Experiencing God Together

By Edgar Mayer

Experiencing God Together is a must-read book for anyone desiring renewal in their own relationship with God and the wider church.

Two things are always on God’s agenda: (1) the need to experience him and (2) to be one with other Christians. The book bears witness to both by sharing from God’s history with his people and digging deep into biblical truths.

Experiencing God Together is for everyone who:

· Hungers for faith renewal.

· Desires a greater experience of God.

· Wants to understand the connection between faith and experience.

· Wonders about unity with other Christians.

· Seeks solid biblical foundations and support from the Christian heritage.

Dr Mayer writes in the Introduction: “This book is a personal account of Lutheran Renewal, the story of how God raised up a national renewal movement among Lutherans and others in Australia. I will share much from a personal and Lutheran perspective but the lessons of God’s dealings with us have wider application. Our story highlights two main points that are constantly on God’s agenda – the need to experience him, and to be one with other Christians.”

Dr Edgar Mayer has been serving in the Lutheran Church of Australia for more than twenty years and is the Senior Pastor of the Living Grace Church in Toowoomba. When Lutheran Renewal – a national renewal movement – was launched at Living Grace in 2015, Dr Mayer became the Chairperson of the movement’s Steering Group. His wife Tatjana is a theologian and preacher in her own right and together they travel and serve across the nation and also overseas. They have two daughters, Dominique and Francisca, who also love and follow Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edgar Mayer
• Release date: Jun 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370761142

Edgar Mayer

Edgar Mayer is an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church of Australia and currently serves as the senior pastor of Living Grace in Toowoomba, Australia. He graduated from the Australian Lutheran College in Adelaide and completed doctoral studies in Germany, where he was born. Edgar and his wife, Tatjana, are blessed with two daughters, Dominique and Francisca.

Book preview

EXPERIENCING

GOD

TOGETHER

The Key

to Renewal

edgar mayer

Dedicated to Living Grace,

our church family and friends.

Experiencing God Together, The Key to Renewal,

Copyright © 2017 by Dr Edgar Mayer.

Published by:

Grace Publishing, Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia

Distributed in Australia by:

Living Grace Church, PO 277, Qld 4350, Australia

Ph: 04 0539 7920 Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.livinggracetoowoomba.org

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews,

without the prior written permission of the author.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (AMP) are taken from the Amplified Bible, Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (CEV) are from the Contemporary English Version Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.

Contents

Introduction

The Day of Breakthrough

Repenting to Pentecostals

Lutheran Renewal

Unity Commanding a Blessing

A Scripture Mandate

Overcoming Sinful Unionism

The Same Message

Sharing Christ at Holy Communion

The Local Church

By Faith Experiencing God

The Hungry Being Fed

Saving Faith

Dynamic Presence

Baptism and Being Baptized with the Holy Spirit

Close

Acknowledgements

Long-term relationships are important to me, and God has blessed my wife Tatjana and our two daughters, Dominique and Francisca, with Living Grace in Toowoomba, a church family that has loved and supported us over many years. How exciting it is to go down memory lane with friends, and retrace the steps we have taken together in following Jesus. The journey with God has not been boring, and I am sure that there is more to come.

Living Grace has allowed me the freedom to be who I am as a person and in God. This book is testimony to that. You will read about a few of our adventures. After so many years, our church members know me all too well, warts and all, and happily poke fun at me in a loving way. I feel at home in our church, and want to acknowledge and thank our wonderful community.

A few people especially have contributed to making the book more readable, and also helped with punctuation. I want to mention Deryck and Nancy Thomas, and Hazel Alley. Jonathan Maxwell has done the layout, cover design, and everything else that goes into producing the book that you now hold in your hands. Thank you for the hours that you poured into this project.

My wife’s dream is to have one year with nothing new happening. But she knows that I could not hold still for that long. Tatjana is patient and loving, and she is worth more to me than I can say.

Introduction

This book is a personal account of Lutheran Renewal, the story of how God raised up a national renewal movement among Lutherans and others in Australia. I will share much from a personal and Lutheran perspective but the lessons of God’s dealings with us have wider application. Our story highlights two main points that are constantly on God’s agenda – the need to experience him, and to be one with other Christians.

