By Rick Renner
When I was first starting in the ministry, I served as an assistant pastor in a denominational church. Because I was in training for ministry, the senior pastor wanted to teach me how to conduct funerals. To instruct me, he took me to funeral after funeral so that I’d learn how handle myself in delicate and difficult situations.
BY ANDREW HOPKINS
Have you ever felt like your past was chasing you down? It can feel like in the background of your mind there’s this voice reminding you of what you’ve done, who you once were or the things you’re ashamed of.
By Dr. MIchael Brown
2,000 years ago, the disciples were told to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, without which they could not complete their mission (see Luke 24:49; Acts 1:8.) Similarly, today, many Christians are praying for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, recognizing that without it, they, too, cannot complete their mission.
By Rick Renner
How would you like God to give you a weapon that can rip to shreds the devil’s strategies against you? Well, that’s exactly what He has done! Ephesians 6:17 declares that God has given you “…the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”!
By Andrew Hopkins
A while ago, I was flying back home from a mission trip to the Philippines. It’s always exciting to see people come to Jesus and encounter His love. On the flight, we hit some kind of storm, and then came the turbulence. Heavy turbulence. I wish I could say I was God’s man of power for the hour and commanded the storm to cease…but that wasn’t the case. I was freaked out. I thought I was gonna die.
By Dr. Michael Brown
In recent months, I have spent a lot of time meditating on and praying about the meaning and the mystery of life.
By Rick Renner
When our family first arrived in the former USSR, we disembarked the airplane to find Soviet soldiers standing all around the landing strip with machine guns in arm — a brand-new sight for our family! Those soldiers tried to rush us along to leave the runway area and get inside the terminal.
By Andrew Hopkins
Lately, I’ve been seeing some posts about the phrase “Holy Spirit, come” and how it is wrong theology to pray that because God is omnipresent. If He’s everywhere at all times, then why ask Him to come? The reality is, God is always omnipresent, but He’s not always manifestly present.
By Dr. Michael Brown William Carey (1761–1834) began his career as an uneducated shoemaker in England. At the end of his life, he was living in India, hailed as “the father of modern missions,” serving also as a professor of Oriental languages at Fort William College in Calcutta. He was almost entirely self-taught. His accomplishments were almost inconceivable, but for Carey, they were just a way of life. His motto was, “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” In describing his own life mission, Carey said, “My business is to witness for Christ. I make shoes just to pay my expenses.” As for his staggering achievements, as reported on the Britannica website, Carey was called the ‘father of Bengali prose’ for his grammars, dictionaries, and translations.” He “translated the Bible into Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, and Sanskrit. He also translated parts of it into 29 other languages and dialects.” (If you’ve ever tried to master a foreign language, chew on that for a while.) Moreover, His social work extended beyond education …
By Rick Renner
I remember one January day several years ago when I was aroused from my sleep very early in the morning, and I sensed that the Holy Spirit was awaking me because there was something He wanted to tell me. At first, I thought I was just having a difficult time sleeping, so I tried to shrug it off and go back to sleep.
By Andrew Hopkins
Do you remember those times when you’re learning a new board game with friends? Someone tries to teach everyone how to play and after a few minutes you kind of get it (but not really) and then you all end up saying, “Let’s just play and you’ll get it as you go.”
By Dr. Michael Brown
You won’t find this in our English translations, but it’s literally what the Hebrew says in a psalm ascribed to David: “In place of my love they hatefully accuse me, but I am prayer” (Psalm 109:4, my translation). What a profound statement, and what a lesson for us.
By Rick Renner
When you live and preach the Gospel in volatile regions of the world, you deal with issues that believers in more civilized nations never have to think about. Some of these challenges simply go with the territory of working on the front lines of the Gospel, and there is nothing that can be done to change it.
By Andrew Hopkins
If supernatural healing really is God’s will (as it is), then why is healing ministry not a normal part of every church? Bringing it even closer to home, is it a normal part of your walk as a believer? God wants to raise up an army of healers, who walk in confidence of God’s healing power and release it as they go through life. This is our inheritance as followers of Jesus!
By Dr. Michael Brown
One of the nicest features of the first house Nancy and I owned was the beautiful rose bushes that surrounded the yard. The previous owner of the house loved to landscape, and those rose bushes were his pride and joy. Nancy especially appreciated them as well, being a natural gardener herself.
By Andrew Hopkins
All throughout Scripture and all throughout history God has released healing in various ways. From the prayer of faith to an anointed handkerchief to a text message – there’s no limit to how God can release healing. All things are possible to those who believe!
By Rick Renner
Denise and I decided to attend an art auction in Moscow simply because we wanted to do something fun and different. We were not going to purchase art, but we thought it might be fun to observe how an event like an art auction would be conducted. We figured it would be a high-class event, so we dressed accordingly.
