This week we were learning about Destiny By Design.
We started this week out by saying how it is a week that we need to be very open and share a lot of things. It was very funny every second my mind would change from yeah, I can do this, I am excited to can't I just sleep through this week. : p
We the defined humility which is to be known for who you really are. We looked at how, when people know their purpose in life, they are willing to give their life for that purpose. We need to be desperate to hear Him and vulnerable Our teacher this week was Myrna which was awesome because she was here for a couple of weeks so we already knew her. She told us that she is not going to give us our answers about who we are because we need to find that out through God, not the teacher or the class. We need to desperately ask God what He has for our life. So how desperate are we to know His plan for us?
You hear God well through your intimacy through Him: walk in relationship with Him, rule the earth, be His temple, give Him glory! Our purpose in life is to have relationship with Him. We need to give God our best moment. When we are most hungry for Him is when He is all you want. Give Him your all, he wants it! Our relationship with God will be reflected in our relationship with others. We then looked at what it is to have a heart of an orphan or the heart of a son of daughter of God. It was very surprising to see how many of us were sometimes in both or mostly the heart of the orphan.
Often times what we see in the spiritual is a reflection of the spiritual. Now God gave us free will. When He did that He ran the risk of us choosing not to love Him. When we love somebody we run the risk of being hurt. When we seek God it is easier to deal with disappointments. We need to love everybody with everything we are though! One thing Myrna said is that we may be the only Jesus that some people will see. Will they see the heart of an orphan or the heart of a daughter? We also need to all be in unity as Christians, one body, one family.
We were created in the image and likeness of God.
Image: the idea of shadowing from a root, it's a shadow or a resemblance.
Likeness: Similitude, image or resemblance form a root to be like, to compare. It molds it is an appearance of the thing.
God designed us the way we are. Our abilities and our personality.
We are born with abilities- mind, will, emotions.
Ability of intellect (mind): imagination. It's our God consciousness- it's what we evaluate what is right from wrong, memory. Ability of spirit and of mind.
Ability of emotion: Spontaneous reactions. allows us to fully enjoy life and relationships with others. Area of satisfaction and happiness of pleasure and pain, worship and adoration. An ability of soul.
Ability of Will: Self determination. The ability to originate our own actions, the self caused energy of personality, the essence of moral character. Commonly referred to as the "heart' of man. It's not programed it is essential to develop true relationships.
God gave us emotions to relate to us.
God intended that we evaluate with our mind and do what is right with our will even if our emotions are telling us otherwise. When we do what is right our emotions will eventually follow us. We CANNOT allow our emotions to control our mind and our will. God holds us responsible for our wrong actions because we have the ability to understand the right thing to do and have the ability to choose it.
God designed us to fulfill our purpose and our destiny.2 Timothy 1:9
God wants to reveal His plan for us! He had been preparing us to fulfill our destiny in Him since before we were born. With our dreams, our desires, our experiences. God has given us special gifts and abilities. We are one of a kind and original. He wants to use each of us to bless the nations of the earth, everywhere. We were intended for a particular purpose. When a child is being conceived, heck even before then, God has a plan and a destiny for them!
Getting to know God needs to be a daily thing, you have every day of your life to get to know Him! : ) God loves us so much that He send His son to die for us! He always was, is, and will be, the only thing that changes is us.
God wants us to have a correct perceptive of Him, get to know Him from His word.
Ask God to show us His heart. To show what He see's that we cannot see!
The next thing we looked out was dreams:
Dreams are very important part of God's plan for our lives!
Every accomplishment starts with a dream that God places in the mind of a person. (Proverbes 13:12)
Sometimes we may have an ordinary dream but the hope comes from the extraordinary. Maybe it's something that you know in your heart but your mind struggles with a lot!
If you want to see the awesomeness of God you need to fight for it!!!
Dreams come from the heart, the mind tries to analyze it. (Proverbs 4:23)
The dreams that seem impossible are the ones that are from God. The ones that motivate our lives, that get us thinking what are God's plans for us.
The fear of failure prohibits us from dreaming, fear paralyzes us, it inhibits us from seeing the future.
Sometimes we want our dreams to come from our own strength, but those are the ones that never come to pass. When we try to do things for ourselves it never works.
Don't let fear of man stop you from dreaming. Don't give man the right to change your dreams, give them to God! Proverbs 29:25.
When you know something is from God you will fight for it! We need to be enthusiastic and excited, but we NEED to surrender them to God because He's the one who will make them possible, not us! God has a dream for you, ask for it. He'll give you little things, be faithful for them.
If you have lost sight of your purpose God will restore you!!! He restored David....
Experiences: God's purpose through our experiences is to teach us but also to help others: to challenge them, encourage them, comfort them, and to relate to them. The experiences that God allows in our lives are for a purpose. The most important thing is that we learn from our experiences.
God will redeem our worst experiences and we can learn from them!
God will use everything that He allows us to experience. God permits those things to happen but He doesn't create the situation.
Personality: Our personality is our soul print. We were fearfully and wonderfully made.
Outside of the relationship with God we cannot begin to fully understand the potential of our personality!
Personality is defined as habitual patterns and qualitites of behavoirs of an individual.
Where do we get our energy, where do we focus our attention.
How do we look at things and learn something new
How do we go about making our decisions and the type of lifestyle we lead.
By discovering our personality we can begin to identify our strengths and weaknesses.
There are two main types of personality:
Extroverts: Simulations from the outside
Introverts: Simulations from the inside.
