NIGHTWATCH FOR EUROPE week beginning Sunday July 20th 2008
‘Could you not watch with me for one hour?’ (Mtt26: 40)
WELCOME TO THE NIGHT WATCH FOR EUROPE
Well done all of you who have let us know that you have booked flights to Majorca for the Nightwatch transition event from September 26-28th 2008. We are now liaising with several hotels and hope to confirm the details by the next watch. In the meantime please keep praying, whether you plan to come or not, and those coming please go ahead and book flights. Some of you are booking for several days for ease of travel or exploration of the location. Can we emphasise that the event runs from an informal get together on Friday evening for those who can make it, with the main time together taking all day Saturday and Sunday morning. So for those planning a longer stay the arrangements are your own. It may of course be that there is accommodation available beyond the Friday and Saturday nights at the venue we settle on, but there will be no guarantee of that.
This week we will give some of the background information to the decision to hold the transition event in Majorca so that we can all be praying from now on. We will also going more deeply into the important material of last week’s watch.
If you know of anyone who would also like to receive this night watch prayer bulletin each week, they can subscribe by going to www.passion.org.uk/announcemail and submitting their details on the web form. Alternatively they can email us at admin@passion.org.uk
IF YOU ARE A REGULAR YOU CAN SKIP THE NEXT 2 PARAGRAPHS
If you are receiving this material unexpectedly it is because someone has suggested that you may be interested to join in. If you do not want to keep receiving it please inform us immediately and we will stop sending it to you. We want to let those of you who are newcomers know that we are very pleased to have your partnership in this watch. We are simply asking for a commitment of an hour a week some time between 9pm and 6am whatever time zone you are in.
We will send you a brief outline for prayer each week according to the prophetic direction coming from the contemporary prophetic movement in Europe. You will not always agree with everything in the watch material. Go with what you can and trust the Lord to help you with the rest. This Nightwatch began in November 2003 and we are looking to carry on until the end of September 2008 after which there will be a transition into a different form of intercessory support. If you have to miss an occasional watch it’s OK as the rest of us will carry it. We are ready for eleventh hour workers for these final months!
THE CONTENT OF THE WATCH FOR THE WEEK BEGINNING SUNDAY 20th July 2008
1. SOME OF THE REASONS FOR HOLDING THE NIGHTWATCH TRANSITION EVENT IN MAJORCA (15 minutes)
i) Prophetic words that led us to conclude that Majorca is the place (5 minutes)
Sue Mitchell wrote: “I have been prophesying concerning the grace on SPAIN NOW, (knowing that they would beat Germany in football and Switzerland in tennis!) because, in my view, God is intent on reconciling North/South Europe & bringing that to our attention URGENTLY.”
Sam Rhein wrote: “A location in Spain is definitely the most prophetic approach to this event, more turned to the future, more adventurous in bridging Europe to Africa, and preparing the Mediterranean union ... if God is saying Spain to us at this time, then he may well be saying Mallorca, given the call to bridge Europe to Africa and all the new activity in the Spirit concerning the Mediterranean basin.”
Martin Scott wrote in answer to the question of whether he thought Mallorca was the location: “Yes please, this is the time!”
Michael Schiffmann wrote: “I feel very good about Majorca. Majorca is marked for things like this for many reasons.”
ii) It is God’s time for North/South European reconciliation, beginning with the church.
This is not easy because it involves Catholic/Protestant reconciliation and this is particularly difficult for southern European Protestants who feel that northerners don’t understand what Catholicism in the south is like. We need to admit that over the last decade some southern believers have refused to co-operate with intercession initiatives from the north because of this. We need to repent for simply dropping relationship because of the strength of feeling on this, rather than pursuing our brothers and sisters in love. The fundamental theological issues are love and forgiveness, even of our enemies, let alone of our brothers and sisters. Only once this is in place can we expect to move ahead in the spirit. (5 minutes)
iii) Europe/African reconciliation – now proceeding apace because of the success of the Europe/Africa Reconciliation Process.
We need light from God on the way ahead for this partnership, and not least for the reconciliation among European nations that God indicated would follow from dealing with the corporate sin of Europe against Africa. Extraordinary shifts are beginning to happen in Africa and we need to pray and believe God for new ways of economic and political life to emerge from the strong church movements in the continent, that can begin to show the way to the increasingly corrupt economic and spiritual culture of the west. Majorca, situated as it is between the two continents provides a prophetic place to pray for God’s will to be done between our nations and continents. (5 minutes)
2. PLEASE SPEND TIME REPRISING LAST WEEK’S MATERIAL ON REPENTING FOR THE SINS OF OUR CHURCH FATHERS. WE URGENTLY NEED PEOPLE TO RECEIVE AND FILL UP THIS REVELATION (15 minutes)
i) We spent time praying and reflecting over the following:
THE REVELATION OF THE NEED TO REPENT TO AND FORGIVE OUR SPIRITUAL FATHERS (5 minutes)
When we first understood the need for intercessory repentance for past corporate sin back in the late eighties, my wife Sue had engaged in a forty day fast. As a result of this the Lord revealed the importance of turning in repentance and forgiveness, whatever the cost, towards the previous churches, ministries and denominations from which our current expressions of church had emerged. Things shifted powerfully in the spiritual realm as a group of us repented first to the Lord and then to representatives of the Apostolics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Assemblies of God, Plymouth Brethren, Mennonites and so on, that we, our families or our churches had started out from. God showed us clearly that unless we did this, then the same spirits of religion and exclusivity that we or our parents had broken away from would threaten or demolish the new expressions of the Body that we were now part of. In some situations the need and the cost of doing this exposed the hold that such spirits already had on the churches and saints that we were walking with and some drew back from completing the initiative because of the issues that it opened up. Nevertheless it is now time for us to fill up this initiative as far as we can before moving on as the Body of Christ in Europe today. One of the most important and controversial issues that this leads us back to is the need to repent towards and forgive our fathers the Roman Catholics and the Jews who came before them.
