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Category Archives: Training

Daily Training Set #4

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by vcfblogger in Prayer, Training

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daily

1. Pray with an awareness that God has people that He has been dropping into your spirit to “carry to term”. There is a good possibility that over any given week that God will bring them to mind- especially if you allow yourself to be drawn out of yourself. Pray with confidence in the spirit until you sense things moving as you pray for them. Be ready to ask God for any leading He may give you to take action. Be ready to share about 1 person that God may have put in your heart to intercede for during our Saturday training, or during small group. It is always good to use a prayer notebook to record “the movements of God in the sanctuary” (Ps 63). See how they pan out in the external world. The more we grow in prayer, the more, we coordinate what we see and hear in our spirit with what we see and hear with our physical eyes and ears.

2. Try to be intentional in taking opportunities to pray beyond the limits of your current capacity. You may want to use the prayer tool for reference. The main thing is to have prayed further than usual a few times in the week. By doing this, you are pushing past the boundaries of your capacity. Remember, it’s not a matter of us trying in our own efforts, but being open to God’s drawing you further. In all this, God is not only working in you, but in the places that He has you to minister – church, work, networks of relationships.

A note about training: Because we have only one session during the course of a month, it is important to be regular in attendance in order for it to be of significant benefit. If you are not able to come for a session for any reason, please inform us about it. The idea is that God is forming us as a body, and the unit through which He works His purposes in this world is the church. And when the church begins to come together in unity to function together, things happen that could not happen on an individual basis.

Lessons on Winning and Asking from Swimming

18 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by vcfblogger in Harvest, Ministry, Training

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Swimming-competition1

You may remember that one Sunday, I shared an email that my oldest daughter sent to her Rose Bowl head coach during a meet. A few days ago, I saw that he had blogged about that email and really went into some very practical lessons that could be drawn out of that email. I think they will be useful as we wrestle with the idea of winning. As we look at the idea of “Winning”, and begin seeking God about what He has for us to enter into the process of Asking (working together with Him in bringing forth), this blog goes into some of the inner dynamics that parallel our quest. I have been given permission to share that blog post with VCF, and the head coach’s blog is publicly available.

A bit of background: my daughter wrote to him during the Total Performance Meet at Kenyon College. It was a bit of an off meet for her and she was quite discouraged. Then, she had an idea to write down the things that she had learned during times when she had these off meets and email it to her former coach. Somehow it was a breakthrough thought, because that morning she swam faster and made the NCAA cut in the 100 Free. That meet turned into a good meet for her. I think God was giving her wisdom for herself, but the practical dynamics are useful as parallel principles that work themselves out in our humanity.

What’s fascinating, and critical, is to have a theology of incarnation that intimately knows, feels, and moves in the human and divine, without any part being disregarded. This blog, if seen not merely in human, naturalistic terms, throws light on some of the ways “the loins of our mind” can be girded up.

“Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ”
1 Peter 1:13

Please check out the blog below.

http://rosebowlnationalgroup.tumblr.com/post/72763107258/a-letter-to-remember-and-lessons-to-learn

Daily Training Set #3

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by vcfblogger in Prayer, Training

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daily2

One thing that causes many people to miss out on the promise of John 15:7-8 is that they do not give the time needed at the beginning of the year to receive words and convictions from the Holy Spirit, and to grow these convictions by praying in the spirit into them. That is where spiritual sets/exercises are crucial. As we pray, we may receive what seems like a little particle or seed into our spirit. The mistake that most people make is to not grow it until it has mass, strength and weight. Many beginnings of great things are aborted through sheer lack of care in prayer. They are relegated to one of many competing ideas, rather than grown into the lens through which everything is viewed.

So, here is the set for the coming weeks:

1. Set aside time everyday to pray for God to deposit in your heart, His desires and goals for the year. These will give you an idea of what He is wanting to focus you on and accomplish through the year. “Without a vision, the people perish.” If you have not heard the sermon from Dec 29 or Jan 5, please try to listen to it (visioncf.org/sermons). Please spend a significant amount of time seeking God about what He’s aiming you towards as your focus for the year. One characteristic about the Asking that God puts in your heart will be that it will be somehow bound up with being a witness.

2. Share with your small group leader, or do make an appointment with me to talk about what God has put into your heart, so that we can work together this year with a vision of this in front of us.

3. Continue the previous set as a staple for your prayer life. Pray unto being filled with the Spirit.

Whatever you are feeling, pray in the spirit (in tongues, or praising Him repetitively, focusing on inviting Him to be Lord) in a relaxed way for 20 minutes using the Spirit Tool. Go for longer if you like. But do this everyday. That will be our staple. Pray towards the point where you feel that the distractions, concerns and depressing thoughts begin to fade, and God’s peace takes over. The Spirit Tool may help you identify some signs of His rising in you and your circumstances around you.