Styles of Worship:
Naturalist: Inspired by nature, outdoors.
Senate: Love God with senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their senses
Traditionalist: Draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols, and unchanged structures.
Ascetics: Prefer to love God in solitude and simplicity
Activists: Love God through confronting evil, battling injustice, working to make the world a better place
Caregivers: Love God by loving others and meeting their needs
Enthusiast: Love God through celebration
Contemplatives: Love God through adoration
Intellectuals: Love God by studying with their minds.
Our design:
We cannot find our destiny until we find our identity in Christ. We'll find our identity in our intimacy with God. The most true things about us are what God says about us.
The more we know who we are in Christ the less people's words will penetrate our hearts. Being secure in our identity in Christ gives us freedom and authority in sharing the gospel.
If we keep living in sin but say that we are a new creation in Christ how will anyone see that? How will anyone want to be a new Creation when you haven't even changed?
Gift: something you are given that you didn't deserve. Our gifts are God's presents to us. Use your gifts to be part of the church.
This week really impacted me! I loved sharing things from our hearts and learning new things about our family and ourselves. I also learned that it really is okay to dream, our dreams come from God! I am very excited for this! This weekend the boys went home for the weekend so we sort of had a girl weekend, it was a lot of fun, but we did miss them! It was nice to finally have a weekend of relaxing after to weekends of driving and craziness! Although the weekend was a little crazy, but mostly relaxing! : D
28 September, 2011
26 September, 2011
Creel!
So I suppose I haven't written anything since I went to Creel so here goes.
At Creel we learned about the sovereignty of God. It was very interesting to me because I wasn't even sure what the word sovereign meant, let alone that my God possessed this characteristic. Now that the week is over I am very glad that He does. It was also really awesome to see how this week matched up with our previous week.
So one thing that we saw that we have to realize when talking about God's sovereignty we need to understand the difference between His authority and His power.
God gave us the freedom and the responsibility to follow His authority. Our battle is between our will and God's will. The devil really likes to come and make our will seem like it is better than the will of God. When we are following our own will we are also following the will of satan.
Jesus came to earth not just to be our salvation but also to deal with the disobedience of man, which is the original problem. Jesus had to be obedient until death and had to be trailed in all the ways we will/could be. Jesus' 33 years of life was so that He would crucify His own will.
The opposite of love is not hate but selfishness. We are born into the kingdom of darkness (the enemy) and we are naturally focused on selfishness. When you are in the kingdom of the enemy you are never satisfied, you always want more. When you cross into the kingdom of God the enemy continues to take your mind/eyes off God and put them on yourself, which is appealing. However, to be a disciple of Jesus, we must deny ourselves everyday, take up our cross and follow Him.
At Creel we learned about the sovereignty of God. It was very interesting to me because I wasn't even sure what the word sovereign meant, let alone that my God possessed this characteristic. Now that the week is over I am very glad that He does. It was also really awesome to see how this week matched up with our previous week.
So one thing that we saw that we have to realize when talking about God's sovereignty we need to understand the difference between His authority and His power.
God gave us the freedom and the responsibility to follow His authority. Our battle is between our will and God's will. The devil really likes to come and make our will seem like it is better than the will of God. When we are following our own will we are also following the will of satan.
Jesus came to earth not just to be our salvation but also to deal with the disobedience of man, which is the original problem. Jesus had to be obedient until death and had to be trailed in all the ways we will/could be. Jesus' 33 years of life was so that He would crucify His own will.
The opposite of love is not hate but selfishness. We are born into the kingdom of darkness (the enemy) and we are naturally focused on selfishness. When you are in the kingdom of the enemy you are never satisfied, you always want more. When you cross into the kingdom of God the enemy continues to take your mind/eyes off God and put them on yourself, which is appealing. However, to be a disciple of Jesus, we must deny ourselves everyday, take up our cross and follow Him.
When we are in darkness we are in ignorance of the truth. We do not want to do this because the truth will set us free.
When we are in self denial we will be trailed many times in our lives, it's a constant truth, constant road, constant decision. When we decide to believe in God we pass from death to life and death has no authority over us. Our whole battle is to see whether or not we are willing to follow God's will or our own.
Everyday we need to be walking toward perfection. Perhaps we will never actually reach it but when we are walking toward it it is another day, another opportunity to be more like Jesus. Everyday there's another trial, another choice to make. During our suffering we will be able to take our sufferings for joy knowing that God has a reason for it, and, in the long run, it will bring us closer to Him. When we go through a trial we shouldn't be looking for a way out we should be asking God what He wants us to get out of it and praise Him for allowing us to go through it (easier said than done no?) We need to be seeking what will bring the most glory to God, even if it is difficult. We need to be asking God what will bring Him the most glory in our lives and be fine with whatever that answer is. Jesus said that the foxes have holes and the birds have nests but if you follow Me you may have nothing (Matthew 8:20). We need to be willing to do this.
When we are walking toward perfection we are not looking for what we can gain but what glorifies God. This requires a continuous death of ourselves. We also need to be willing to prune the areas of our lives that are no longer producing fruit, prune areas that we need to die to ourselves. God will send tests our way and, sometimes, they are not easy and difficult to understand and some people loose their faith because of this. But God brings difficulties in our lives in order to help us reach perfection. We should strive to get to a place where we can want difficulties. Job is the perfect example of rejoicing in our trials. God will always know how big and how hard the trials need to be in order to work in our lives. Maybe if God is not healing someone He has a plan to glorify Himself in that sickness, sometimes even to the point of their death. Are we willing to die in order to glorify God?