Chapter one

The Day of

Breakthrough

It was a Monday morning, and for my devotion time I searched for a suitable video on YouTube. I found the videos of the 20th anniversary conference of the Toronto Blessing, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a Toronto church in 1994. The speakers at the conference, who themselves had been impacted by this outpouring, included some of my favourite church leaders, especially Bill Johnson and Heidi Baker. I was sitting in my office, with my feet resting on the table, leaning back comfortably and watching the first session. Randy Clark recounted his testimony of how God had prepared and called him to be the guest-preacher who would be triggering this outpouring. I was fascinated. The testimony was about God doing the unexpected.

Today Randy Clark ministers in many countries but back then, when the invitation came to hold services in Toronto, he did not even have a valid passport. Randy tried to cancel the meetings, advising the hosting pastor (John Arnott) that he should not spend so much money on his airfares. He was afraid that nothing would happen. However, his fears were unfounded. God did so much that thousands of people kept streaming from all over the world to seek God in this church, making it Toronto’s top tourist attraction of 1994, according to Toronto Life magazine.¹

Then the phone rang. It was the Lutheran pastor of Rockhampton, a city five hundred kilometres further up north. He informed me that the Bishop of our state had visited him on the weekend and forbade him and his church to receive any ministry from me and our church. When the pastor asked for reasons, he was told that I was ministering in the Toronto Blessing. Listening to him on the phone, I was surprised by the accusation because we honoured the outpouring at Toronto, but this particular church and their leaders had not become a model or mentors for our ministry. The Lutheran pastor of Rockhampton knew me and spoke up for me, but he followed the Bishop’s directions and cancelled an invitation to do five days of mission work, using a tent for preaching.

For the Saturday of this week, we had scheduled a meeting with local Rockhampton pastors to brief them on the outreach. Now I would have to go and share with them the latest developments.

After the phone conversation, and because I did not feel in the right frame of mind, I rang a retired pastor in our congregation. He agreed to preach for me the next Sunday.

Then followed a heavy Monday morning, but – strangely enough – I also began to experience joy. The joy remained with me for the whole week. I sensed that God had shifted something in the spiritual realm. This had happened to me before, seven years earlier in 2008. In the midst of despair over the pain of members breaking away from the church, at about my lowest point, I suddenly knew that we had turned a corner and soon after experienced amicable resolutions to the conflict.

The next Sunday, our pastor in active retirement, Herman Ruyters, shared that God had given him a new message, and the message was Breakthrough. Herman said that it was breakthrough not just for individuals but breakthrough also for Living Grace (our congregation) and the Lutheran Church of Australia.

Then Vicki Meagher, our Chairperson, told me her experience. She had been on a forty-day fast, and the Monday of the ministry cancellation happened to be the last day of her fast, the fortieth day. At five-thirty in the morning, as she was reading the Bible and praying, suddenly words came out of her mouth. They were all out before she realized what was happening. This had never occurred before. She had spoken out aloud: Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things thou knowest not.

She was still for about an hour and then became angry because for so long she had been crying out to God, but with few results. In her anger, she ignored the words.

Three days later, at the same time in the morning, the same thing happened again. The same words came out of her mouth: Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things thou knowest not.

This time, she did not get angry. She cried, repented, and meditated on what God had been saying through her – not once but twice. Vicki suspected that she had spoken out a Bible verse, and found the words in Jeremiah 33:3.

When she told me about her experience later on, it seemed to confirm my joy and Herman’s word of Breakthrough. God promised so much: Call unto me, and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things thou knowest not (Jeremiah 33:3).

……………….

Repenting to Pentecostals

Seven years earlier, God had already talked to us about the Toronto Blessing.² One Sunday morning I preached a message that confronted us Lutherans in Australia with our persistent opposition to God and what he was doing through non-Lutheran people and ministries. It seemed to me that whatever God blessed in a particular season, we either rejected outright, or kept our distance with negative words. As I was preaching, I demonstrated how we had found fault with Billy Graham, the Alpha Course, the Emmaus Walk, Hillsong Music, 40 Days of Purpose, and other popular Christian resources. And for some reason, I included our opposition to the Toronto Blessing in the list of evidence, even though I hardly knew anything about this outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

At the end of the sermon, the whole congregation repented of opposing God and the non-Lutheran people he was using. Four days later, I found myself lying on the floor of another church, overcome by the Holy Spirit. This was a new experience, and I pricked up my ears when I found out that this particular church belonged to the Toronto Blessing church network and was directly linked and accountable to the leaders in Toronto. One month later, a Lutheran colleague conducted a Father’s Heart Weekend at our congregation, and it turned out that his ministry was also inspired by the Toronto Blessing. A former staff member of the Toronto Airport Church had prayed for him. My colleague ended up on the floor, overcome by the Holy Spirit, and – in a moment – all the Bible truths of the father-heart of God came alive in him and he was ministering this grace to us.