If you have done this consistently last week, you will probably have experience a difference in your state of heart in the morning. There will have been some days in which you felt a change of heart, a strengthening, a liberty, and even a sense hope or faith rising. On some other days, you may have felt that the work of prayer had not been fully done.

As we enter more fully into our exercise in prayer, rather than just praying by the clock (20 mins), aim to pray till you feel the grip of God changing your heart. Keep that trajectory in mind as you now pray, not just for the 20 minutes, but towards that inner transformation of state of mind. It may take more than 20 minutes, but now you are going for something more – you’re going for God’s reign in your heart, mind and circumstances.

Daily Training Set #2

12 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by vcfblogger in Prayer, Training

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daily2The training set that you have been using last week is a basic practice that we shall build upon. So instead of thinking in terms of moving onto something else, what we want to do is to build upon the basic 4 things we have been practicing for the season, and going deeper, exploring and noting the movements of the Spirit in our souls. For this week, we’ll add some definition to the 4 things. Basically, I’ve laid out the basic sets from the last week, and added something.

A word about mornings

Each of us has a different time when we do our devotions and spiritual exercises. Whether you do your devotions in the morning or evening, or any other time for that matter, the morning is a crucial time at the beginning of all that will take place that day. Many people lose the day because they lose control of the morning. For many, the mornings are not the tranquil sacred place where we receive grace for the day. For many, the mornings are more more like a messy, tension-filled rush – a battlefield in which we have been acted upon by failing alarm clocks, underestimations of time required to do the things we need to do, people around us who don’t conform to our expectations, random occurrences, wakings on the wrong side of the bed, accelerated movements of the hands of the clock, overhanging troubles from the day before, and spiritual heaviness that comes with the day we are about to embark on. Losing the morning to common human dynamics often means losing the day. If we do not take control of the morning, much will be lost, and we will often start the day on the wrong footing. The fears, apprehensions and sinking feelings we wake up with will take control of us during the day if we do not take control of them by the Spirit.

That is why the psalmist proclaims, “Lord in the morning will I direct my prayers, and will look up” (Psalm 5:3). Whether you do your devotions in the morning or at any other time of the day, it’s important to actively begin the day in active prayer. The trajectory of our prayer in the spirit should be towards being taken over by the Spirit of God -where there is a change of heart, a change of sentiment – where even our mood and state of mind is lifted, charged and infused with God. That’s where in prayer, we move from expressing our own sentiments to praying the prayers of God (see previous blog post).

Training Set

  • 1. Whatever you are feeling, pray in the spirit (in tongues, or praising Him repetitively, focusing on inviting Him to be Lord) in a relaxed way for 20 minutes using the Spirit Tool. Go for longer if you like. But do this everyday. That will be our staple.  Pray towards the point where you feel that the distractions, concerns and depressing thoughts begin to fade, and God’s peace takes over. The Spirit Tool may help you identify some signs of His rising in you and your circumstances around you.

Praying unto being filled with the Spirit

If you have done this consistently last week, you will probably have experience a difference in your state of heart in the morning. There will have been some days in which you felt a change of heart, a strengthening, a liberty, and even a sense hope or faith rising. On some other days, you may have felt that the work of prayer had not been fully done.

As we enter more fully into our exercise in prayer, rather than just praying by the clock (20 mins), aim to pray till you feel the grip of God changing your heart. Keep that trajectory in mind as you now pray, not just for the 20 minutes, but towards that inner transformation of state of mind. It may take more than 20 minutes, but now you are going for something more – you’re going for God’s reign in your heart, mind and circumstances.

  • 2. During the day, be sensitive to times when you feel “off”, then find a space to pray back into orientation towards God. Keep drawing your attention back to His peace. What we are doing is to find a position of living from the presence of God. We are learning to find our way back to our dwelling place (where Jesus says “where I am there you will be also”) from places where we don’t feel at peace. Use your notebook to record how it goes.

As you continue the practice of praying back to His presence, note the things that set you off track, and resolve ways to avoid these traps and tricks of the Enemy. Often, noting these susceptible places will cause us to avoid situations when “defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory!” (Chesterton)

  • 3. Look out for opportunities for ministering to needs around you and for inviting people for Christmas. Pray in the spirit for them. Again, use your notebook to keep track of who you ministered to or interceded for.

Continue this practice of looking out for opportunities for ministering to needs. In this practice set, we are developing the innate ability to “see differently” – to discern the harvest. This takes practice. As Lee Strobel just tweeted, “Who can you invite to Christmas services at your church? Pray and then take a relational risk. People are open this season.”

  • 4. As you feel led, begin praying for your land, expecting God to put certain people on your heart. Begin interceding for people that keep coming up and note them in your notebook.