If your Christian life is boring then your Christian life is just going in a bunch of circles. We need to dive into the word of God and ask ourselves if we are really following Him. Our Christian lives were not meant to be boring and, if they are, then we are moving in circles and we need to ask God what we can do in order to move forward again. We need to run toward perfection with the understanding that there is a possibility that we will never get there, but we are running in order to glorify God.
Every trail that we go through we mature a little bit more.
God tests our hearts to see if we want to live by His law or not. There are always two battles of wills going on in our minds. If we give into our own will we cannot continue to walk toward perfection. God brings us through deserts to make us spiritually strong. We need to endure them and rejoice in them. We need to experience the tribulations with all joy and with a deep desire that continually increases to know God.
We are all going to fall sometimes, but we are in an ongoing war. When we loose a battle we need to get up and be ready to fight our next one. The victorious people are the people who stand up on more time then they fall. Sometimes, as Christians, our failures in the past hinder us from our future plans.
We must, however, be careful not to make a god out of our dreams. When God gives us a dream or a vision we need to continuously follow God, even if it may seem like He is leading us away from the vision. God gave us the vision and He knows how He is going to get us there. Look at the life of Joseph for example (Gen 37-52) The road must be lived in constant faithfulness, diligence, and self control. Sometimes it is difficult to see God's exact will in our lives. If we are seeking and searching for God He will be faithful in completing His will in our lives! Do it with your all, make the best of it, and trust that God will take you the rest of the way!
We are to live not a life of receiving but a life of giving! Sometimes we do not understand but God's thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9) and we need to let Him reign on our hearts and try to understand.
Our main challenge in life is our character: our willingness to serve, and our willingness to support others, and our holiness. Sometimes God will lead us to something that has nothing to do with what He is calling us to but it is part of our training for what He wants us to do. We need to do everything to the best of our abilities. We need to ask God what He wants to do in our hearts.
When we are in self denial we will be trailed many times in our lives, it's a constant truth, constant road, constant decision. When we decide to believe in God we pass from death to life and death has no authority over us. Our whole battle is to see whether or not we are willing to follow God's will or our own.
Everyday we need to be walking toward perfection. Perhaps we will never actually reach it but when we are walking toward it it is another day, another opportunity to be more like Jesus. Everyday there's another trial, another choice to make. During our suffering we will be able to take our sufferings for joy knowing that God has a reason for it, and, in the long run, it will bring us closer to Him. When we go through a trial we shouldn't be looking for a way out we should be asking God what He wants us to get out of it and praise Him for allowing us to go through it (easier said than done no?) We need to be seeking what will bring the most glory to God, even if it is difficult. We need to be asking God what will bring Him the most glory in our lives and be fine with whatever that answer is. Jesus said that the foxes have holes and the birds have nests but if you follow Me you may have nothing (Matthew 8:20). We need to be willing to do this.
When we are walking toward perfection we are not looking for what we can gain but what glorifies God. This requires a continuous death of ourselves. We also need to be willing to prune the areas of our lives that are no longer producing fruit, prune areas that we need to die to ourselves. God will send tests our way and, sometimes, they are not easy and difficult to understand and some people loose their faith because of this. But God brings difficulties in our lives in order to help us reach perfection. We should strive to get to a place where we can want difficulties. Job is the perfect example of rejoicing in our trials. God will always know how big and how hard the trials need to be in order to work in our lives. Maybe if God is not healing someone He has a plan to glorify Himself in that sickness, sometimes even to the point of their death. Are we willing to die in order to glorify God?
If your Christian life is boring then your Christian life is just going in a bunch of circles. We need to dive into the word of God and ask ourselves if we are really following Him. Our Christian lives were not meant to be boring and, if they are, then we are moving in circles and we need to ask God what we can do in order to move forward again. We need to run toward perfection with the understanding that there is a possibility that we will never get there, but we are running in order to glorify God.
Every trail that we go through we mature a little bit more.
God tests our hearts to see if we want to live by His law or not. There are always two battles of wills going on in our minds. If we give into our own will we cannot continue to walk toward perfection. God brings us through deserts to make us spiritually strong. We need to endure them and rejoice in them. We need to experience the tribulations with all joy and with a deep desire that continually increases to know God.
We are all going to fall sometimes, but we are in an ongoing war. When we loose a battle we need to get up and be ready to fight our next one. The victorious people are the people who stand up on more time then they fall. Sometimes, as Christians, our failures in the past hinder us from our future plans.
We must, however, be careful not to make a god out of our dreams. When God gives us a dream or a vision we need to continuously follow God, even if it may seem like He is leading us away from the vision. God gave us the vision and He knows how He is going to get us there. Look at the life of Joseph for example (Gen 37-52) The road must be lived in constant faithfulness, diligence, and self control. Sometimes it is difficult to see God's exact will in our lives. If we are seeking and searching for God He will be faithful in completing His will in our lives! Do it with your all, make the best of it, and trust that God will take you the rest of the way!
We are to live not a life of receiving but a life of giving! Sometimes we do not understand but God's thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9) and we need to let Him reign on our hearts and try to understand.
Our main challenge in life is our character: our willingness to serve, and our willingness to support others, and our holiness. Sometimes God will lead us to something that has nothing to do with what He is calling us to but it is part of our training for what He wants us to do. We need to do everything to the best of our abilities. We need to ask God what He wants to do in our hearts.
