Whitefield grew up poor in England, the seventh child. He worked his way through Oxford. He wrestled with God under conviction of sin for months, fasting, longing, praying for God to “birth him” spiritually. It happened and the world was changed. He became the most well known person in the world during the 18th century. He was like the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and the Rolling Stones rolled into one. He started his preaching ministry in New England, in the city of Philadelphia November 8, 1739. When he first preached there, the largest city in the colonies at the time, the crowd that gathered numbered 6,000 thousand, on field at the edge of town. Then the area of Philadelphia was 12,000, 50% of the population of Philadelphia came to hear him. He preached from two to three hours at a time without notes “It seemed like ten minutes.” He walked to the scaffolding set up as a platform to hold him above the crowd and he stood there silent until he felt the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. “I have nothing to say if God is not in it.” According to Benjamin Franklin Whitefield’s voice carried just over a 500 foot radius. (That is the length of almost two football fields.)
Whitefield headed up the Eastern seaboard. Jonathan Edwards invited him to preach at the Northampton Church where he preached there four times. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards sat on the front row. Edwards reported to be “weak in body” when Whitefield spoke and sobbed through each sermon. Sarah said, “It is wonderful to see someone proclaim the simple truths of the Bible and have such effect. I have seen everyone hang on every word with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob…”
He journeyed back and forth from the British Isles to America for the next 30 years, spending much of that time in his beloved American colonies, which he called home. On September 29, 1770 he preached his last field sermon, again over 2 hours, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The text was 2 Corinthians 13:5: “Examine yourselves too see whether you are in the faith.” He died the next morning, at the age of 56 years old. He always said, “I would rather wear out than rust out.”
There is no comparison to George Whitefield. Huge crowds were drawn to him. His preaching had a ripple effect for years, even decades.
One insight that he told continually: Whitefield pretended to be talking to Abraham in heaven. “Father Abraham,” he cries. Whom have you in Heaven? Any Episcopalians?” “No!” “Any Presbyterians?” “No!” “Any Baptists or Independents or Methodists?” “No! No! No!” “Whom have you there, then, Father Abraham?” “We do not know those names here! All who are here are Christians-believers in Christ, men who have overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the Word of his testimony.” “Oh so that is the case? Then God help me, God help us all, to forget having names and to become Christians in deed and in truth.”
What is the best that we can learn from him? “I have put my soul, as a blank, into the hands of Jesus Christ my Redeemer, and desired Him to write upon it what He pleases. I know it will be His own image.”
GEORGE WHITEFIELD:
The Lessons of Leadership
1. Critics are the unpaid guardians of the soul.
2. Humility is the freedom from self that great leadership demands.
3. Suffering purifies the heart, hones the vision, and fashions the soul for battles to come.
4. A truly effective public life is only possible if grown from a truly nourishing private life.
5. Great leaders read in order to lead.
6. Intercessory prayer is the long range artillery of God. Leadership of eternal consequence is impossible without it.
7. Extremes are deformity of purpose and wise leadership check the one to preserve the other.
8. Applying the past to the present so as to shape the future is the leader’s art.
9. To view life from the vantage point of death is to grasp the purpose for living.
10. Leadership is a trust of power on behalf of the poor and the needy.
11. Great leaders welcome hardship as the price of lasting change.
12. The leader who knows he is destined is the leader who can risk in pursuit of a dream.
13. Leaders must conquer the demons of their souls before they can conquer the demons of their age.
14. Great leadership is impossible without great love.
15. Leadership is about values that leaders must live before they proclaim.
16. To offer people hope is to acquire a position of leadership in their lives.
17. Humor is the celebration of joy that gives life, and thus true leadership, its meaning.
18. To draw out the best that is in a man despite his flaws is to lead him toward the man he is called to be.
19. To make a divided people one in the service of a noble cause is the hallmark of great leadership.
20. Every man has a destiny, but his destiny is fulfilled by investing in the destinies of others.
Most of the material here came from a book called, The Forgotten Founding Father, by Stephen Mansfield
The Practice Of The Presence Of God by Brother Lawrence
The BIBLE On One Page
Charles Simpson
Charles Simpson is a world renown teacher in the body of Christ. His ministry has reached into 100 nations over the last forty years. His emphasis has always been discipleship. He is one of the best teachers I have ever heard. He is insightful, funny, and humble. In the sixties revival broke out in the church he pastored in Mobile, Alabama. This revival affected the whole city of Mobile. His 3 part series on Real Revival is a great series that will stir your heart for historic revival. For more teaching you can link to his website: www.csmpublishing.com
Click the links below to listen to his teachings:
Charles Simpson – Real Revival, Pt 1
Charles Simpson – Real Revival, Pt 2
Charles Simpson – Real Revival, Pt 3
Religion
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| From Timothy Keller, pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. | |