It would now be time to move from praying for them to inviting them for Christmas!

Daily Training Set #1

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by vcfblogger in Training

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daily2

As always, the training set will be in addition to your devotions.

We will begin slowly, so for this week and next (till Dec 7), we’ll focus on orienting towards God and praying in the spirit till we experience what it is to feel subjectively immersed in God.

Training Tools

  1. Download and print out the VCF Spirit Tool if you don’t have one already.
  2. Purchase a journal or notebook to take notes.

Training Set

1. Whatever you are feeling, pray in the spirit (in tongues, or praising Him repetitively, focusing on inviting Him to be Lord) in a relaxed way for 20 minutes using the Spirit Tool. Go for longer if you like. But do this everyday. That will be our staple.  Pray towards the point where you feel that the distractions, concerns and depressing thoughts begin to fade, and God’s peace takes over. The Spirit Tool may help you identify some signs of His rising in you and your circumstances around you.

2. During the day, be sensitive to times when you feel “off”, then find a space to pray back into orientation towards God. Keep drawing your attention back to His peace. What we are doing is to find a position of living from the presence of God. We are learning to find our way back to our dwelling place (where Jesus says “where I am there you will be also”) from places where we don’t feel at peace. Use your notebook to record how it goes.

3. Look out for opportunities for ministering to needs around you and for inviting people for Christmas. Pray in the spirit for them. Again, use your notebook to keep track of who you ministered to or interceded for.

4. As you feel led, begin praying for your land, expecting God to put certain people on your heart. Begin interceding for people that keep coming up and note them in your notebook.

Introduction to Daily Training

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by vcfblogger in Training

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daily

The purpose of this blog post is to begin to introduce you to a daily regimen of “exercising in godliness”, or spiritual training that would be necessary for us to minister consistently in the power of the Holy Spirit. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is a divine-human thing. We understand that we minister not out of our own works but by the grace of God. What’s not often understood is that this grace is not held aloof from our humanity, but is worked into our habits, our soul, and even our bodies – but always by grace.

Another way of thinking about this is that just as the Son of God was incarnated by the Spirit into a flesh-and-blood human, so too the life of the Spirit has an inescapable human aspect that is subject to all our human traits. If Jesus often said that healing was “according to your faith” and there are degrees of faith, then it is therefore true that we are like spiritual athletes that bring into the ministry situations, a certain condition of spirit that does have an effect on our effectiveness. If you read Paul’s 2 epistles to Timothy, much of it sounds like a coach, advising his athlete on the inner workings of effective ministry.

Context of Training

One thing that is distinctive about spiritual training is that it is always in the context of God’s River moving dynamically to minister to the dry places of people’s lives. He is now moving you into position to be an answer to people’s hearts’ cries. I’m always finding that ministry never stops even outside church! That means that everything we do in training is in real situations where the Holy Spirit is calling out to His children, always wanting to find a harvester who can be sensitive to that. If we refuse to be like the shepherds of Is 56 who “always look their own way”, we will find God at work calling His children everywhere. We are never in a situation in which we are able to extract ourselves from God’s presence. In other words, training is never offline.

As a community of practice, we do have our fields of harvest, both in church as well as in our lands.  Those who came to our last Spirit training received the Spirit Tool and how to use it to correlate what happens in prayer with what happens in the external world, e.g., in church as well as in our lands. Please use the tool often!  In addition, I would like to remind you to carry a notebook with you so that you can note often the situations of ministry, what happened, what worked, what didn’t.

Daily Training – Practicing Sets

To use the analogy from competitive swimming, like any serious sports team, its activities don’t only take place once a month, or even once a week. There is a daily practice and engagement that individuals do on a regular basis. Without that daily lifestyle of spiritual practice, the depth of skill will still be pretty shallow, and the talk about the ministry will be far greater than the practice of it.  But if we are taking seriously Jesus’ call to taking up our cross daily, then we move from being mere weekend warriors who do ministry recreationally, to a whole different category of Christian – not as subject to the flesh and spiritual inconsistency, and always going deeper and having deeper effects in our ministries. The change is radical and in this the cost should be counted. What we are going for is a quantumly different ministry that is akin to the difference between “weekend- warrioring” and everyday living as anointed ministers of God. It involves a whole different self understanding and call.

So just as a club swim team practices sets every day (and not practicing every day does affect performance) so too I would like to introduce a regimen of spiritual sets every week in order for people to grow. This would not be confined to corporate meetings at church but especially practiced at home and in the land. The fact is that we are called to minister out of our store of real being, so how we live in the habit of practicing the presence of God and being led by the Spirit is critical to embodying what we minister to others. Either it’s real every day in our lives, or it’s not. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have hard, even bad days. Actually those hard days may sometimes be harder, but they will now be an integral part of our life with God and His training of us. That’s because He will constantly be pushing us up against our barriers and eventually, through that process, breaking through to greater freedom. Swimming sensation Katie Ledecky, a few days ago at the Golden Goggles Awards, said very simply, “This award represents a process”.