When God gives us a dream that is probably not all He has for us. He most likely has MUCH more. If our vision becomes our god then we will be pursuing something way less than what God actually has for us. We need to make sure we are not trying to do the things in our own strength but look at God and His vision and His strength. If God gave you the vision He wants it to happen and He will make it happen in His ways.
So how do we experience the sovereignty of God in our daily lives?
Just because God is sovereign doesn't mean that everything is going exactly how He wants/wanted. It's because He is working through authority and not through power and He wants us to submit to that. It depends on us how much God will reign on this earth. Even though it is hard we need to try. Hopefully when He comes to pick us up He will be able to say "well done my good and faithful servant." I surely hope so!
God desires to train us up and use our lives to bring righteousness to others. He wants to use our lives to set the example and the norm for other people.
God wants us to set up walls. Walls of the laws and rules where God gives us authority. (ex. Parents with their kinds) Also where God gives us influence we are to set the norm for laws and rules.
So no one said this life would be easy, but what are we going to learn from our trials? How are we going to get one step closer to God, closer to perfection?
Okay so that is everything from the class. I am very sorry that it is sort of all over the place. This class was very intense. We covered a lot of stuff in a little bit of time. Sometimes it was hard to keep up, and sometimes it was all over the place, but it was amazing!
Also, in Creel there were a lot of rocks that we loved to climb all over in our free time. It was a lot of fun and a great experience! We had many adventures. One day we went to these hot springs. It literally took us about two hours to get to them and it was completely down hill! I was pretty much dying on the way back up, it was crazy! We also went to a lake and a lookout. It was really awesome. One thing that really impacted me was, when we were at those places, there would always be children who were selling things. They obviously didn't have much and I felt very sad for them. When we were eating they would just look. Some of them would come up and tell us that they were hungry. We gave food to them a couple of times and it made me more happy than anything else that whole week. They really were beautiful and I wish I could have given them more! It was a very long drive there and back and we were exhausted! A couple of times we got to watch the staff's kids while they had their meetings (because it was a staff retreat.) I loved that very much. It was so much fun to play with the children and just have a good time!
We also got to see a lot of God in scenery. It was amazing! God really spoke unity into our group and showed us that we cannot be apathetic about hearing His voice. Great things happened on this trip. All in all it was amazing! : )
So how do we experience the sovereignty of God in our daily lives?
Just because God is sovereign doesn't mean that everything is going exactly how He wants/wanted. It's because He is working through authority and not through power and He wants us to submit to that. It depends on us how much God will reign on this earth. Even though it is hard we need to try. Hopefully when He comes to pick us up He will be able to say "well done my good and faithful servant." I surely hope so!
God desires to train us up and use our lives to bring righteousness to others. He wants to use our lives to set the example and the norm for other people.
God wants us to set up walls. Walls of the laws and rules where God gives us authority. (ex. Parents with their kinds) Also where God gives us influence we are to set the norm for laws and rules.
So no one said this life would be easy, but what are we going to learn from our trials? How are we going to get one step closer to God, closer to perfection?
Okay so that is everything from the class. I am very sorry that it is sort of all over the place. This class was very intense. We covered a lot of stuff in a little bit of time. Sometimes it was hard to keep up, and sometimes it was all over the place, but it was amazing!
Also, in Creel there were a lot of rocks that we loved to climb all over in our free time. It was a lot of fun and a great experience! We had many adventures. One day we went to these hot springs. It literally took us about two hours to get to them and it was completely down hill! I was pretty much dying on the way back up, it was crazy! We also went to a lake and a lookout. It was really awesome. One thing that really impacted me was, when we were at those places, there would always be children who were selling things. They obviously didn't have much and I felt very sad for them. When we were eating they would just look. Some of them would come up and tell us that they were hungry. We gave food to them a couple of times and it made me more happy than anything else that whole week. They really were beautiful and I wish I could have given them more! It was a very long drive there and back and we were exhausted! A couple of times we got to watch the staff's kids while they had their meetings (because it was a staff retreat.) I loved that very much. It was so much fun to play with the children and just have a good time!
We also got to see a lot of God in scenery. It was amazing! God really spoke unity into our group and showed us that we cannot be apathetic about hearing His voice. Great things happened on this trip. All in all it was amazing! : )
02 September, 2011
Intensity...
This week we were learning about the evidences of salvation. When I first read about this week a little bit ago I thought it would be so easy because who doesn't know what salvation is, right? Well if I've never been wrong before I was definitely wrong this time. The first day our teacher, whose name is Stephen, said that before anyone will believe what you say they need to believe who you are. For a large part of the day he told us who he was, and his story of salvation. Then he had us each go up and tell our story of salvation. We then went over the fact that only the Holy Spirit has the right to tell you that you have become a child of God. Which makes sense, who else has the right to say that we are their children other than our parents? This week is going to be a bit difficult to write about because it really was intense but I am going to do my best to describe the wonderful things God has been doing in my heart and what He has been showing me this week. So the first term we went over this week was enlightenment. At this point I wish we spoke Spanish because it is much more clearly explained in Spanish. Here is a quick lesson so I can use what I need to to describe enlightenment. There are two words in Spanish for to know. One is Saber which is head knowledge. It's when you know things like math or my hair color or your classmates name. The other one is Conocer and this is to know someone intimately. This is how you know your wife, or your best friend. Conocer has to do more with the heart. So enlightenment is something that happens in the mind, when you saber the truth and saber God.
