That's why to me, I personally as kind of the Pastor of this church and the shepherd of this church responsible for lives, feel that I have to - I need to have Pastor Mike come every January. I just know for me [laughs] ... [Laughter] ... I kind of hit ceilings every year thinking man, why I can't I break through this thing? Then you realise it's this dominant thought, this insecurity, this fear, this - you know, junk and I'm just thinking I've got to - we've got to bring - and so you know fasting will open stuff up. But I just want you to know today, today you're ready to go to a brand new level of freedom ... [Applause] ... in this house, so without any further ado, now that you've sat down I want you to stand up again one more time. Would you welcome the amazing Pastor Mike Connell all the way from Hastings, New Zealand, Aotearoa! ... [Applause]
[Pastor Mike Connell] Halleluiah, we give you the honour Jesus! We give you the glory for the victories this weekend and in this coming year! We open our hearts for all you want to do to receive breakthroughs in our lives and we say holy, holy, holy are you Lord! We give you all the honour. Amen. The spirit of God, we welcome you to come. You know what we need. You know the help we need, you know how it needs to be done and so we just invite you to come into the service, every person, those around us, in front of us, behind us that Lord, every one of us will experience the power of God touching us, be different people, free people, rise to new levels. Lord, we give you the honour today. Amen. Amen. Give someone a hug before you sit down will you.
What awesome musicians. That was fantastic worship. ... [Applause] ... I loved it. It's hard to want to start a meeting when you're in worship like that.
Well yesterday we laid some foundations of deliverance and just to give you some insight so you understand evil spirits. We saw that a demon is a spirit being. We saw how they operate. We saw how they try to get into people's lives and once they're in people's lives how they begin to affect them and influence them and today we want to go a bit further and I want to spend quite a bit of time in ministry to people today, but I found that ministry is often built on your faith level being opened up by the word of God. So I always want to just lay a few things out, so this session I want to just talk about the foundations for freedom and then begin to go back into that list of those things to be freed from and we'll have some altar calls and just believe for God to move.
Our second session, I want to just teach on bondages of the heart and I want to share some of the ways that our heart gets into bondage and how you could recognise that and what to do about it and then we'll start to pray into some deeper areas that for many of you it'll bring a release well beyond what you've ever expected and it's going to be fantastic. So first of all I want you to come with me and we're going to look in Colossians, Chapter 2 and I want to show you what Jesus did for us. Then we're going to look at what we've got to do, the part we play because there's the part He's done but there's a part we play in working out our salvation, in journeying with Him.
Let's have a look in Colossians, Chapter 2 and in Verse 13, 14 and 15. Now we saw that part of Jesus' ministry was to bring deliverance to people. When you look in Luke 4:18 you see the full breadth of Jesus' ministry is to bring the gospel to the poor, to reconnect people to God, to heal the broken hearted, to deal with the issues of the heart that stopped us being intimate with God and intimate with one another, to set the captives free, to in other words open people's lives and set them free from evil spirits, to bring vision and direction for our life, to lift off oppression and every limitation and to empower us to live out our destiny. That's basically the message that Jesus proclaimed was His ministry and yet so often the churches just limited it to preaching the gospel and praying for the sick, rather than realising there's a whole dimension of the spirit realm that we need to understand. I want to share a little bit more on that in the session tonight and get you activated again in your life, but we saw in Jesus' ministry how everywhere He went He confronted people who were demonised, confronted the demons, got the demons out. So you find a balance in His ministry of preaching the word, healing the sick and delivering spirits and He made it very clear, there was an intention that His disciples operated in this ministry so He empowered the 12, the 12 delivered people; He empowered the 70, they delivered people. Then He empowered the whole church. He said go, make disciples. These signs will follow those who believe, in my name they'll cast out demons, so He expanded the ministry of deliverance to all believers. So why we would leave this ministry out is beyond me, except that something's been stolen from the church. It's time to have it restored back into its right place again. ... [Applause] ... Amen. Amen.