Week 7

Wow another week gone, I’ve only got one more month of lecture phase to go!

Dean Sherman (a YWAM legend) taught on spiritual warfare this past week. Dean didn’t actually come to Perth but we watched videos that were filmed while he was teaching at our base 8 years ago. I was kind of skeptical towards the videos at first because I wasn’t too sure I could get much out of them, but hey God speaks through so many ways, why not through videos?

Dean’s teachings were fantastic. We learned what spiritual warfare is, that we are all called to do warfare, about our authority in Christ, the church, the nature of an attack, the armor of God (I encourage you to read Ephesians 6 again!), the enemy’s strategies and how to pray against some of those strategies,…   We learned how to fight and how to win.

Last Sunday I went to an event called ‘church together’ where over 15,000 people from about 200 churches around Perth came together to worship God as one. It was beautiful to see Christians from so many different denominations worship God in unity.

Then we went chocolate selling on Thursday to raise funds for new property for our base. Our base is growing and we need more space! We basically walked around the city and visit every business and office we could find to sell the chocolates an the girl I went chocolate selling with and I were able to sell all of our chocolates yay

I had some great times with God last week as well. On Tuesday I had to give a talk on one of God’s character attributes and I chose to speak on His grace. God has teaching me a lot about grace lately. Grace is a word we hear all the time and yet, at least for me, it is so hard to understand what grace is really about. I can’t believe that God loves unconditionally and with an everlasting love and doesn’t’ expect anything in return. Grace is something I cannot earn, which means that it doesn’t matter how much I pray, how much I read my Bible, God will love me the same. There is absolutely nothing I can do to make Him love me more, because He has loved me first. So grace is the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in our salvation and the bestowal of blessings.

“And if by grace, then it is no longer by works, if it were, grace would no longer be grace.” Rom. 11:6

We have some great future worship leaders in my DTS so we like to get together and worship. After small group on Tuesday a handful of us got together and had one of those special worship jam sessions in a back corner of the base (by the fire exit so literally a back corner haha). The presence of God was so intense though and I can truly say I loved God even more after that evening.

This week’s teaching is on missions and our speaker is Joseph Chean, the base director of YWAM Singapore. He has already been sharing awesome stories on what has been happening in Singapore and on Missions from Genesis to Revelation. I am excited to hear more these next days!

I told you in my last blog entry that I’ll be going to Cambodia and New Zealand on outreach and I thought back than that I had my outreach fees. The thing is though that the flight prices have gone up 50% due to the economic crisis, which means that our outreach fees have gone up around 40% of what was originally planned. This means that I am in desperate need of finances for my outreach at the moment and the fees are due next week on Wednesday! I would like to invite you to prayerfully consider supporting me financially. Any kind of help would be appreciated a lot!

If you feel lead to donate you can either:

 

European residents can make a bank transfer to: 

Stephanie Clewett 

Sparkasse Baden 

(Specify: for Stephanie‐ DTS) 

BLZ: 20205    

account no: 01301012728

IBAN: AT352020501301012728

BIC (swift): SPBDAT21 

 

Or you can donate via credit card:

www.ywamperth.org.au/007/payonline.asp

(if the link shouldn’t work out of some reason you can go to www.ywamperth.org.au and then scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on ‘payments’)

Payment Type: Other

Recipient: Stephanie Clewett

School or Ministry Name: October DTS 08

Details:  Donation towards Stephanie Clewett’s outreach fees

 

Thanks so much for your support guys! I really appreciate it and need it a lot right now. Please continue remembering me in your prayers, prayer is powerful and it makes such a difference when you’re supported in prayer. 

Week 6

cleaning a Jaguar

my outreach team

This week all of our staff left to go on staff retreat so we ran the base by ourselves. The base is still standing and we’re all alive, so all went very well.

Our guest speaker David Gava from Zimbabwe of

ficially spoke on Evangelism but touched on other topics, such as spiritual warfare, spiritual gifts, our identity in Christ and healing as well. He is man on fire and very prophetic, so we had a lot of on fire prayer and worship times where he prophesied and prayed over every one of us. One of the most important lessons this week was:

It’s not about my ABILITY but about my AVAILABILITY.

During the beginning of the week we could all sense a spiritual battle going on, I, myself struggled with the spirit of unbelief and doubt. God woke up some guys Monday night and they prayed and fought all night for our class until they sensed the battle was won.

God has been speaking to me and through me more than ever this week. I can hear His voice better and better now. We as a class spend a lot of time in worship this week and it has been doing me good. I can really feel that I am growing closer to God day by day here.