By Dr. Michael Brown
There is a pressing, urgent need in the Church today for more men and women of prayer, for people who will pray and cry out and persevere until the answer comes. Our God is a prayer answering God.
By Andrew Hopkins
God wants to raise up an army of believers who walk in the healing power of God. Healing was an essential part of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Everywhere He went He released the healing touch of God. Not just emotional, medical, or inner healing – although that’s great and something God does – I’m talking about healing miracles that remove the pains, sickness, and diseases in people’s physical bodies.
By Dr. Michael Brown This story might seem hard to believe for some, but I heard it firsthand from a good Christian friend, whom we’ll call Sam. And upon reflection, it’s not far fetched at all. Sam’s daughter is dating a 28-year-old Jewish man, a graduate of Tufts and MIT. Shortly before Christmas, Sam, who has been a pastor and served in various ministry capacities over the years, had an opportunity to talk with this young man about the gospel. To Sam’s shock, he learned that, not only did this well-educated Jewish man have no understanding of the gospel message, but he also had a deeply flawed view of what it meant to be a Christian. As far as he knew, being a Christian meant that you held to certain conservative political viewpoints. These included gun rights and voting for Trump (or, more broadly, Republican), along with a number of other conservative political values. As for the message of salvation, Sam said that this young man “had not been introduced to the gospel of faith …
By Rick Renner
I have had to deal with demonic manifestations on several occasions in my ministry. I remember one time when a young Satanist teenager came forward at the end of one of my meetings in a large church. That night ….
By Dr. Michael Brown
You would think this would be pretty easy to get right: according to the Gospels, Yeshua (Jesus) was born a Jew in an ancient Jewish city in the historic land of Israel. But no, all this must be disputed, after all, how can Jesus be the liberator of the oppressed if He Himself was born to an oppressor people in an oppressor city? The narrative must be changed.
By Michael Brown
There is no shortage of bad news today, both on the national and global level.
By Andrew Hopkins
In the world we live in, there are all kinds of voices that try to tell you what you should think and what you should do. But you weren’t made to be tossed here and there like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind of everyone’s opinions! You were meant to stand upon the truth of God and influence others for the sake of Jesus. You are called to be a thermostat, not a thermometer.
By Rick Renner
I cannot begin to count the times people have told me, “Rick, no one has ever been able to do what you’re attempting to do in your part of the world. We know several who tried to do it in the past, but they failed and ended up in a mess.
By Dr. Michael Brown
This article is not meant to provoke or insult or demean or antagonize or gaslight. Instead, it is meant to help readers understand why I continue to say that the “NAR” of the critics does not exist.
By Andrew Hopkins
There is a current in our culture that is working to pull us contrary to the ways of God. It’s working overtime to get us to go with the flow of its tide. Just a few moments spent in the media, news outlets, or advertisements and you can feel the sales pitch vying for your attention and submission to its narrative.
By Rick Renner
Many years ago, my wife and I were invited to minister in a church that believed it was a sin for women to wear jewelry or cosmetics. We only discovered it was this kind of church when we arrived that evening.
By Andrew Hopkins
The day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday is known as Holy Saturday. The “in-between.” Between the crucifixion and the resurrection.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. — Romans 8:14 By Rick Renner When your journey of faith begins, you may not have all the answers you would like to have before you take your first steps of faith. For instance, when my family moved to the other side of the world so many years ago, we sincerely thought it would be a one-year investment in the USSR. But when we took the first step and arrived at that land, God gave us the next step. When we obeyed that step, He then gave us the next, and the next, and the next. That’s the way it is for all of us when we walk with the Lord. As wonderful as it would be to see the whole picture before we get started, He usually leads us one step at a time after we get started. This has certainly been true in my life. God had given me a vision for my life, but His …
By Michael Brown
The debate about cessationism vs. continuism—meaning, whether all the gifts of the Spirit are still in operation today—is not just an abstract theological debate.
By Andrew Hopkins
I believe we’re in a season where God is restoring the Spirit of the fear of the Lord back to the church. You can either fear God or you can fear whatever the world is fearing. God is saying, “Choose this day whom you will fear.
By Rick Renner
When our youngest son Joel was first learning how to pray, he always prayed the same exact prayer every time he bowed his head. When we got on our knees alongside his bed at night, he repeated the same prayer.
By Rick Renner
If you want to be free from every stronghold of the enemy in your life, you have to understand that there are two kinds of strongholds: rational and irrational. The rational strongholds are the more difficult to deal with — because they usually make sense!
By Andrew Hopkins
Have you ever heard of weightlifters whose upper body strength is like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s back in his heyday, but their legs look like Olive Oyl’s from the old Popeye cartoons? (Wow, I just hugely dated myself). What was their problem?
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