Paul Hopkins personal blog » resources

Repentance Teaching

Paul — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:04:38 +0000

For all of you that were at the freed for Life session on Tuesday 11th at the King’s Lodge, you can listen to the teaching on repentance again by clicking here

two realms notes

Paul — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:23:10 +0000

Here are some notes on the two realms that we use in teaching. Feel free to download and use! two-realms.pdf

the end of a great week

Paul — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 08:24:50 +0000

I am now, sitting in our warm house, watching Gabby play in the snow. We’ve not had much this year… and I miss it! It’s refreshing to sit here, enjoying the creativity of my daughter after a long week in Heidebeek… a week that I thoroughly enjoyed! I must have prayed for about 14 of the students for a hour to hour and a half session. Seeing what God is up to in people’s lives and listening to the Holy Spirit and then leading people in specific repentance and claiming who God has made them to be rather than what lies they have believed is awesome! Proof again, if ever I needed any more, that God intervenes in our lives and wants to deal with the things that we ‘pick up’ that get in the way of us living a life of obedience and joy. On the left I am eating with some of the students in their accomodation, what a great bunch they are! Guys have a great rest of the Discipleship Training School and make a difference on your outreaches.

I said that I would send some resources to them, and anyone else interested. Here is a sheet that summarises the five ‘R’s leaflet-on-five-rs.pdf. And some notes on our original design: our-original-design.doc

Thanks to Christchurch!

Paul — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:42:01 +0000

Wow, that was an intense and rich three days! We have just had a team come up from Christchurch in Fulham. Stuart Lees the vicar did several talks and a team of 12 prayed for people throughout the whole time with one hour appointments. One of our staff looked at me and said “Thank you so much for getting these people up Paul”. The way she said it was so genuine and real. She had been so deeply struck by the prayer times that she had had. I confess I said, “You are making me cry!”. Here’s Stuart’s talk from the open evening. Stuart’s talk Thursday Night

the shack

Paul — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:23:46 +0000

I cannot recommend The Shack highly enough! It is certainly the best ‘novel’ that I have read in a long time, but more than that… it is profoundly moving. If you have struggled with the meaning of pain when God is love, then this may well be the story for you. It has some deep theology in it, and in some ways it is like Brian McLaren ‘The Story We Find Ourselves in’, but if you ask me… far more moving and deep. It is a story, an allegory, a picture of God… a triune God who is love in the midst of a tragic story of a father’s loss of his youngest daughter to a murderer. The last but one chapter brought tears to my eyes.

It’s like ‘The Story We Find Ourselves in’ meets The Matrix, meets ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, meets C.S. Lewis. Theologically speaking it’s narrative theology, and boy, does seeing a drama of the trinity played out communicate so much more powerfully than a list of bullet points in a systematic theology book. Buy It! Give it to your friends, give it to people at work. God just might meet you in the reading of this book.

tried google earth? try google sky!

Paul — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:56:14 +0000

If you are familiar with google earth – the free program the enables you to look at anywhere on the planet in photographic detail, seeing cars, houses, even people, then you may also know about its latest advance – google sky. This means that you can now look at the stars and constellations in the same way! You can download version 4.2 which has the sky add on here

a great css reference

Paul — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:06:28 +0000

Sitepoint have just released a great resource. An online css reference.

css should be so easy, yet can end up being so complicated, usually because of all the quirks of Internet Explorer and the way it makes things look on the web. For those of you who don’t know, ‘css’ stands for ‘cascading style sheets’ and is the computer code used to make web sites look like they do. This reference could help you hugely as you get into making web sites.

unseen activity

Paul — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 07:55:40 +0000

As you will know from a previous post I have been teaching on a masters course, and it gave me the chance to read some new material, but also go over some foundational material that I have read several times. One of those books was Christus Victor by Gustaf Aulen. We are currently seeing people break free from issues that have been hindering their life and witness for Christ for many years. Part of that is being aware and dealing with what is going on the spiritual realm over people. This bookhighlights how a key part of what Jesus did with his life, death and resurrection has broken the power of sin, death and the demonic over us. He talks of how we have tended in the west to move away from viewing life as a spiritual battle constantly raging over us. We think sin is just sin, rather than seeing it as cooperation with lies from an evil personality. Sure, obedience to God is cooperation with Him, his power helps us do that… but we tend to blank out the demonic in my experience. Maybe out of fear. Maybe just simply thinking, ‘let’s focus on shining the light rather than putting out the darkness’. Aulen suggests that we may have slipped into thinking about the demonic as ‘primative’, something that we have grown out of, we are more sophisticated than that now, we don’t sacrifice to the god of rain anymore… ! Yet we are astounded at the level of evil that can form in rational human beings minds. Turn on the UK news about the investigations into child abuse in Jersey and we are reminded of that yet again.

I have been inspired again by Aulen’s challenge to us that Christ’s victory over sin, the law, death and the enemy was complete… we can be enforcing that victory today as we pray, as we are tempted to get angry in our homes, as we are tempted to develop resentment towards people in our communities. Perhaps we need God to open our eyes, like Elijah’s servant, to see what is really going on around us.

more freed for life teaching

Paul — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:23:30 +0000

We continue to run the freed for life course at the King’s Lodge. We’ve been teaching the whole course in one week on our Discipleship Training School this week. It’s been significant for many of the students. After 8 hours of teaching and 13 hours of individual praying… we still seem to have energy left for another day! Want to hear some more of the teaching? here are two more sessions from our Tuesday nights:

Original Design – who we are in Christ (7 MB Download)

the Nature of Strongholds (16 MB download)

even more freed for life

Paul — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:46:20 +0000

We are running the seven week, freed for life course again at the King’s Lodge. Back by popular demand, many new people are doing it including some from local churches. It seems that lives are being changed by Christ through this. If you can bear the 9Mb download you can listen to the first session here.