Building the Ark, and Killing Giants

The weekend away with the men from New Covenant hearing from Tony Ling was wonderful! Tony opened the weekend with a message from Genesis 6, which chronicles the mysterious "Nephilim" or giants that were rebelling against God in Noah's day. The encouragement was brought to "build the ark" that is Christ's Church and allow God to take care of killing the "giants" of our day. The rest of the messages were portraits painted from Scripture of how God has killed giants in the past and exhortations on how He might use his Church to slay giants again.

I am amazed at Tony's deep knowledge of Scripture. It is more than obvious from listening to him speak that he does not simply construct some sort of topical message to deliver to God's people, but rather, his messages are the out-flowing of a love for and a prophetic discernment of God's Word. He is able to take comments that might normally sound cliche or trite, such as, "God is raising up a generation of young men to fulfill his purposes," and make them completely fresh and new by putting them in the context of the precedent of God's activity in the grand scheme of Scripture. It is wonderful to see the prophetic gift in action; not in the sense of giving spooky or weird predictions, but simply in bringing the Word of God to His people in a fresh way that speaks to a specific situation. And yes, he did make reference to my favorite biblical hero, "Shamgar, Son of Anath!"