WELCOME to Issue #319 of The Seedhead from Alex and Hannah at Dandelion Resourcing
- a weekly confidence booster to help you step into naturally supernatural discipleship and mission!
God wants to give you supernatural power so you can demonstrate and declare the Kingdom
“Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised… you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses...” (Acts 1:4b, 8)
Christians have a litany of excuses for why we don’t share our faith.
“I don’t want to impose my faith”
“I have plenty of time”
“What if they reject me?”
“I don’t know all of the answers”
We’ve all tried some of these on for size, and if we’re honest, we know that they will never fit us, because they (and similar ones) all violate the clear commands of Jesus and the teaching of Scripture. Sorry!
When Paul writes in Romans 15:18-19, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done - by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ”, he makes clear that the Gospel is not fully proclaimed in the absence of demonstrations of the Spirit’s power.
As we absorb that, our little Enlightenment-trained brains start popping fuses all over the place!
To be clear, this is not an argument against deeply exploring our faith, the rational and mentally satisfying arguments for Christ (for instance, the overwhelming evidence that the resurrection really did occur as the NT describes it), and for being able to have thoughtful and deep conversations with our lost friends.
Yet alongside that, we also need to be sharing our faith through tangible signs of the Spirit’s power.
In this video, we discuss this topic, why it is so culturally important (and growing ever more resonant with the way things are moving), and how we can start to step into this way of sharing faith.
Next Steps
Are you willing to demonstrate the Spirit’s power when you’re with your lost friends, colleagues, and neighbors? This means a prior commitment to offer to pray for people for whatever’s going on in their lives.
Ask God to help you become more attentive to those little Holy Spirit nudges in the moment, and to lean into them with boldness and faith.
Watch session 7 “Jesus Witnesses” of The Spirit Empowered Disciple Course - Church Track (spiritcourse.com). We share several tools for faith sharing - the Bold Intentional Witness and the 6 Gears of Conversation - that have been so well received wherever they’ve been adopted. You’ll love them!
A year we didn't see coming
At the start of this year, around 2,200 of you opened The Seedhead each week. Today it's over 4,300.
If you forwarded it to a friend, thank you. That's the most Dandelion thing you could have done!
Then, as autumn came around, we launched The Spirit Empowered Disciple Course, and more than 400 people have already registered to work through it, most often with a group of friends. The pace of sign-ups keeps picking up, which is a lovely problem to have.
None of this is about bigger numbers for their own sake. We love helping believers and churches grow in naturally supernatural discipleship and mission without becoming wacky. Every new reader is one more person learning to hear Jesus and do what He says on an ordinary Thursday - like today, for instance.
Over the next few weeks we'll share a little about how this work is developing, how it's funded, and how you can be part of it. For now, thank you.
With love,
Alex + Hannah
ALEX AND HANNAH ABSALOM
P.S. All the videos in The Spirit Empowered Disciple are FREE - so jump in now and see what it’s like! Spiritcourse.com
