Speaker 1: Who knows that Christians are good news people?
Speaker 1: Do you know we're good news people?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, you don't have to look too far to see that.
Speaker 1: The world's full of bad news, right, whether it's wars, political turmoil, environmental catastrophe or personal tragedy.
Speaker 1: It's actually really hard out there.
Speaker 1: And the problem begins in the human heart.
Speaker 1: Jesus said from the heart come evil thoughts.
Speaker 1: Murders, adultery, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander these are the things that defile a person.
Speaker 1: It's not a great image, is it?
Speaker 1: These sins alienate us from God and cause all sorts of conflict between people.
Speaker 1: But Jesus came with good news about the kingdom of God, that the rule and reign of God, with his goodness, beauty and truth, has arrived.
Speaker 1: Jesus died for the sin of a broken and hurting world so that in the midst of the darkness he can bring hope, healing and light to those who trust him.
Speaker 1: You know, I recently met with a family.
Speaker 1: It was really sad.
Speaker 1: They're part of this guy's partner and I met with the daughter and son-in-law.
Speaker 1: So mom had died when she was hit by a car nearby in Carlisle.
Speaker 1: Their faith was wafer thin, not just because of that, but it had been for a while.
Speaker 1: But as I talked to them it was evident that their faith was real and so, in the midst of their pain, I was able to bring some hope.
Speaker 1: Not because they're good people, although they seemed lovely, not because they had a big faith, because they're good people, although they seem lovely, not because they had a big faith, but because they didn't, but because whatever faith they had was in a big God, a God whose grace is big enough to carry them.
Speaker 1: And I felt confident to say his grace is big enough to carry her.
Speaker 1: I believe you'll see her again.
Speaker 1: That's good news.
Speaker 1: Christians are good news people and over the past few weeks we've been exploring how you can carry good news blessing to your communities and how I can in my community, and we've been seeing that as Jesus' people and we've been seeing that as Jesus' people.
Speaker 1: God's spirit lives within each of us and so we carry his kingdom wherever we go.
Speaker 1: If you want to know what that kingdom looks like, then look to the king Jesus.
Speaker 1: Jesus was full of truth and grace, full of holiness and compassion.
Speaker 1: He held these things together.
Speaker 1: He said the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news.
Speaker 1: So he called people to turn from their sins that lead to pain and death and turn to God, who is the source of life life and Christians carry this life in us.
Speaker 1: Through his spirit, jesus said I will ask the father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever.
Speaker 1: He is the spirit of truth.
Speaker 1: The world is unable to receive him because it doesn't know him or see him, but you do know him because he remains with you and will be in you and because we carry God's presence.
Speaker 1: The Bible says we are a priesthood and one of a priest's responsibilities is to intercede between God and people.
Speaker 1: And as we spend time with God standing in his presence, we can more effectively carry his presence and speak blessing over people.
Speaker 1: And finally, we saw that Jesus gave us the Lord's prayer as a model for us to build our prayer life on.
Speaker 1: He said pray like this and he sort of gave us a skeleton for us to put flesh on.
Speaker 1: He showed us that prayer begins with looking heavenward to God and we pray that God's kingdom may come on earth.
Speaker 1: We pray heaven's blessings for people their physical, relational and spiritual welfare, and so we've been focusing on blessing these last few weeks.
Speaker 1: But the real goal is healing and transformation.
Speaker 1: Blessing is a vehicle to help transform our world, and today I want to get really practical.
Speaker 1: What does this lifestyle of kingdom blessing look like Now?
Speaker 1: A key tool is local houses of prayer, or LHOPs, and most of what I'm going to talk about this morning are in your brochures on your seat.
Speaker 1: It's actually a trifold.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to fold a hundred brochures, so I thought you might fold your own, and so feel free to follow along in that.
Speaker 1: We'll hop around to different parts.
Speaker 1: And so feel free to follow along in that We'll hop around to different parts.
Speaker 1: It's designed for you to use, not as sermon notes.
Speaker 1: What is an LHOP?
Speaker 1: Well, while there is an individual dimension to the ministry of blessing, the kingdom of God is all about relationships, first with God and then with one another.
Speaker 1: So, luke 10.1, the Lord appointed 72 others, and he sent them ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself was about to go.
Speaker 1: You know, jesus called his disciples into community and then he sent them out in community, and so being in community is integral to following and serving Jesus.
Speaker 1: And you can see on the back of your brochure a definition of Elhopt.
Speaker 1: What is a local house of prayer?
Speaker 1: So let's begin with the second paragraph.
Speaker 1: There, participants choose a small local area for Jesus, worship and pray for the manifestation of the kingdom of God, proclaim blessings and actively participate in its release through their lives and witness, guided by the Caleb questions in this brochure which are inside.
