ians blogposts
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 By Ian Ashby
This morning I attended the funeral of Patty Yellis. For the past two years Patty had battled with cancer. However, I was glad to hear today, someone say, 'Cancer did NOT win'. Ultimately, Jesus won, he always wins. Today, Patty, a courageous believer, is more alive than she has ever been. I have got to know several of the Yellis family over the past few months, as two of the sons have been in membership at Harbor Church and other members of their family, including Patty, have visited and worshiped with us at North Church. I have to say that I have been very impressed with the Yellis children that I have met. Today it became clear that they owe much to their mother, who taught them, helped shaped their values and set such a great example for them, in life and death. As their father, Mark Yellis, so eloquently said, the six children (two by adoption from China) are six of the jewels in her crown. And it wasn't just her own family that she impacted. Her love for orphans in China and her work with the Living Hope Adoption Agency has clearly left it's mark on many lives, as evidenced by the letters of appreciation that were read out today. I believe I can say with confidence that in heaven, Patty Yellis is now very much alive. But the legacy of her life also continues here on earth, through the lives of the family and friends that she has touched so deeply. May our own lives leave a legacy like Patty's. For more on Patty Yellis and the family's work in China go to http://www.pattyyellis.org/ |
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By Ian Ashby To help raise awareness for Restore 61 we held an art exhibition on the weekend of June 4/5. Almost twenty artists from the community donated work to this show all on the theme of ‘restoration.’ An article about the show was written by the Portsmouth Herald. Click here to read it. Among those in attendance Friday night was Portsmouth Mayor Tom Ferrini. He lauded the nonprofit for its valuable service to the community and commended its members for finding a niche in a social service agenda that he said could use some assistance. "The idea of trying to give people a chance to get back into society and keep moving is important, and I'm really proud of the local artists who were able to bring their wonderful work here to raise consciousness," he said. The full follow up press report can be read by clicking here. |
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Written by Ian Ashby
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If you read the Douglas Grant Story, you will have heard about Restore 61, a non profit organization started by members of Harbor Church. Originally named Acorn Foundation, the name was changed recently to avoid confusion with the national ACORN organization that has had so much bad publicity recently.
Why ‘Restore 61’? The name is taken from a chapter in the bible - Isaiah 61, the same chapter that Jesus quoted to describe his own ministry. Verse 1 says, “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners...”
The same Spirit that led Jesus to reach out to the poor and needy, to have compassion for the lost and helpless, to heal the sick and outcast has also been given to his followers. Harbor Church is a church that takes this mandate seriously. As Tim Keller says in his book ‘Ministries of Mercy’, “Mercy is not optional or an addition to being a Christian. Rather, a life poured out in deeds of mercy is the inevitable sign of true faith.”
That’s why we started this non-profit - to provide a vehicle that enables all kinds of people to engage in deeds of mercy, demonstrating God’s love in practical ways. Our vision is that the people we serve will eventually be made strong, able to stand on their own, like ‘Oaks of righteousness’ (Isaiah 61:3). That’s why we originally named the organization Acorn Foundation. It’s from little acorns that oak trees grow. But Isaiah also says that it is those same people who will “rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”
It is transformed and restored lives that bring transformation and restoration to communities and cities. That is our vision for Restore 61 on the Seacoast.
As mentioned in the Douglas Grant story, we have been providing food and friendship to needy people on the streets of Portsmouth for a number of years now. Our goal is to also provide transitional housing for people, like Douglas Grant, who need a helping hand. A house will enable us to help four to five people at a time to become self supporting as well as providing opportunities for people in the community to give support through friendship, counseling, transportation, skills training, work and much more.
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By Ian Ashby
I was speaking at one of our churches in Boston recently. A lady from Sri Lanka gave a testimony about a healing that really stirred me. She had a baby daughter who had been diagnosed as being practically deaf. They were told she would need a hearing aid and would need help learning to talk. The parents were understandably upset. They sent a message to their church back home to be praying for their daughter. One of the church leaders there who is known to be prophetic sent a message back, believing that he had heard from God. He told the couple that their daughter would be healed, but that it would be a gradual process and only when she was 17 would her healing be complete.
The mother was relaying this story to her new church in Boston. She then told them her response to what God had said: “We told God, ‘this is unacceptable!’”
What audacity! Telling Almighty God ‘this is unacceptable,’ how could she say that? But she did and she and her husband set out to pray and fast for their daughter. A few weeks later they took her back for some more tests. The doctors had to run the tests four times because they couldn’t believe the results. At the end they concluded, ‘she can now hear perfectly. We don’t know how, this kind of thing never happens.’ Wow! Amazing!