So we were talking a lot about when we lead people to Christ because it's a practical application to these things since that is part of what we will be doing on outreach. We talked about how when we "lead" people to Christ sometimes people come up because they've been enlightened. They believe in God and now saber about Him and they want to be assured that they will go to Heaven because they don't want to go to hell. They know God is real and they want to go to Heaven, so they are willing to "pray the prayer" but there heart hasn't changed, they do not yet conocer God, there was no change in heart. But wait! Didn't I just say that no one can say whether or not you are a child of God, only God Himself? Yes, I did just say that. I'm not saying every person who responds did not actually want a change of heart, for all we know all of them did or none of them did, but that's the thing, there is no way we can know.
Okay, so wait, then what is salvation? Good question, that just happens to be the next thing. Salvation is an ongoing relationship with Christ. Salvation is a relationship. A lot of people when you ask or hear about eternal life they will talk about how one day they will have eternal life, that one day they will live eternally in Heaven with the Lord. But that's not actually what eternal life is, eternal life has already started! John 17:3 says "now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." So salvation is to conocer God. To be in real relationship with Him- a profound, deep, loving, knowing relationship with God. So do you value eternal life or eternal love? When eternal life is valued it is because of fear and selfishness, it is knowing God's nature but not His character. The desire for eternal life is because they do not want to suffer any longer which is selfishness not salvation. One super encouraging thing about his is God wants, He DESIRES to be known! He wants us to experience true love for Him. There are a couple of things that we may be doing to hinder ourselves from knowing God. We may be thinking knowing God may increase our pride and make us think we are special or something. There is something completely wrong with this... God wants us to be special, we are special (Isaiah 57:15 explains that even though He lives in a Holy place He also lives with the ones who are contrite and lowly in Spirit to revive their hearts.) The second thing is the religious view which is only the pastor can really know God so they don't really try. They choose the value what the pastor says more than what God is telling them. But what God tells us is the most important thing and we should take what the pastor says to God. The third one is the pessimistic view which is you shouldn't waste your time, you can't get to know God anyway so why even try. Although we can never FULLY know God, because He is an infinite God and the more we discover the more there will be to discover, we can still know Him. And the more we know Him the happier and more fulfilled we are in life.
I'm sure you've heard before that Christianity it not a religion, but why? A religion is a set of beliefs (a cause) and a set of action (effects.) Christianity is not a cause and effect, it is a relationship. We need to spend time with Him, just like any other relationship, talk to Him, and LISTEN to what He is saying too. It's just like the relationship you have with your best friend. If you don't take time for those relationships eventually you will not know that person anymore.
Now one thing a lot of people think is that when enlightenment happens that is their salvation. Many times they think that is because the person tells them "now you have been saved" but we can't know that for sure because we do not know their heart. A person's salvation is when they start their repentance and faith produces a heart connection, conocer, and that starts their continuing relationship. When they have nothing more than enlightenment it is like their are born dead into their rebirth.
That night we had a class where we read 1 John in order to prepare us for the next day of class. The next day in class we looked at the evidences of salvation. There are seven evidences of salvation.
1. Walking in the light (1 John 1:6-7)
In order for this part to make sense we had to define a couple of things first.
Walk-purposeful action in a specific direction
Fall- An involuntary action
Temptation- A proposition presented to the ind to fulfill a good appetite in a way forbidden by God.
Sin- The decision to satisfy good appetites in ways forbidden by God.
Have you ever heard someone say that they fell into sin? This, however, does not make sense because sin is a decision and falling is an involuntary action therefore you do not fall into sin. You either walk in the darkness or you walk in the light. An interesting question that was presented was if you knew that you wouldn't get caught and no one would find out what you did, would you do it? If so that is sin, even if you didn't do it yet, because sin starts in the heart. Actually doing it, the actual action of sin is a result of the sin that we committed in the heart. Have you also heard of someone saying that every single day you sin? That you cannot go a day without sinning? I went my whole life thinking that, that every single person sins every single day. Show me in the Bible where it says that? You are going to be looking for a very long time because it doesn't. The thing is we train ourselves to think that we sin every day. So much so that sometimes if I would be praying for the forgiveness of my sins while doing intercession or something like that I would ask for forgiveness and say "I'm not too sure what they are but I know I sinned today so please forgive me." And if I thought that I hadn't sinned I would ask for forgiveness from that! I can just imagine God saying one day she'll get it. One day she'll understand that I sent my son to take away her sin. Now I'm definitely not saying that I do not sin, nope! And I'm not saying that there are people who have never sinned because the Bible says "for all have sin and fall short of the glory of God." -Romans 3:23. But once we have gotten to the point where we hate our sin, we are repulsed from it, we ask for forgiveness, and we begin to conocer God we can begin to stop sinning. If we hate our sin we will be convicted of it and we will never want to do it again. Although we may still do it, we ask for forgiveness, and try harder not to sin. It is possible to go all day without sinning. How freeing is that?!?
It's not easy though, it's like if you were to run a marathon. You wouldn't just wake up one day and decide that you wanted to do it, and do it. It would be terrible. Rather you train for the marathon everyday, intensely, giving up things that you normally would do for it. That's what we need to do with God. And the closer we get to God the more we will hate our sin and the more we will want to stop doing it. I could probably go on for a while longer but I'm only on number one so I will move on. : p
2. Love the Law: 1 John 2:3-5
Some people may not be interested in this because they think there is too much in the law and it may be too hard to complete it. Well there is a reassuring thought, God will never give us a commandment that we cannot keep. God tells us to be perfect. Do you think He would tell us to do that if we couldn't? NO! Now He's not asking us to never have a pimple, or a cut, or a blemish, no that would be impossible. However He is asking us to be perfect in love.