Speaker 1: So, in essence, an LHOP is a small group of people who want to see a neighborhood, community or place transform and they bless it and pray for it.
Speaker 1: Question, then, is what makes an LHOP different from other groups?
Speaker 1: And if you've been tracking with us over the last few weeks, you'll already be familiar with some of the core tenets of LHOPs.
Speaker 1: Already be familiar with some of the core tenets of LHOPs which are also on the brochure on the back Seeking the presence of God.
Speaker 1: You know, the presence of God really is everything in this process.
Speaker 1: If we go out and we pray or we work, we're just doing it all.
Speaker 1: It's just words, it's just human effort, but where the presence of God is leading and empowering us and it becomes divine, presence of God is leading and empowering us and it becomes divine.
Speaker 1: Building an altar in our communities, and that's about inviting God's presence into a particular place through prayer and worship, longing for the redemption of all things.
Speaker 1: You know we have a holistic perspective.
Speaker 1: It's not just about getting saved and going to heaven, but the renewal of all creation.
Speaker 1: Not just about getting saved and going to heaven, but the renewal of all creation, agreeing with heaven and each other being in alignment with God.
Speaker 1: You know, unity is so important.
Speaker 1: Unity is vital.
Speaker 1: Blessing and interceding with an individual and community slash land focus.
Speaker 1: So the blessing is specific for people, communities and even places Breaking in of the kingdom, the rule of God in our community.
Speaker 1: So again we're looking for kingdom transformation and then believing in the power of testimony as we share stories of green shoots breaking in.
Speaker 1: So this is just encouraging one another, even when our story seems insignificant.
Speaker 1: I've heard the odd story I don't know.
Speaker 1: Does anyone have a story they want to share this morning about blessing, blessing someone or something, and something even smaller has happened.
Speaker 1: I need to be more proactive with that, but I have heard stories from people that just seem insignificant but they're not.
Speaker 1: You bless and then something happens in a relationship or a street or something.
Speaker 1: So one of the key differences between an LHOP and, say, our discipleship groups is that D groups are more inward looking.
Speaker 1: They're about growing together and caring for one another.
Speaker 1: Lhops are more about looking outwards.
Speaker 1: They're about praying for and caring for our community, and we really need both postures in a church.
Speaker 1: We need to be building up within and becoming stronger, but taking that out and making a difference in our world.
Speaker 1: At this point you might be saying, alex, I'm already in a D group, I don't have time for an LHOP as well, I don't have time to fit it into my life.
Speaker 1: No, in an ideal world we'd do both.
Speaker 1: But who here lives in an ideal world?
Speaker 1: None of us.
Speaker 1: So I'm just happy you're in fellowship, quite honestly.
Speaker 1: So don't sweat it if you just don't feel like I can add something else.
Speaker 1: But if it is on your heart, how is it we actually start a local house of prayer?
Speaker 1: It's about a group.
Speaker 1: Well, although D groups and LHOPs do have different focuses, your dGroup could be a natural place to begin and form a local house of prayer.
Speaker 1: Can you carve out time in your dGroup to bless and pray for your community, to share stories of blessing and, as we'll see in a moment, pray through the people you're each individually blessing?
Speaker 1: Or perhaps you can form a subgroup?
Speaker 1: Some of you meet fortnightly.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you could just get together with a few others in your group on the off week to do that, but maybe that doesn't work for you at all.
Speaker 1: There is a danger that your group could lose focus, and not everyone may have a heart for local houses of prayer, but in which case maybe you could find two or three other Christians to pray with and just do it another time.
Speaker 1: Independently of that.
Speaker 1: Where would you find people like that?
Speaker 1: Well, you begin with praying, asking God to lead you to them and them to you.
Speaker 1: Look for the people you naturally connect with might be in your dGroup, it might be in our church, it might not be, it might be a Christian outside of our church and listen out for people who have a common burden to you, for whatever it is that you want to pray for.
Speaker 1: I've mentioned before I live in a little enclave in Ellenbrook that's divided by a road, a rail or two major roads and a rail, and so it sort of feels like this little isolated pocket.
Speaker 1: I'm praying and blessing that, and I'm looking for others who might share that common burden too, which isn't going to be anyone here, I know, because none of you live in Ellenbrook but what about your community or school or whatever it is you're praying for.
Speaker 1: Another difference between LHOPs and D groups is that D groups are a more formal ministry of the church and they need a bit more organisation and, frankly, accountability, and small group leaders have been getting on board with some of our Safe Church stuff in the last week or two and LHOP is far smaller.
Speaker 1: It's really just two, three, maybe four people.
Speaker 1: It's less formal and you know, these kingdom missional ministries really need to be nimble so it can meet anywhere anytime.
Speaker 1: It's about releasing the kingdom of God in our world, and you just can't contain that, and so an LHOP can meet anywhere a home, a church, a park, a cafe.