But this kind of praying is not unusual in the bible. So many of the great prayers in the bible are appealing to God to be true to his character and his word, often it seems in response to God's invitation or revelation. God wants his people to interact with him, to dialogue. Prayer is not a formula, it is a relationship. "Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD (Isaiah 1:18)
Abraham is a good example of this. When God revealed to him that he was about to destroy the City of Sodom and Gomorrah, the place where Abraham’s nephew and family lived, Abraham’s bold response was, "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?...Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:23-25) ‘This is unacceptable’ he was saying and then he proceeded to humbly reason with God. Abraham’s appeal was based on his knowledge of God’s character, that God is merciful and just.
Nehemiah is another example. As he wept over the ruins of jerusalem, he appealed to “the great and awesome God who keeps covenant” (Nehemiah 1:5) and then reminds God of his word, specifically, his promise to Moses, that if his people would return to him, he would gather them again and bless them.
Like many of the saints of old, he was pleading the promises of God, knowing that God must be true to his word.
This is one reason why it is so important that we are regularly reading God’s word, meditating on it and feeding on it, because as we do so, the Holy Spirit speaks to us through it, revealing God’s will to us. Surely that’s also what it means to ‘pray in the Spirit’; that we not only pray ‘with our spirits’ as we have seen in the previous blogs, but we also pray ‘with our minds’ (1 Corinthians 14:15) allowing God’s word to inform our praying.
There is a close connection between the word of God and the Spirit of God when we pray. We see it clearly in Ephesians 6:17-18 where Paul tells us that all of our praying should be ‘in the Spirit’. He says, “take...the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.”
Praying in the Spirit includes praying the word of God. As H. W. Frost commented, “There is an inseparable union between the Spirit, the Word and prayer, which indicates that the Spirit will always lead the saint to make much of the Word, and especially God’s promises in the Word. ...This explains the fact that the great pray-ers have always been great students of the word.”
When we know the promises of God, then, like so many of the saints in the bible, we can pray, “You said Lord” appealing to God to be true to his character and his word, knowing that we are on sure ground when we do.
What is unacceptable to you right now?
Next time we will look at ‘praying with faith.’
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By Ian Ashby Wow! That was my reaction when I read Jackie Pullinger’s biographical story, Chasing the Dragon. It was 1983, I was a new Christian and this was the first Christian book I ever read. It really opened my eyes to the supernatural realm and helped shape my thinking for my whole Christian life. It was her story that introduced me to this phenomenon that the bible calls ‘speaking in tongues.’
Jackie has lived in Hong Kong for over 40 years now and the impact of her organization, St Stephen’s Society has been remarkable, the subject of many documentaries. It all started when she began to minister to the down and outs that she encountered in the notorious, Triad controlled, ‘Walled City’ of Kowloon. At first she had little success, but everything changed when she was filled with the Holy Spirit and started praying in tongues, an exercise she would do for 15 minutes every day.
She’d start by saying, ‘Lord there are all these people dying, you want them to have life, I want them to have life, please help me now to pray for them with your understanding’, because she says, ‘when you pray in tongues, you pray according to the Spirit of God, you are depending on him because he knows how to pray for those people better than you.’
‘The extraordinary thing was’, she said, ‘a few weeks after beginning to pray like this, I found I’d tell people about Jesus and they’d believe. At first I thought my Chinese had improved, but then I realized I was saying exactly the same things as I was saying before, but THIS time, I was saying it to the right people, people who were ready to hear.’
Many of the people that God led Jackie to were hopelessly addicted to heroin and opium, but Jackie believed that the same Jesus who healed people in the bible, must surely be able to heal people today. This has been her testimony. One of the most remarkable and well documented aspects of her ministry is seeing heroin addicts coming painlessly off heroin, without medication, just through people praying in tongues for them around the clock.
Personally, I am convinced that there is an intercessory use for this gift that many underestimate or are just unaware of. The bible doesn’t seem to shed much light on this, but perhaps we are given a clue in Romans 8:26 “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” As Gordon Fee comments in his book, Paul, the Spirit and the People of God, whatever else Paul has in mind here, it must surely include praying in tongues.
I think for many of us, our personal experience would bear that out. I often pray in tongues when I don’t know how to pray and I often find the Holy Spirit empowering my praying. I think it’s one of major ways that the Holy Spirit helps us.
One final example. In the first part of the twentieth century, WFP Burton went as a missionary to the Congo in Africa. While there he got seriously sick with a fever and it looked as if he was going to die. However, on his deathbed, he suddenly, unexplainably, miraculously recovered. He said, ‘I felt this warmth of life come through my body’. Later, on a home visit to England, he told his story in a meeting. A woman came to him and asked whether it was on a specific date that he recovered. She said she’d had a vision of him, ‘I saw you, lying as if dead, and I was broken down before God on your behalf and was praying for you, when suddenly the Spirit filled me and there I was speaking in an unknown tongue, and when I’d finished, I saw you perfectly well’. Burton looked up the date in his journal and found that it was the exact time of his recovery!
When Smith Wigglesworth heard this story his response was: ‘We need more of the Holy Ghost, let it no longer be we, but the Holy Spirit who prays!’ I can only say, Amen! |
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