ii) Then we prayed and reflected over
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRIT OF RELIGION AND IDOLATRY (5 minutes)
If we cannot find it in our hearts to repent for bitter or apathetic attitudes towards our spiritual fathers and turn and forgive them, then we will be vulnerable to the same spirits that brought about their problems and failures. This is not easy to accept. In some cases the level of rejection and persecution shown by past Christian leaders has been huge. In the history of Europe, Christians have been killed, robbed and disenfranchised in the name of Christ. As a result reformers, revivalists and new church planters have been tempted to identify their fathers as misguided, mistaken or even anti-Christian. Almost always the sin of our fathers has been to regard their teachings, leaders, structures and ways of doing things as the best or only expression of God’s character and will. This soon becomes idolatry as Jesus and his kingdom is displaced by our attempt to interpret and embody it. This then becomes the object of our worship. This is the essence of religion and is the spirit that Jesus resisted in the Jews who believed in him when he described them as “of their father the devil” (John 8:31, 44). It is the same spirit that Paul resisted in the Judaizers; Jewish believers who tried to enforce their Jewish religious practices on their fellow believers and of whom he said “beware of the dogs, beware of the evil doers, beware of the false circumcision” (Phil 3:2; see also Gal 2:12ff; Rev 2:9). If we do not repent of our hard hearts and forgive the sins of our fathers then the same idolatrous attitudes will overtake us. Our expressions of church, whether traditional or new, emerging or post-congregational will become increasingly threatening and destructive to the kingdom of God. Pray for the same love and grace towards our fathers that Jesus demonstrated at the cross and Stephen echoed in martyrdom when they spoke the words “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” and “Lord do not hold this sin against them.” (Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60)
iii) Then we reflected and prayed over
GETTING IT RIGHT ABOUT ISRAEL (5 minutes)
In the international intercessory movement there is much focus on Israel about who Paul says “who are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” (Rom 9:5) But the difficulty for many of us is the frequent presence of a religious spirit in this current emphasis, which fails to recognise and confront the past and present sins of Israel. These have often been religious pride and cooperation with the economic and military powers of empire in the attempt to maintain power over the land. Whereas Jesus, Stephen and Paul recognised, identified with and willingly suffered for their fathers’ sins, some have tried to gain cheaply the blessing promised to those who bless Israel. True blessing comes from real loving, which repents of actual bitterness and resentment and recognises and forgives actual sin. This will not come until we expose the sin and unforgiveness of our own hearts towards our Roman early church fathers who themselves hated and separated from the Jews. At the council of Nicea in 325, instead of turning their hearts in repentance and forgiveness to them, the church of our fathers separated entirely from all that was Jewish. (For details of this see Sue and my book Target Europe (Sovereign World 2001 pp. 20-23). The recent intercessory walk from Whitby to Rome and on through Nicea to Jerusalem that we have covered in prayer, together with the intercessory initiatives in Trier and Brussels, has dealt with some of this. However, unless we complete this work in the context of our own lives, movements and churches, we will simply step over the sins of the past in a religious spirit that affirms the pride and self-assertion of our own religious practices. Instead of opening up the way back to truly loving and forgiving our fathers we will allow a religious idolatry towards Israel to block the pathway to the resurrection of the work of the kingdom of God in Europe.
3. ONE WATCHER VERY HELPFULLY RESPONDED TO THE LAST SECTION “GETTING IT RIGHT ABOUT ISRAEL” AS FOLLOWS:
“For a long while, I've been seeking what is the ‘correct’ perspective about Israel/the Jews that we, as Christians are to hold. I've gained a lot of valuable insight in the journey, but I can't say that I stand today in a place of clarity, certainly not a level of clarity that I see others stand in. I'd like to see if I understand what you're saying in this paragraph by restating it. I believe you're saying that our stance as the Body of Christ (particularly Western I'd say) on Israel is necessarily muddled (even to the extent that we can ‘blindly’ bless Israel...the nation/state of today...regardless of her behaviour) due to our judgment and unforgiveness towards the Roman Catholic Church's historic sins against the Jews. By inference, perhaps a real sweeping repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation in this specific area of the Body of Christ would ‘clear the spiritual atmosphere’ with respect to Israel and Jews?”
My response is that this is partly what I am saying; but that the key point before dealing with the Catholic Church’s sin against the Jews is to recognise that these are also our sins, because Catholics are our fathers. So the issue is not first of all the Catholic Church’s sin against the Jews, but our sin against our fathers the Catholic Church. The suggestion is that we need to turn back towards the Catholics from the heart, repenting for our attitude to them, not in a superficial way, but recognising that although the theological and practical sins they inflicted on our fathers need to be forgiven by us, we must first begin by repenting of our own unforgiveness, hardness of heart and harsh judgements against them. Only then can we stand in the gap for and own their sins against Israel in a true and honest way that overcomes the religious spirits that caused their problems and ours.
4. FINALLY SPEND TIME SPEND TIME PRAYING AND REFLECTING OVER THE FOLLOWING VERSES (15 minutes)
“And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” (Luke 11:4) (5 minutes)
"If you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” (Mat 6:14-15) (5 minutes)
“If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1Jn 4:20) (5 minutes)