Speaker 1: What's important is people coming together with a common vision, and so you just go for it.
Speaker 1: But please let me know if you're going to start an Lelhop, not so that we can keep tabs on you, but so that we can celebrate what God's doing.
Speaker 1: Well, whether you start Nelhop or you just want to start blessing people by yourself, how do you choose who to bless?
Speaker 1: We've been talking about blessing lately, but we haven't been talking about who and how do you actually bless them.
Speaker 1: Well, you can bless anyone any time, of course, but one of the LHOP principles is a focus on specific individuals, places or even the land you can bless.
Speaker 1: I bless a park in my local area and that's where the principle of fives come in, which you'll see on the inside of your brochure.
Speaker 1: There's a room there to list five people who you want to pray for, and down below it's some ideas for identifying who might be those five people.
Speaker 1: Again, ask the Holy Spirit, think about people in your life.
Speaker 1: It may be family, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, maybe a person of peace, a Christian or not.
Speaker 1: I mean, really, you don't need to overthink it too much.
Speaker 1: You're praying for and speaking blessing over people, and as long as your heart is to bless, you're not going to get it wrong.
Speaker 1: And so simply put who's on your heart to bless.
Speaker 1: I know some people struggle with the idea of blessing people who are far from God.
Speaker 1: So what do we do with that?
Speaker 1: Well, we don't bless sin, but we can bless sinners.
Speaker 1: Didn't Jesus do that?
Speaker 1: In Romans 12.14?
Speaker 1: It says Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse, and so we can bless even godless people.
Speaker 1: You know that we could bless them, that they might have wisdom to know the secret to the good life.
Speaker 1: What's the secret to the good life.
Speaker 1: Jesus, right, the gospel.
Speaker 1: You know that they might not know that, but who's going to object to that sort of blessing?
Speaker 1: Bless them according to your faith, but there's nearly always something you can bless someone with, even your enemies, even your enemies.
Speaker 1: Well, how do I bless someone?
Speaker 1: Well, the idea of fives is that, initially at least, you bless and pray for five people five days a week for five weeks.
Speaker 1: What do you do when you're blessing them?
Speaker 1: What do you pray?
Speaker 1: Well, lhop has a great acronym to help you cover this, which reflects the priorities of Jesus, and you'll see it again in your brochure there BLESS B-L-E-S-S.
Speaker 1: And that's we bless their body, so that's their health and safety and so on.
Speaker 1: Their labor, so their work, employment, their emotional life, their social life, so their relationships and their spiritual life.
Speaker 1: What does that actually look like?
Speaker 1: Well, when I do this, I go somewhere quiet.
Speaker 1: When I'm just blessing individually, I pull out my list during my prayer time and I say something like this so maybe I'm blessing Gary and I say, gary, this is me.
Speaker 1: I say this out loud, there's no one else around.
Speaker 1: Gary, I bless you in Jesus' name that you may have good health.
Speaker 1: That might be my Monday blessing.
Speaker 1: That might be it.
Speaker 1: Maybe I know some stuff about Gary, so I pray a bit more for him.
Speaker 1: Tuesday I bless you that you might have favour and safety at work.
Speaker 1: Wednesday I bless you that you might know the joy of the Lord.
Speaker 1: Thursday I bless your marriage in Jesus' name, that it may be strong and fulfilling.
Speaker 1: Friday I bless you that you may have a deeper experience of God, and that's it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be long and complicated.
Speaker 1: As I say, it might flow out into more prayer.
Speaker 1: There might be more there I can bless someone with, but we're just mixing it up every day and getting a holistic picture of their life every day and getting a holistic picture of their life.
Speaker 1: I do think it's important to say these things out loud, though this is actually part of we.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you know the first?
Speaker 1: It wasn't until about the 4th or 5th century AD that people suddenly got the idea I can pray in my head Before then reading praying.
Speaker 1: Everything was done out loud, and there's actually something to be said for praying out loud even when we're by ourselves.
Speaker 1: This is part, I believe, of building an altar in a place.
Speaker 1: So building an altar is about inviting God's presence into a place which pushes back the darkness.
Speaker 1: I'll talk a bit more about that in a moment.
Speaker 1: But anyway, don't be shy.
Speaker 1: And don't be shy about asking people if you feel they're open to it, if you can bless them there.
Speaker 1: And then Just someone.
Speaker 1: You've got something on your heart where you just think they need to pick me up.
Speaker 1: They'd be open to this, to receiving it.
Speaker 1: Go for it.
Speaker 1: What's the worst that could happen?
Speaker 1: They'll feel better because someone said something nice to them.
Speaker 1: Well, as I said earlier, lhops are about community.
Speaker 1: It's important that we meet together in groups as much as we can for this.