There are many other laws than to be perfect and holy. Look at the ten commandments for example. Now all of those things may be hard, but God didn't just make them because He was bored one day, He made them for our own good. As Christians we love the law because it keeps junk out of our lives. Let's take adultery for example. When you commit adultery you are breaking the bond made between two people. Do you think that is a wise thing for us to do? We love the law because we will never have to deal with the junk that breaking or hating the law brings to us!! How exciting.
Another reason why we love the law is because our sin is destructive. It destroys us and it destroys people and things around us.
3. Love your brother 1 John 2:9-11
There is an equation we got for this.
God gave Jesus who gave His life to us and we should give our lives to our brother. (It looks a lot cooler with arrows.)
Now we have to ask ourselves, do I love those that I once hated?
4. Fellowship With God: 1 John 2:18-29
We had two definitions with this
General Revelation- What we can know about God through Creation.
Special revelation- What we can know about God through the Bible, dreams, intercession, His Voice, and, the ultimate one, Jesus.
Fellowship with God is very important in our walk with Him, as mentioned before.
5. Abide in Christ: 1 John 2: 24-25
Abiding in Christ can be a very exciting thing. He is going all around the world and He will take us there. If we keep up with Him he will take us around the world. One thing the teacher said is it's almost like Jesus has ADHD, He is all over the place and we need to keep up with Him. We need to start practicing so we will be able to keep up and reach all the people He wants us to.
6. Witness of the Spirit: 1 John 3:24
God has the spirit of adoption. Like I said before no one else has the right to call us Children of God, only Him, and His spirit has to adopt us. When we speak to a group of people we do not have to worry about "getting them saved" we just have to pray that the spirit of adoption will speak to them, and He will.
Our spirit is the breath of God, that is what gives us understanding.
7. Love not the world: 1 John 2:15
God insists that we have a change in purpose from pleasing ourselves to pleasing Him.Before we knew Him sin ruled our lives. When we know Him we think it is okay that we still have some sin, but take out most or the "worst" but our whole lives need to be only Christ.
When it says love not the world it is not saying do not love the creation God has put in it, the people He created, or the sinners, it is to hate the world system. To hate anything that operates to keep you enslaved to sin. Satan comes to steal kill and destroy. He will steal your life, kill you, and, if that is not enough he will destroy you as well. Even if you are already a Christian the world will come to try to steal you again.
In 1 John 2:16 it shows us that satan only has three tools to destroy us.
1. The lust of the flesh: This is wanting to be as God was. He tempted Eve with this and also used it in the tower of Babel (Gen. 10:9.)
2. The lust of the eyes: Judges 3: 7-8 This is materialistic things. It is like people who praise Baal they just praise him to get stuff.
3. The vain pride of life. We learned about this idol called molek. People would throw their friggin babies into it's hands and the baby would burn alive as a sacrifice. They would throw it twenty feet into the air and, if they missed, they would try again. (Leviticus18:21, Leviticus 20:2, 1 Kings 11:7-11)That is grotesque. I'm sure almost everyone would agree.
Modern day this is abortion, so why aren't we just as disgusted?
That is all seven of them. Then we have an overview. One equation we had was awakening+conviction+ repentance (which all comes from the Spirit)= A heart connection with God.
If you decided to walk in the light you will still sin but it will suck. You will be convicted of the sin and want to run back to the light. You will hate your sin more and more and not want to go back to it. God is much more concerned with where our hearts are rather than whether or not we sinned and, if we focus on that too, it will become easier and easier.
The people who don't go to Heaven are the ones who don't want to be there. Sin is the destruction of your life. Living in sin is destruction and makes your life terrible. When people choose sin they love there sin and want to be in their sin. When they die they are going into a reality of what they have been living their whole lives.
The final thing we talked about was forgiveness. 2 Corinthians 7:10-11 10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. 11 See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter.
There is a very long list I could go into with this but I do not feel the need to. However all of those things is what repentance looks like. It is when you HATE your sin.
We looked at the difference between Godly and worldly sorrow.
Godly sorrow leads to repentance which leads to salvation which =no regrets.
Worldly sorrow= death
People who don't have a relationship with Jesus are killing themselves because they are all SO broken and sad but they are not dealing with their sin.
Repentance means the sorrow from sin. It's a change of mind about sin because you hate it and you are repulsed. It's a complete transformation of purpose.
If you have something that you feel badly about doing, and don't want to do it anymore, but still go back to it, is it repentance?
Our ideas lead to beliefs which lead to actions which leads to habits which leads to character which leads to ultimate destiny. If you don't change your mind about something you'll never change your actions.
Now one part of the equation of salvation is faith. Biblical faith is unmovable, it's an unwavering commitment. You commit yourself to Him because He is real. Believe in Him and bind yourself to Him. God is not just a little story to believe in but a relationship that literally changes everything.
There is SOO much more I could get into, this week was absolutely amazing, life changing week, that has got me thinking about a lot of stuff. I apologize for this being so long, but it was needed.