Each week I will have “sets” for us to practice. That would be the nearest thing to centralized training in a training college that I can think of. That way, training does not just happen once a month, but everyday. Each of us will be doing our sets (spiritual exercises) at the level of maturity that we are at.

One Note of Caution

One thing that is important to watch out for is that the spirit in which we do this sets has to be one of worship, and not performance-orientation or self-empowerment. These exercises actually move in the opposite direction. In all this, we are decreasing as He is increasing. If you find that they actually make you feel less liberty in your heart, or more stressed out, please stop them and see me about it. What may be needed is just a few clarifications and reorientations.

Training Schedule

02 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by vcfblogger in Training, VCF

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Calendar_0

Focus of the training:

  • Spirit and Word unto Winning
  • Timeline: 1st set – Nov, Dec, Jan

Spirit:

  • Training: Monthly prayer meetings on Saturday 10am in Stalder Chapel (Nov 9, Dec 7, Dec 14, Jan 11)
  • Opportunity to intercede with others: weekly on Sundays: 9:15 to 9:45am in Fellowship Hall (downstairs)

Word:

  • Monthly teaching on devotions – how to hear from God through His Word (with mentoring available)
  • Starts week of Nov 11 – exact schedule to be announced soon
  • Idea is to make use of small group structure mid-week – offer Saturday morning for those who can’t come mid-week

Winning:

  • Christmas service – Dec 15

Why Train?

01 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by vcfblogger in Training

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prepared

“Prepare your chariot and go down lest the rain prevent you”… and the hand of the LORD was upon Elijah, and he gathered up his garment and ran before Ahab. (From 1 Kings 18:41-46)

The perils of not being prepared

It may come as a surprise that the things we pray for often involve a challenging degree of turmoil, chaos, danger and even potential for destruction. The promise of spiritual outpouring is accompanied by perils that, if we are not prepared for, can be overwhelming. The big things that we pray for require a requisite largeness, strength and spiritual heft on our part, to carry them through.

The rain that the king, nation and prophet had earnestly prayed for came with devastating suddenness and required a pace of movement, understanding and strength that Ahab did not have. Elijah, on the other hand, was able to run at a pace that overtook the chariot and function in a capacity that reflected supernatural power.

How we function depends on training and preparation

And it is this realm of functioning that is called for and brought in by the outpouring of the Spirit. If we have not been used to moving in the realm of faith and revelation, we find ourselves flat-footed in this new dynamic.

The mental brilliance we had which looked so good in the absence of God’s move, looks clumsy and pedestrian where we need to be stepping out boldly at the impulse and leading of our spiritual instincts. The reliance on relational adeptness and listening techniques are left at the post in the face of the need for decisive action that shows forth God’s wisdom. The much-touted humanistic creativity, so valued in the absence of a move of God, seems irrelevant and awkward in the midst of more powerful spiritual weapons.

When Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzar need a word from the gods, naturalistic, hip Christianity, for all its contrived “relevance” and emergent postmodernism, is brushed aside. A move of God is a dangerous thing, and can only be met by spiritual preparation.

In other words, revival can actually be painful for those unaccustomed to moving in sync with the Spirit. Just as God is exposed in revivals, so is our reliance on the flesh. But just as the San Francisco earthquake at the turn of the Century, and the Chicago Fire have been read as times of great calamity, they also happen to have been the occasion for great revivals – the awaited times that certain men and women of God had been preparing for. These were the “such a time as this” moments that required them to be able to minister more than human help to people who had been devastated. They had to have the spiritual wherewithal to rise to the situation. Just as the rain in Ahab’s and Elijah’s case required them to move faster than they could under normal circumstances, so too will the opportunities that God affords require a level of united, committed corporate prayer to see harvest. The opportunities will be there – for those who know their God, have developed a strong spirit, and can take action.

This is what our training is preparing us for.

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  • Listening for the New Year, part 2
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  • Daily Training Set #4
  • Considering the work done during the Easter period
  • God’s winning ways…that involve losing temporarily when necessary!

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  • Listening for the New Year, part 2 February 9, 2016
  • Listening for the New Year, part 1 February 1, 2016
  • Daily Training Set #4 May 19, 2014
  • Considering the work done during the Easter period May 19, 2014
  • God’s winning ways…that involve losing temporarily when necessary! March 6, 2014
  • Lessons on Winning and Asking from Swimming January 18, 2014
  • Daily Training Set #3 January 8, 2014
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  • Daily Training Set #2 December 13, 2013
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