Speaker 1: So perhaps you have a burden for a particular school or street or housing estate.
Speaker 1: You long for its redemption, and then maybe you discover one or two as you're talking, or you just know of them who share that burden as well.
Speaker 1: So you ask them would you form an LHOP with me and to pray and bless that person or place or street or whatever?
Speaker 1: What do you do next?
Speaker 1: Well, ideally you'd get together every week, but if you can't do that, get together as often as you can.
Speaker 1: In your brochure, again, there's a model agenda that you could follow.
Speaker 1: You don't have to follow that exactly, but it's a useful guide and I want to highlight a couple of items in there.
Speaker 1: And first of all, it says to pray for your area.
Speaker 1: And this is where the local in local houses of prayer is important.
Speaker 1: And again, it's part of what we mean by building an altar.
Speaker 1: There is power in praying on site and, as I said before, out loud in a location does somehow invite God's presence in and pushes back the darkness and releases blessing to the surrounding area.
Speaker 1: There's just something spiritual, spiritual warfare in that simple act.
Speaker 1: You're not having to bind demons and drive out the darkness, you're calling God to come and you're blessing and he'll do the rest.
Speaker 1: I know one church that prays for a local shopping centre across the road from them and they have seen some small transformation happening there.
Speaker 1: And yes, god even cares about business.
Speaker 1: He cares about the business or company you work for, because businesses are about people.
Speaker 1: You might pray for a street, a school, a neighborhood, a park Where's the need, where's the opportunity, or simply what's on your heart.
Speaker 1: And then in the brochure are these what's called Caleb questions which really can help you take this on a little bit further.
Speaker 1: Maybe there is someone I can speak a blessing to personally, maybe there's something I can do practically to bring blessing and Caleb.
Speaker 1: Why are they called Caleb questions?
Speaker 1: I actually haven't been told, but I'm guessing it's because Caleb was a man of faith who took hold of his inheritance in his old age.
Speaker 1: He let nothing stop him, he just trusted God, and nothing is too hard for God when we trust him.
Speaker 1: And so I reckon these Caleb questions could be dynamite as you go forward and they start to put flesh on the spirit of your blessing, flesh on the spirit of your blessing.
Speaker 1: And then I've included in the brochure a blessing which I've gotten from local houses of prayer.
Speaker 1: They use it over in Wales, so we've modified it, made it a bit more generic.
Speaker 1: We pray it at what will be our Tuesday prayer meeting.
Speaker 1: We pray that over Bentley, and if you'd like to, you can use it too, and if you form an LHOP, or just by yourself.
Speaker 1: So after five weeks you review what you're doing.
Speaker 1: And again there are some questions in your brochure to help you think through that.
Speaker 1: And if you've been praying through these fives and one or two, perhaps it's just feeling like a slog and not quite working, you have permission to change it up.
Speaker 1: Uh, if you're in a flow, seeing fruit, keep, keep going, seek the lord on on what next and just repeat the cycle.
Speaker 1: So as we start on this journey as a church, it and and if you start on a journey of blessing people, it might seem not much is happening.
Speaker 1: Is it really making a big difference?
Speaker 1: But you know, jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.
Speaker 1: It's the smallest of all the seeds, but when grown, it's taller than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches.
Speaker 1: Here's a fun fact the mustard seed doesn't actually grow into a tree, it's a bush.
Speaker 1: I think Jesus knew that and his audience knew that, and in fact there's not even a bush that's big enough for the birds of the sky to perch in.
Speaker 1: But here's what I think Jesus was saying.
Speaker 1: Given that background that they all knew, it would have been like well, hang on Jesus.
Speaker 1: What are you saying?
Speaker 1: Well, I think what Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God is something supernatural.
Speaker 1: Change starts imperceptibly, but when the spirit moves, something miraculous happens.
Speaker 1: I've learned I have to be patient and let that mustard seed start to grow Once you've planted it.
Speaker 1: There's not a whole lot you can do, but we do have to tend it diligently.
Speaker 1: We can't try to make it grow, but we can water it and fertilize it through persistent faith and prayer and in time we'll see the fruit of the kingdom.
Speaker 1: That is way beyond anything we could expect, naturally.
Speaker 1: And so who can you bless?
Speaker 1: Who could you form a local house of prayer with and bring kingdom transformation to your community?
Speaker 1: Let's pray and then Gary's going to lead us in a time of communion.
Speaker 1: Father, I pray that you will give us a faith to enter into this kind of transformational mission, not because we feel we are adequate because, frankly, I feel very inadequate, but because you are an amazing God who has a heart that we just can't imagine for our community, a heart that led just can't imagine for our community, a heart that led his son to the cross.
Speaker 1: Lord, teach us to bless, to expect, to carry your presence into our world, and please move through us.
Speaker 1: We pray in Jesus' name, amen.