Now I will finally finish getting ready for Creel. That is where we are going next week so I will be without internet. I hear it's amazing though. (But pray for me I also hear it is cold. : p) : D
So we were talking a lot about when we lead people to Christ because it's a practical application to these things since that is part of what we will be doing on outreach. We talked about how when we "lead" people to Christ sometimes people come up because they've been enlightened. They believe in God and now saber about Him and they want to be assured that they will go to Heaven because they don't want to go to hell. They know God is real and they want to go to Heaven, so they are willing to "pray the prayer" but there heart hasn't changed, they do not yet conocer God, there was no change in heart. But wait! Didn't I just say that no one can say whether or not you are a child of God, only God Himself? Yes, I did just say that. I'm not saying every person who responds did not actually want a change of heart, for all we know all of them did or none of them did, but that's the thing, there is no way we can know.
Okay, so wait, then what is salvation? Good question, that just happens to be the next thing. Salvation is an ongoing relationship with Christ. Salvation is a relationship. A lot of people when you ask or hear about eternal life they will talk about how one day they will have eternal life, that one day they will live eternally in Heaven with the Lord. But that's not actually what eternal life is, eternal life has already started! John 17:3 says "now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." So salvation is to conocer God. To be in real relationship with Him- a profound, deep, loving, knowing relationship with God. So do you value eternal life or eternal love? When eternal life is valued it is because of fear and selfishness, it is knowing God's nature but not His character. The desire for eternal life is because they do not want to suffer any longer which is selfishness not salvation. One super encouraging thing about his is God wants, He DESIRES to be known! He wants us to experience true love for Him. There are a couple of things that we may be doing to hinder ourselves from knowing God. We may be thinking knowing God may increase our pride and make us think we are special or something. There is something completely wrong with this... God wants us to be special, we are special (Isaiah 57:15 explains that even though He lives in a Holy place He also lives with the ones who are contrite and lowly in Spirit to revive their hearts.) The second thing is the religious view which is only the pastor can really know God so they don't really try. They choose the value what the pastor says more than what God is telling them. But what God tells us is the most important thing and we should take what the pastor says to God. The third one is the pessimistic view which is you shouldn't waste your time, you can't get to know God anyway so why even try. Although we can never FULLY know God, because He is an infinite God and the more we discover the more there will be to discover, we can still know Him. And the more we know Him the happier and more fulfilled we are in life.
I'm sure you've heard before that Christianity it not a religion, but why? A religion is a set of beliefs (a cause) and a set of action (effects.) Christianity is not a cause and effect, it is a relationship. We need to spend time with Him, just like any other relationship, talk to Him, and LISTEN to what He is saying too. It's just like the relationship you have with your best friend. If you don't take time for those relationships eventually you will not know that person anymore.
Now one thing a lot of people think is that when enlightenment happens that is their salvation. Many times they think that is because the person tells them "now you have been saved" but we can't know that for sure because we do not know their heart. A person's salvation is when they start their repentance and faith produces a heart connection, conocer, and that starts their continuing relationship. When they have nothing more than enlightenment it is like their are born dead into their rebirth.
That night we had a class where we read 1 John in order to prepare us for the next day of class. The next day in class we looked at the evidences of salvation. There are seven evidences of salvation.
1. Walking in the light (1 John 1:6-7)
In order for this part to make sense we had to define a couple of things first.
Walk-purposeful action in a specific direction
Fall- An involuntary action
Temptation- A proposition presented to the ind to fulfill a good appetite in a way forbidden by God.
Sin- The decision to satisfy good appetites in ways forbidden by God.
Have you ever heard someone say that they fell into sin? This, however, does not make sense because sin is a decision and falling is an involuntary action therefore you do not fall into sin. You either walk in the darkness or you walk in the light. An interesting question that was presented was if you knew that you wouldn't get caught and no one would find out what you did, would you do it? If so that is sin, even if you didn't do it yet, because sin starts in the heart. Actually doing it, the actual action of sin is a result of the sin that we committed in the heart. Have you also heard of someone saying that every single day you sin? That you cannot go a day without sinning? I went my whole life thinking that, that every single person sins every single day. Show me in the Bible where it says that? You are going to be looking for a very long time because it doesn't. The thing is we train ourselves to think that we sin every day. So much so that sometimes if I would be praying for the forgiveness of my sins while doing intercession or something like that I would ask for forgiveness and say "I'm not too sure what they are but I know I sinned today so please forgive me." And if I thought that I hadn't sinned I would ask for forgiveness from that! I can just imagine God saying one day she'll get it. One day she'll understand that I sent my son to take away her sin. Now I'm definitely not saying that I do not sin, nope! And I'm not saying that there are people who have never sinned because the Bible says "for all have sin and fall short of the glory of God." -Romans 3:23. But once we have gotten to the point where we hate our sin, we are repulsed from it, we ask for forgiveness, and we begin to conocer God we can begin to stop sinning. If we hate our sin we will be convicted of it and we will never want to do it again. Although we may still do it, we ask for forgiveness, and try harder not to sin. It is possible to go all day without sinning. How freeing is that?!?
It's not easy though, it's like if you were to run a marathon. You wouldn't just wake up one day and decide that you wanted to do it, and do it. It would be terrible. Rather you train for the marathon everyday, intensely, giving up things that you normally would do for it. That's what we need to do with God. And the closer we get to God the more we will hate our sin and the more we will want to stop doing it. I could probably go on for a while longer but I'm only on number one so I will move on. : p
2. Love the Law: 1 John 2:3-5
Some people may not be interested in this because they think there is too much in the law and it may be too hard to complete it. Well there is a reassuring thought, God will never give us a commandment that we cannot keep. God tells us to be perfect. Do you think He would tell us to do that if we couldn't? NO! Now He's not asking us to never have a pimple, or a cut, or a blemish, no that would be impossible. However He is asking us to be perfect in love.
