The interview is fascinating and heartwarming, and you can listen to it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t32h5#-

It begins just after 1:39.

Anyway, here it is, highlights from thursday:

In the main session Tom Shaw spoke on John 5:16-18, sharing how we should do nothing without the father. Our attitude should be one of total humility, total acceptance of our inability to act on our own initiative. And from that position of humility and surrender we are then able to do what we see the father doing.We are able to follow and imitate him totally, not on our own initiative but following his.

Key to this is to take time to pause in our lives and observe. Lay aside time to rest in Gods presence and just listen and watch him to see what hes doing. I was massively challenged that my life is full of activity and busyness, and that I leave little room for just hanging out with God, seeking his will.

This theme was massively carried through to the seminar I went to on Biblical leadership. The essence of the seminar from Mike Betts was that true Biblical leadership is the act of responding and reacting to the promptings of God. Leadership should be reactive based on what God promises us and what he initiates in us, not proactive and from our own strength and desires.

Mike really helpfully encouraged each of us that one of the greatest challenges to aspiring leaders is that of being unknown and obscure. This is a challenge that we must wrestle with and overcome, because some who feel called to leadership will in fact remain obscure for most or perhaps all of their lives. Its up to God to decide if and when to initiate positions of leadership for us, and until that happens we simply need to trust in him.

I was particularly touched by Scotts challenge to bless those around us, especially those who are against us. God purposes to bless us, but also to bless the nations through us, so its our job as Christians to actively seek to bless people around us in any way possible!

The theme of caring for the poor was David Strouds focus in the third session, and he took us on a wonderful journey through Isaiah 58, provoking us to rethink the importance of the poor in our lives. Isaiah makes it clear that although Israel are fervently praying, fasting and desiring after God, they were not close to God because they didnt care for the poor among them.

Caring for the poor around us is a clear and essential evidence of true faith and obedience to God. It isnt something we tack on once everything else has been finished, caring for those around us is an essential part of being Church. Its also an essential part of our individual lives, and I was particularly challenged by Davids call to first ask what can I do to help? instead of the perhaps more natural cry of what can the Church do to help?

It was also great to hear David unpack the wonderful positive results of caring for the poor. Not just the obvious benefits to those around us, but also the fact that God promises to particularly bless his people when they do care for the poor.

Hopefully we will manage to make daily video updates like this, and they will all appear on the blog!

Tomorrow morning the conference kicks off, and I will be blogging about the week as it happens. I’m not really sure how many other people are blogging about mobilise itself, I know of quite a few ToaM live bloggers, but not so many of the young ‘uns.

I’m really looking forward to an exciting week, and I’m especially pleased that there are so many of us together from King’s Church to share the experience and then bring it all back up to Leicester together.

Our purpose as Christians is not to overthrow government, and it certainly isn’t to use government to impose Christianity upon the nation. Our main purpose is to share the gospel, and we do not do that through politics. However we do have to deal with government, and the Bible is pretty clear on how government should function.

Romans 13 describes a government which is a terror to evil conduct, and approves of good conduct. Our government should be like that, it should deal with good and evil on those terms. We live in a democratic country where we are able to influence government very easily. So we should be engaging with and influencing the authorities in the UK in such a way that they become a government that approves of good conduct, and punishes evil.

We should be sharing with our government exactly what we understand to be good and evil, and how they should be dealing with those things. We should be voting on those terms, so that the government which ultimately will have control in a weeks time is a government which deals with good and evil correctly. We should not leave it there either, after the election we should continue to engage with our rulers in such a way that we show them what the Bible has to say about good and evil. We need to show government what their job is.

If you like, you can have a listen to the whole talk here:

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The Cross is a beautiful place, where Jesus became sin for us so that we could live and have freedom to worship God. I love the Cross and I go there often because I need constant reminding about where my strength comes from.

The resurrection is better though. Without the resurrection the Cross would be an empty gesture, without any power to save. The fact that Christ rose again is absolutely essential, and the resurrection is what we celebrate at easter. On good friday Jesus’ died, and on easter sunday he rose again.

We celebrate Sunday, as the completion of what began on Friday.