Family Table FIRST PEOPLES VOICE | September 2019 The Pentecostal British Columbia & Yukon District First Peoples Newsletter Hebrews 10:32-39 But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
Perspective Perspective is everything. When we receive the call, our lives do not become uncomplicated or unencumbered with life. As we pursue the call there too we will find challenge, disappointments, and opportunity for discouragements to hinder or even side track, or worse shipwreck us. God has already written our story. he has written it,
from beginning to end. Within the context of all we have become and now live is the call of God.
Calling and Election It was a cool calm night as the breeze whispered through the tall ponderosa when the amazed congregants emerged. For hours, the congregation had sat praying, communicating with The All Mighty, as a young, five-year-old, boy knelt amongst the whispering of a gentle wind, filling his soul till tongues beyond his will came uncontrollably flowing from deep inside his spirit and across his lips. Spirit filled at the Altar of Pleasant view Baptist Church. In the weeks and months that followed this new gift became second nature and more frequent. God was conditioning me to know His voice. Along with the awareness of an omnipresent God came the ma ni fe st a tion o f the d em onic. Not knowing that there was a conquest happening for my allegiance. Even at the age of five I had become a threat to the powers of evil. So much of the North American Pentecostal church today has become distant to, and unaware of the power and privilege that there is in having an intimacy with a supernatural eternal powerful loving
God. My experience and story is rare or possibly even non-existent in the contemporary church, misnomered, Pentecostal. The battle is real! The war is intense. It is not merely on foreign soil, in a distant land. We have not been conscripted to be a part of the allied forces, fighting a distant war, but it is an act of our volition to enlist. It is one thing to believe it a much different thing to practice. James 2:19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe - and shudder! At the age of five I did not know the extent of my prayer of repentance. It was the prayer of enlistment, an enlistment that I would grow into, an enlistment into a war I was not gifted to fight, in a war nonetheless, that in it I would grow more and more aware of my assignment. Just as Israel (Isaiah 60) was called to get up and shine, so was I. Ephesians 6:12 “We are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Let us stay true to our call, discipling all nations.