Week 3

This past week has been the most challenging but also the best week so far. Shirley Brownhill spoke on repentance and forgiveness and almost my whole thought life this week was about repentance and forgiveness.

Some of the lecture highlights for me were:

The 3 steps to repentance are:

1.   Change of mind

2.   Change of heart

3.   Change of life towards sin

4.   Everything I do that is against the nature and character of God is sin. Sin opposes God and without repentance there is no restoration with Him.

5.   Pride is our greatest enemy and humility our greatest need in repentance.

6.   I must take personal responsibility for all of my actions and have to fear the Lord more than men.

7.   It’s possible to live a holy life here on earth already. Of course we’ll still sin, but we’ll be so alert that we’ll do everything possible to make things right with God and men as soon as possible because sin means separation from God.

8.   Jesus can’t be my salvation if He doesn’t have my will and my heart.

9.   Forgiveness is a choice not a feeling. We have to be forgive others just as Christ forgave us.

10.       I’m not doing God a favor when I repent, but I’m doing myself a favor.

11.       Jesus came on earth to restore our relationship with God.

I got more and more burdened this week as I realized all of the areas of sin in my life and really started hating sin more than anything. On Thursday we listed all of the sins the bible mentions (there are a whole bunch!) and then wrote a letter to God where we apologized for all of the sins He convicted us of and on the back we had a list with people we had to forgive and why we had to forgive them.

The next day we had our repentance and forgiveness day. We started out in the morning with worship and we prayed for a deep revelation of the cross. Someone had a vision of her nailing Jesus to the cross and that was when I understood the meaning of the cross. I was the one who nailed Jesus on the cross, my selfishness and my sin brought Jesus on the cross!

 At 9:30am the first person started reading their prayer to God out loud in front of the whole class while the leaders were praying for the person. It was a very, very emotional and, for me, emotional exhausting time. With every student that went up front to repent and forgive, the pressure on my heart got greater and greater. I could sense some of the pain the people felt while reading their letter and I felt God tell me that what I was feeling at that moment was just a little glimpse of what Jesus felt when He was hanging on the cross.

When it was my turn to repent I decided to confess every single thing I had ever done no matter what other people might thing because it was all about me and God and I didn’t want the enemy to have any stronghold in my life whatsoever again.

As I was reading my confessions to God I realized again how bad sin is, how much I have hurt God and it was good to let it all out. My leaders prayed for me and I felt free. When I nailed my letter to the cross I knew that everything was part of my story and no longer part of who I am. The last student repented at 1:30am the next day (we were glad that we were finished ‘that early’ the DTS last quarter took till 6am the next day!).  Friday definitely drew us closer together and I love everybody even more than before!

On Saturday I had such a great quiet time because I knew that there was absolutely nothing between God and me anymore!

Thank you so much for your prayers. Please keep praying for God’s protection on all of us and that we will cling to the truth now matter what. The enemy is already trying to bombard us with lies and some are feeling badly attacked right now.

Thursday night evangelism was great as well. We started with knocking at some doors and as we were on our way to the next house we saw a drunk man stumbling down the street and went up to him. We asked him how he was and to our shock he said that he felt like committing suicide. As we continued talking to him he shared how he was in the army and how he had killed loads of people in Bosnia and the Congo and saw his best friends die. He never got over his horrible experiences and tried to forget them by drinking, doing drugs and cutting himself up. Three years ago he gave his life to God, got baptized but fell back into sin shortly after because his past was still haunting him. He can’t believe that God would ever forgive him and he simply cannot forgive himself. We prayed for him and I was able to share with him about God’s grace and that for God sin is sin. To God lying is just as great of a sin as murder. After that he started to cry and prayed for himself. He asked for God’s forgiveness and told us afterwards how glad he was that he met us.

Other than that I’ve been busy with book reports, journaling and base life. I’m really looking forward to next week’s teaching on Worship and Intercession.