Archive for the ‘spiritual warfare’ Category

Wanna be drenched in God’s love?

Posted: May 7, 2013 by mikehanafee in Holy Spirit series, Internship, preaching, Restore Church, spiritual warfare, the gospel, Trinity, Uncategorized
1

Between the ditches of dead intellectualism & empty emotionalism is an authentic experience of knowing AND feeling God’s love for us in the Gospel. Check out this message if you want to know how the Holy Spirit positionally and personally drenches us with the Father’s love through Jesus. You’ll also hear about the incredible union the Spirit creates across ethnic lines, providing a real time picture of the future, in the gritty here and now, through the Church.

Sunday we also had the joy of announcing our first summer intern at Restore Church, Nick Lee. Nick is a student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston and will be arriving June 12.

Please pray for Pastor Clete as he preaches Thursday the funeral of a father (of a young man in our church) who lost his life last week. And please carry this grieving family to the throne of grace!

JESUS IS WORTH IT! Restore Sunday with missionary David Sitton

Posted: April 30, 2013 by mikehanafee in Church Planting, David Sitton, Restore Church, spiritual warfare, suffering, world missions
0

Jesus is not just worth going with your life, He is worth giving your life! Listen to David Sitton talk about the PRIVILEGE of going after unreached peoples across the world. He is looking for the “right kind of missionary” – are you one of them? I pray that Restore will send others and our own to unreached peoples. We already have one prospect! Check out To Every Tribe for more information. And take 3 minutes to watch the video below.

Jesus kicks Satan’s butt!

Posted: November 5, 2012 by mikehanafee in acts, adoption, Church Planting, Discipleship Groups, Leadership, new facility, Restore Church, spiritual warfare, the gospel, Vision, worship
0

Behind the plexiglass at the counter of the coney island I frequent is a lot I can’t see. Likewise, behind the stuff that you see with your physical eyes in everyday life is a spiritual realm in which a battle is raging. Some people ignore it & others are obsessed with it. Urban missionaries will face this spiritual opposition as they attack demonic strongholds. The way to fight is with the very thing that translated us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love, the gospel of Jesus Christ. 1 John 3:8 tells us Jesus destroys the works of the Devil, or to put it plainly, Jesus kick satan’s butt. In Acts 19 we see this displayed, experienced, & opposed.

Please be in prayer for our upcoming Dgroup commissioning service (11/25), our next facility workday (12/1), neighborhood canvassing (12/8), & a neighborhood welcome service (12/9).

The Gospel is Unstoppable

Posted: September 17, 2012 by mikehanafee in acts, Church Planting, election, Gordon Park, preaching, Restore Church, spiritual warfare, the gospel, worship
0

Step into mission & the difficulties will come – relational problems, plans that don’t go quite right, closed hearts, demonic opposition, & persecution. The early church experienced these challenges as well, as we saw Sunday at Gordon Park in Acts 15 & 16. Thankfully they experienced what is true to this day, the gospel is unstoppable! The gospel is, as our worship leader said, self-propelling! This encourages us to be faithful in tough slogging!

I’ll be attending a church-planting roundtable in Minneapolis for 2 days for a group of pastors & planters in the EFCA. Please pray there will be a passion lit for planting in urban areas like Detroit! The gospel, after all, is unstoppable! 

Satan’s Knockoffs, Gordon Park

Posted: August 20, 2012 by mikehanafee in Gordon Park, Restore Church, spiritual warfare, the gospel, worship
0

Knockoff. “An imitation, a fake.” And the better the knockoff, the harder to detect, sometimes until it is too late. In this 3rd message in our Spiritual Warfare series we examine how Satan employs knockoff teachers, “Christians”, & community to destroy non-Christians & mess with Christians. The video stopped after the first point but my notes for the second & third points are below if you can read them.

Please continue to pray as our building search continues. We have 3 good leads, one of which is a potential purchase. Also, in 2 Sunday’s we are having a baptismal service out in the open at Gordon Park – we are really pumped for this!

Satan is a defeated enemy who sends goon after goon over the boards to destroy

Posted: July 10, 2012 by mikehanafee in preaching, spiritual warfare, Uncategorized
0

Sunday we worshiped again at Gordon Park. Before the service I was reminded of the significance of this location by a man in attendance for the first time who told us he was shot there 5 times April 17, 1987. Praying, singing, & preaching the gospel there open air style has been beautiful & impactful, but it has also launched, without any exaggeration, a new level of spiritual warfare. For that reason we stayed on that topic of spiritual warfare. In the message I discussed how Satan is a defeated enemy (Colossians 2:15) who awaits his final destruction (Revelation 20:10). In this age he’s like a hockey team that is way behind with no chance of winning that simply sends goon after goon over the boards to hurt as many as it can. Specifically, he exploits 9 ordinary (non sensational, non spin your head 360 degrees & vomit gallons of green goop aka “The Exorcist”) potential footholds into our lives. The only way to close these doors is through the gospel – believing it again & again, praying it again & again, speaking it’s authority again & again. I also spend a little time talking about how certain Christian groups tend to focus only on 1 aspect of “the world, the flesh, & the devil.” You can check out the message here.

As Clete joked, it was standing room only. Seriously, we do need chairs, so if you know any churches that have a set they would donate please let us know. It was great to have our new battery powered PA system so I don’t quite feel like I smoked 2 packs of Marlboro Reds yesterday.

Spiritual Warfare

Posted: July 6, 2012 by mikehanafee in preaching, Restore Church, spiritual warfare
0

“Today we are going to look at Spiritual Warfare…” “Kill whitey!” shouted someone from a car passing by Gordon Park. That’s how last week’s sermon began.  (I paid the guy $20 to help me with my introduction;) Actually it was kind of funny. There are haters everywhere. And God saves haters, which is who we all are outside of His grace. In this message from Ephesians 6:10-20 I lay out a basic grid for spiritual warfare. We have a great enemy who wants to destroy us. We have a greater Lord who is over all. Satan is on God’s leash, and God walks him where he wants, and has him urinate where he wants. (Yeah, that was an unplanned comment that somehow made it’s way into the sermon.) We have a gritty fight to join. Christians are in spiritual combat, & this passage is a call to arms. You can check out the message below. I also included some pics from this week’s very wet Dgroup neighborhood cookout (& Ian’s birthday celebration – we have a cool practice of using our Dgroup gatherings to celebrate the birthdays of Dgroup peeps by sharing ways we see God working in that person). We will be worshiping at Gordon Park again this Sunday at 11AM.