Thinking back to gloriously happy days of ministry in Wester Hailes. It was a consistent pattern that in an atmosphere of grace and healing those Christians who thought they were strong soon realised they were not. Having become part of us to give they realised there were areas of their story still needing touched by the healing of Jesus. The only people who didn’t stay around us very long were those who thought they had no need of a physician because they were saved and strong. True not just of members but of staff too. Having come to serve they realised their need of healing and help. They found out they were there by the grace of God for fuller purposes of grace than they were aware of when they first arrived, gifted and with a sense of call.

You may be ministering to others this weekend. Remember as you do that you too are in need of a physician…and always will be until the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus…

You need to remember that most especially when you are involved in itinerant ministry. It is the most dangerous form of ministry I know. I have seen people who fell with a great fall because they believed the introductions they received away from “home” before they got up to speak…God save me from that, as in this season of admittedly partial recovery (felt, though not backed up by tests, which show continuing slow decline!) I tend to preach from place to place or event to event , conference to conference in Scotland and occasionally further afield, as health permits and wisdom dictates. May I never believe the fliers! Oh for safe spiritual homes, local congregations of accountability and grace. If we are without such a home, may God lead us to one.

God bless

Kenny

Awake early. Just letting my mind wander back and forward in time to good memories and future hopes. Looking forward to being with Dr. Jack Deere for the Conference in Lewis in June 2020, health permitting and God willing. Why not consider planning to come over to Lewis to hear him? I first heard him preach in Toronto in 1994? 1995? His talk led me to re-evaluate just about everything to do with “Church” and helped me into a more fruitful ministry in the Holy Spirit than had been the case up until then. I will be forever grateful for that sermon: biblical clarity, wisdom (not just cleverness), honesty. I was cut to the heart. I knew I could never minister in the same way again, nor stick to the way in which I led a congregation if I was going to be truly obedient to the Bible and open to the Holy Spirit, willing for Him to be Himself in me and through me. Everything I brought to parish ministry from that point on, anything I brought to CLAN Gathering, to conferences and retreats for leaders in the UK and beyond came from what God spoke to my mind and to my heart from the Bible through that one talk. By the way, I listened to it lying down, having been slain in the Spirit just before Jack got up to speak! That talk still influences just about everything in my ministry to this day.

One of my favourite memories of Jack is when he was speaking at CLAN Gathering on one of his visits to us, about meeting a young man back home in America who claimed to have the New Testament gift of prophecy (as distinct from Prophecy in the Old Testament). However it seemed to function in a way that was completely different from the way Paul teaches it is meant to function in the church. It enabled him to see what was wrong with everybody else! Jack’s response to that as he shared the story with us was this: “Always and only seeing what is wrong with people is not a spiritual gift, it is a psychological condition requiring medication!”

…I try and keep that story in mind..

…I also keep this in mind too from that talk in Toronto. Jack has a background in theological teaching. He is a bright guy intellectually. He said “There is a big difference between the anointing of cleverness and the anointing of wisdom.” 

…I keep this in mind too. When Jack first spoke at CLAN Gathering, it was one of his earliest ventures into public ministry again after his son’s suicide. Over the years since his ministry and writing has been marked by almost unbearable honesty. That unrelenting honesty about his own struggles in the story of his life opens him up to rejection by the religious who like things nice and neat. However, it is powerfully helpful to those who seek to truly embrace the Gospel Jesus preached. in its glory and in its pain. We carry the mystery of “The Already Here but not yet Kingdom” in our very being until That Day.

I hope many of you manage to come to Lewis in June. Don’t get me wrong. Jack is full of humour and a wonderful communicator. You will “enjoy” hims as a speaker if you come to Lewis in June 2020. But I know that something much deeper will happen for many. Perhaps you will hear something that will change the way you live, the way you minister, the way you lead, the way you want to “do church” for the rest of your life.

God bless

Kenny

(The dates of the Conference are the 5th and 6th of June and then, of course, folk can stay for the Sunday as well. I am glad that the amazing Tommy MacNeil will be speaking this year along with Jack and myself. Can’t wait… I feel like a kid before Christmas as I have written this post!)

A late night last night at “Restored” in Ruchill and North Kelvinside Church. Yet another work of God where the real God is meeting the real needs of real people. Oh I know in saying that I open myself to an attack of church and theological snobbery which would tell me there is more to God and Church than that. So be it! What and where I was privileged to speak at, and then privileged to pray one to one with people, looked, sounded, felt like Jesus.

What moved me most? A farmer from Kilmalcolm who brought a young man all the way from Johnstone to the meeting because he sees it is helping him. I had met the young man at “Jumping Jacks” a few weeks ago and he was in my mind as I prepared my talk for last night even though I did not think for a minute he would be there. A farmer, preacher and a precious but struggling young man brought together in the loving purposes of a living Jesus in a work established by a visionary leader, Mark Lowey, who simply has had the courage to devote effort to where he saw God working and join in there. Amazing. How Satan and Religion must hate it. Pray for Mark and and “Restored” and Yerik and Michelle Kellett-Smith who run Jumping Jacks. They are proving Jesus’Gospel: The Kingdom of God is near: with Him nothing is impossible, no life is beyond hope.