There are many other laws than to be perfect and holy. Look at the ten commandments for example. Now all of those things may be hard, but God didn't just make them because He was bored one day, He made them for our own good. As Christians we love the law because it keeps junk out of our lives. Let's take adultery for example. When you commit adultery you are breaking the bond made between two people. Do you think that is a wise thing for us to do? We love the law because we will never have to deal with the junk that breaking or hating the law brings to us!! How exciting.
Another reason why we love the law is because our sin is destructive. It destroys us and it destroys people and things around us.
3. Love your brother 1 John 2:9-11
There is an equation we got for this.
God gave Jesus who gave His life to us and we should give our lives to our brother. (It looks a lot cooler with arrows.)
Now we have to ask ourselves, do I love those that I once hated?
4. Fellowship With God: 1 John 2:18-29
We had two definitions with this
General Revelation- What we can know about God through Creation.
Special revelation- What we can know about God through the Bible, dreams, intercession, His Voice, and, the ultimate one, Jesus.
Fellowship with God is very important in our walk with Him, as mentioned before.
5. Abide in Christ: 1 John 2: 24-25
Abiding in Christ can be a very exciting thing. He is going all around the world and He will take us there. If we keep up with Him he will take us around the world. One thing the teacher said is it's almost like Jesus has ADHD, He is all over the place and we need to keep up with Him. We need to start practicing so we will be able to keep up and reach all the people He wants us to.
6. Witness of the Spirit: 1 John 3:24
God has the spirit of adoption. Like I said before no one else has the right to call us Children of God, only Him, and His spirit has to adopt us. When we speak to a group of people we do not have to worry about "getting them saved" we just have to pray that the spirit of adoption will speak to them, and He will.
Our spirit is the breath of God, that is what gives us understanding.
7. Love not the world: 1 John 2:15
God insists that we have a change in purpose from pleasing ourselves to pleasing Him.Before we knew Him sin ruled our lives. When we know Him we think it is okay that we still have some sin, but take out most or the "worst" but our whole lives need to be only Christ.
When it says love not the world it is not saying do not love the creation God has put in it, the people He created, or the sinners, it is to hate the world system. To hate anything that operates to keep you enslaved to sin. Satan comes to steal kill and destroy. He will steal your life, kill you, and, if that is not enough he will destroy you as well. Even if you are already a Christian the world will come to try to steal you again.
In 1 John 2:16 it shows us that satan only has three tools to destroy us.
1. The lust of the flesh: This is wanting to be as God was. He tempted Eve with this and also used it in the tower of Babel (Gen. 10:9.)
2. The lust of the eyes: Judges 3: 7-8 This is materialistic things. It is like people who praise Baal they just praise him to get stuff.
3. The vain pride of life. We learned about this idol called molek. People would throw their friggin babies into it's hands and the baby would burn alive as a sacrifice. They would throw it twenty feet into the air and, if they missed, they would try again. (Leviticus18:21, Leviticus 20:2, 1 Kings 11:7-11)That is grotesque. I'm sure almost everyone would agree.
Modern day this is abortion, so why aren't we just as disgusted?
That is all seven of them. Then we have an overview. One equation we had was awakening+conviction+ repentance (which all comes from the Spirit)= A heart connection with God.
If you decided to walk in the light you will still sin but it will suck. You will be convicted of the sin and want to run back to the light. You will hate your sin more and more and not want to go back to it. God is much more concerned with where our hearts are rather than whether or not we sinned and, if we focus on that too, it will become easier and easier.
The people who don't go to Heaven are the ones who don't want to be there. Sin is the destruction of your life. Living in sin is destruction and makes your life terrible. When people choose sin they love there sin and want to be in their sin. When they die they are going into a reality of what they have been living their whole lives.
The final thing we talked about was forgiveness. 2 Corinthians 7:10-11 10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. 11 See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter.
There is a very long list I could go into with this but I do not feel the need to. However all of those things is what repentance looks like. It is when you HATE your sin.
We looked at the difference between Godly and worldly sorrow.
Godly sorrow leads to repentance which leads to salvation which =no regrets.
Worldly sorrow= death
People who don't have a relationship with Jesus are killing themselves because they are all SO broken and sad but they are not dealing with their sin.
Repentance means the sorrow from sin. It's a change of mind about sin because you hate it and you are repulsed. It's a complete transformation of purpose.
If you have something that you feel badly about doing, and don't want to do it anymore, but still go back to it, is it repentance?
Our ideas lead to beliefs which lead to actions which leads to habits which leads to character which leads to ultimate destiny. If you don't change your mind about something you'll never change your actions.
Now one part of the equation of salvation is faith. Biblical faith is unmovable, it's an unwavering commitment. You commit yourself to Him because He is real. Believe in Him and bind yourself to Him. God is not just a little story to believe in but a relationship that literally changes everything.
There is SOO much more I could get into, this week was absolutely amazing, life changing week, that has got me thinking about a lot of stuff. I apologize for this being so long, but it was needed.
Now I will finally finish getting ready for Creel. That is where we are going next week so I will be without internet. I hear it's amazing though. (But pray for me I also hear it is cold. : p) : D
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