Hello to my beautiful friends and family! I am now into my second week on dts! Crazy I feel like I have known these people forever. This week we are talking about friendship with God. Such a different concept to think about huh? Normally it is he is our Father, our lover or our king but I have never really thought about God as my friend, my best friend.
Adriel Booker is our speaker this week. I love the way she speaks to us like we are in a personal conversation with her rather than she is lecturing to 35 students. The first day she had us simply analyze the friendships we have in our lives and things we love in our friends. I am so blessed that I have the friends that I do and so many examples of friendship that pull out the qualities that people want in a friend. It makes it so much easier to relate friendship to God. Abraham and Moses were the only two people in the whole bible to be called friends of God so we studied their stories and the characteristics they brought to their friendship with Christ. Jesus just wants to enjoy us, go on adventures with us, laugh with us, talk with us, and simply BE with us.
After talking about friendship with Christ she began to talk about fear of the Lord. Dun dun dun everyone instantly thinks fear of the Lord as being afraid, walking on egg shells or waiting for God to punish us. Buuuut in fact that is not what the bible means at all. In Hebrew fear means stand in awe of/reverence. A way she related this was to our fathers. We know they love us more than the world, wants the best for us and would do anything to protect us. They would never do anything to harm us but yet we still have a sense of fear towards them never to disappoint them and always wanting to respect them. Same thing with God. So then we analyzed if our delight was in the fear of the Lord to answer that we looked at scripture(funny how everything is in scripture huh :) One of my favorite parts of this days lecture was when we looked at Jesus' value system and compared it to the world's value system...
Jesus' Value System
Lay down your rights
Leaders are to serve their people
Love your enemies
Befriend the outcasts
Accept Foreigners
Marriage and sex=sacred
Cover sin and restore
Build others up
The World's Value System
Fight for your rights
People serve the leaders
Revenge
Protect yourself from the outcast Go back 'home'
'try before you buy'
Expose it
Compete
After really taking a good look at that it just blows my mind by the world we live in. Then we went on to talk about Why we fear the Lord. We fear him because of who he is, because it is commanded in scripture (Deuteronomy 10:12-13) and because of the benefits! The benefits are we get to have intimacy with God, for our own good and the good of our children, protection, prolonged life, provision, to avoid evil, wealth, honor, life, and to be spared by the Lord. We also fear him to grow and strengthen the church and most importantly to give him glory!!
Naturally as a human my biggest question was HOW DO WE DO THIS?!? ha okay here is how...1. Persuing him/knowing him. 2.Dealing with fear of man(could go on forever on this one) 3.Obeying Him. 4. Being holy (holy does not mean perfect. holiness is positional..in God's family) 5.Identifying sin issues. 6.Dealing with sin (confession and repentance) I know that was a lot but so far this week's topic has been awesome and continues to humble me and make me fall more in love with my God.
On Tuesday nights we have outreach prep to get us ready when we go on our outreach! I think we find out locations next week..so exciting!! This week we just did a bunch of team building games. We are going to have four outreach teams so it is going to be great! I cannot wait!!
On Wednesday we have all base worship in the morning and it is soooooo good! Ahh it is so nice to come together with everyone here...like 200 people right now and just worship. Always starts the day off right. Then Wednesday nights we have community bbq where we invite people from the community to come share in a meal with us and just hang out. It is a good time to get to know people in the town and let them know what ywam is all about and our mission. We also celebrate birthdays on these nights..so cake is always fun :)
On Thursday nights we have study time to do our journals for the week and our workbooks. They are due weekly and are pretty extensive but I am really trying to not label it as homework because the scriptures we read for it and the questions they ask us are awesome and really make us analyze our faith and where we are at in our walk. We all get together and do them with each other so it is fun!
Friday nights are free nights so we just do whatever. Saturday is when we have our youth program!! I met 3 awesome middle schooler girls last week and it was so fun to just hang out with them and begin to build relationships with them. The youth here need Jesus. We are doing a Youthstreet has talent night this weekend for them to get up on stage and put on an act. We are excited!!
Sundays are our free days as well. Last Sunday we went to a park on the beach and had a huge bbq consisting of chicken, buffalo wings, chips, corn on the cob, veggies, soda...so good!! I love just being with the people here. Everyone is so encouraging and just living in community-I love it!!
Well I have made this super long..thank you to everyone who made it to the bottom of this..to those who stopped halfway...I still love you :) I hope this finds everyone in good health and happy. I miss you all and I would love to hear updates. Send me an email or a message on facebook. You are all missed dearly. To my little Olivia...I had our song stuck in my head the other day. "Woah Woah stuck like glue, you and me baby we're stuck like glue" I love you!!
Prayer requests: energy for our team! We get up at 5:30 everyday-praise the Lord I am adjusting really really well but it is difficult for some people. Finances for my team-school fees are due this friday (mine are in, praise jesus) but some people still owe a lot of money so we are excited to see the Lord provide. Outreach finances..we don't know exact amounts yet until we find out where we are going but it looks like I am still going to need some finances for that but I will have that figured out next week. I am so thankful for everyones prayers and support!! You are all apart of this with me and on this adventure with me...the people in australia and the people in papa new guinea who we are helping thank you as well. I love you all!
PS it is raining here so Oregon is on my mind!
No comments:
Post a Comment