At one point as I was praying for someone a growl came up and a voice snarled, “I am not staying around for this. I am going.” Well whatever spoke the man himself stayed put in his chair and received more love, more prayer! It is good news when a demon speaks out of a life and days, “I am not staying here any longer!”

Jesus saves from hell by standing condemned in our place, He baptises in the Holy Spirt, He still heals and delivers from demons, He still loves new people into being. Maybe you need to free yourself from any more sophisticated or respectable , less crude, less outdated, less intellectually embarrassing, more “cool”, more refined versions of Jesus and His Gospel.

Oh for more churches and works of God to be established that infuriate hell and infuriate that demon called Religion! Oh for more outposts of the Kingdom of God invading the darkness that has shattered so many countless lives whether being lived in a palace or the gutter, in the remotest island or in the busiest city, in the corridors of the University or in Rehabilitation Residences.

God bless

Kenny

Found it difficult to hold it together tonight as the inmates at Shotts sang the words of the song below alongside words read beautifully from Psalm 139. What a show they put on for “Prisoners’ Week” with its heart rending theme, “Out of sight, Out of mind.” May it not be so for these men, their families and victims of crime. Moving, funny, informative, astonishingly open, touches of true delicate creative beauty, an open door for the presence of the One who is grace and truth through which He came and moved in the midst. Unforgettable. I mean it. As long as I have a memory I will never forget it. “Please Lord make it so for me.” What a blessing from God these guys gave to the full house who attended.

I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough

Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up

Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low?

Remind me once again just who I am, because I need to know

[Chorus]

You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing

You say I am strong when I think I am weak

You say I am held when I am falling short

When I don’t belong, You say I am Yours

And I believe, I believe

What You say of me

I believe

[Verse 2]

The only thing that matters now is everything You think of me

In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity

[Chorus]

You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing

You say I am strong when I think I am weak

You say I am held when I am falling short

When I don’t belong, You say I am Yours

And I believe, I believe

What You say of me

I believe

(Lauren Daigle)

God bless

Kenny

Those of you waiting and praying for Revival even as you work fully for the advancement of God’s Kingdom, would you recognise when the new thing is beginning? By the time the New Testament story begins the line of David was reduced to a stamp, a root out of dry ground. All that was visible was a man, a woman and a baby in some sort of animal shelter… easy to pass over as being of no significance….who knows where the whirlwind of God may begin at any moment….Move on 30plus years to the cross and the line of David was reduced to a man unrecognisable as human, mocked by people and apparently unwanted by God Himself. Yet there, the breakthrough and beachhead of the Kingdom, a door into the Kingdom of God, was being opened at street level for all who would believe down through the centuries until it is shut forever when Christ comes again. “FINIISHED!” “Now, is the judgement of this world, now is the prince of this world cast out, and I, wen I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself!”

Both Jesus birth and cruxifixction would have been passed over as completely insignificant. The birth of a baby among thousands? A cruxifixction among thousands? Yet from those tiny insignificant specific points and moments in history according to onlookers observation, the world was changed and the door from and into eternity opened.

At what insignificant point, unnoticed by the church or the world, might the the whirlwind, the next nation shaking Revival begin?

God bless

Kenny

When surrounded by mountains in Glencoe yesterday, I could not help but think of the following verses in Revelation Chapter 6. The imagery of people calling on the rocks and mountains to fall on them in preference to encountering the terrifying wrath of God ( and of the Lamb, Jesus) is repeated at least four times in Scripture. Sobering thought… not often preached today when in a desire to be missional and attractional we often sanitise the God we are presenting to the world…

“Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Revelation 6: 12 – 17 ESV.)

Thank God for Jesus. The Apostle Paul writing to God’s people in Thessalonica teaches that He saves us from the wrath to come. Do you know Him? Have you come to Him and put your faith in Him as the only Saviour there is from our sin and what our sins deserve? “God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but shall have everlasting life.”

Edited this to add a comment: I intended yesterday, Wednesday, while in Glencoe to post what I have written above today when I got home. I did not know there was two small earthquakes in Glencoe yesterday evening, felt in Ballachuish after we had arrived back home. Not that unusual perhaps, though slightly so. You can read about it if you allow the link Angela has posted below. Thanks Angela: that was news to me. Touched me afresh though with the fear of the Lord as to why he wanted me to post as I have done.

For those who care about the spiritual wellbeing of Scotland and want our true Scottish Christian heritage to be awakened with its distinctive emphasise, pray for a restoration of the right fear of the Lord….it is largely missing from the nation and the church of today. Words that are prophetic are often accompanied by confirming signs in the natural physical world. I have noted this many times, though it has only happened personally on two occasions with words/prayers I have been led to speak out over almost 4 decades of ministry.

Here is the link from Angela for your interest.

God bless

Kenny