I had no strategic intentions when I preached the sermon about us Lutherans opposing God and the people he was using. I had no emotional attachment to the Toronto Blessing. But immediately God responded to our repentance and allowed us to share in what was coming out of Toronto. God knew our unfinished business. We needed to repent, or at least make a beginning, before we could step into the stream of blessings that he had released through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Toronto.

Now, seven years later, the Toronto Blessing was all of a sudden on the agenda again because one Monday morning I received a phone call that cancelled my ministry on account of the Toronto Blessing. The next day, I received an invitation to preach in Adelaide, at an inner-city church. The pastor did not know me, and I did not know him, but I pricked up my ears again when I found out that this church too belonged to the Toronto Blessing denomination, the church network known as Partners in Harvest (PIH), directly accountable to the Toronto pastors with whom the outpouring began. There were only six such congregations in all of Australia. Previously I had received from the Spirit in one of them, and now I was to minister in another.

In the past, our congregation had already repented of opposing God’s work in Toronto, but many in our denomination had remained hostile. Did God want us to repent again, this time on behalf of the wider church? With the permission of the pastor, I came with a motley crew of twenty-odd Lutherans from across the country, and together – kneeling on behalf of the Lutheran Church of Australia – we repented of maligning and rejecting the Toronto Blessing and Pentecostals (Sunday, 13 September 2015). It was fitting for this to happen in Adelaide, the heartland of the Lutheran denomination in Australia where the National Office, the Bible College, and other institutions were located.

In the Bible, several people repented on behalf of their community. It makes sense because we always belong to a community and share in God’s dealings with this community. Jeremiah prayed: ... We have sinned against the Lord our God, both we and our fathers... (Jeremiah 3:25). Daniel said that he was confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel (Daniel 9:20). Ezra cried out: From the days of our forefathers until now, our guilt has been great... (Ezra 9:7). And Nehemiah wept: I confess the sins we Israelites including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you (Nehemiah 1:6). See also Nehemiah 9:2: … They … confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors.

The leaders in Toronto heard about this, and sent a video greeting. Dr Rolland Baker also became interested. I was excited about his interest, because I had followed his ministry for quite some years, and I had not known that he also belonged to Partners in Harvest.

In the following year, we organized a national conference, the second national conference of Lutheran Renewal. We had the conference on the 50th anniversary of the Lutheran Church of Australia which coincided with the start of the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation (28-30 October 2016). In line with these important anniversaries, the conference itself had reformation intent.

Pentecostals and other Christians were expressly invited. Pastor Barry Manuel, the pastor of the inner-city church where we had repented the previous year, helped us with his contacts. Dr Rolland Baker came, and then we humbled ourselves again. This time, hundreds of Lutherans were kneeling in front of their Pentecostal brothers and sisters. Many were weeping in repentance. We repented of our behaviour and judgments against Pentecostals and the Toronto Blessing. We confessed our own sin repenting on behalf of our denomination, the Lutheran Church of Australia. This time, we had an adequate platform and good representation. And then we rejoiced in hearing words of forgiveness. In turn, our Pentecostal friends repented of their judgments on us Lutherans and other mainline churches, and we declared forgiveness to them.

Reflecting on what happened, I still find it interesting how God seemed to insist on us repenting properly to our Pentecostal brothers and sisters. He set this up more than once because the sin of speaking out against Pentecostals and living in disunity with Pentecostals prevented us from sharing in the blessings of the Holy Spirit among them.

There is a Bible principle that we ignore at our peril. Judgments and lack of honour block and keep out the Spirit from among us. Even Jesus’ closest neighbours, the ones living next door to him in his hometown, could not receive from him for lack of honour: Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.’ He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith (Mark 6:4-6). See also Ephesians 6:2-3 and Matthew 10:40-42:

Honour your father and mother – which