One big thing for me this week though was that God lead me to do a bible study on Martha and Mary and I sadly could identify myself more with Martha than with Mary. I still had this great fear of failing God and thought God had expectations of me. I felt God tell me to abide in Him, to enjoy Him and to draw close to Him more instead of focusing on my weaknesses.

On Thursday night we went out to evangelize again and since this week’s teaching was on evangelism we were able to put the things into practice that we had learned all week in class. Miriam and I were able to share the gospel with quite a few people, tell many people that God loved them and pray with four. It was so cool how God spoke to them through us and how He led our prayers that evening. It was a very, very encouraging night for me!

Yesterday we washed cars for four ours to raise funds for outreach. We had a pretty good business going and my outreach team was able to raise a total of nearly $600!

Next week’s teaching is on spiritual warfare. I hope that after next week I’ll know how to fight and win ALL the time! 

Week 5

Last week was interesting, adventurous, exciting, fun, stretching and challenging.  Our topic for the week was The Fear of the Lord and I put last week like this: During repentance and forgiveness week God touched the surface but during last week he cut deep. I had heard of the Fear of the Lord and remember my Dad praying for the Fear of the Lord upon my life when I was a little girl but I never knew what it was. I am so glad I finally know what it is because I now know what I’ve been lacking all my life!

The main points this week were

- What the FOTL is 

- God’s Holiness

- Hatred for Sin

- Fear of the Lord in our Thought Life

- Fear of the Lord in our Communication

- Fear of the Lord in our Relationships

- Fear of the Man

- Obedience

- Results of Obedience

- How do we get the Fear of the Lord?

Some key things that stuck out for me were that we will never do what we need to do to get away from sin if we are not completely surrendered to God and have a revelation of His worthiness and holiness, what consumes our thoughts consumes our lives, holiness is the basis of our respect for God and for our intimacy with Him, asking myself what my response to sin is (how do I react when I’m confronted with sin?), that the battle is won or lost in my heart, we are holy as our thought life is holy, we have to actively chose to resist temptation, biblical obedience is submission not compliance and many other things.

I came to a point where I realized that I desperately need the Fear of the Lord in my life. On Friday we cried out to God for 4 hours for the Fear of Him and I can feel a break through already. I no longer am controlled by my thoughts but I know that I can control them. I am trying hard to take every thought captive to the obedience of God and to think on whatever is good, noble, honorable, pure and lovely. I’m fighting and I admit it is really tough at times but I want to win the battle in my mind and I know that with God’s help I can. For now I am pressing in and praying for God to change my heart (because if we struggle with our thoughts and communication we can be sure that it’s a heart issue. Scary, out of the overflow of the heart the tongue speaks!).

Soo now finally to the part you’ve probably been waiting for. I found out last week where I will be going on outreach. We’ll be having three different outreach teams. The first one is going to Sri Lanka for 6 weeks and to Jakarta for 5 weeks, the second team is going to Cambodia for 4 weeks and to New Zealand for 6 weeks and the third is going to Ethiopia for 7 or 6 and to Northern Australia for  4 or 5 weeks.

The day after we got our options I prayed and got an impression on where to go to much faster than I would have expected. I felt a ‘no’ on where I originally wanted to go and felt God tell me to go to Cambodia and New Zealand. A little disappointed at first I decided to ask God again a little later and got the same answer. I felt real peace though and I am trusting for God to give me His heart for these countries.

I must admit I didn’t expect to do my DTS outreach

a)             in a western country and

b)            working with Christians

but I know God will do great things during our outreach and that it’s the place He wants me to be. We’ll be going to Cambodia with a group of 15-18 year olds for the first two weeks who are doing their Summer of Service. there  and after that we’ll be working with YWAM Cambodia for another 2 weeks. After that we’re going to travelling through all of New Zealand visiting different churches and youth groups to call young people into missions.

So this outreach is going to be waay different than I would have thought but the main reason is to motivate and excite young people for missions and what we’ll be doing will in turn have an impact on the nations as more and more young people go out into missions. I am stoked to go on outreach because I love getting people excited for things (especially missions!!), disciplining and watching young(er) people grow in their relationship and understanding of God.  While I was praying about where to go on outreach God reminded me of the great times I had in King’s Kids and how we went to Sweden last year, one of the richest countries in the world, to help a youth group do outreach in their town and of the amazing things God did in them and through them during that time.  What we’ll be doing on outreach will probably be quite similar so I am super excited!

The outreach is about $1500 more expensive than I thought it would be though because end of December is the most expensive time to fly out of Australia…

 

Other than that my small group had a fun time baking loads of cookies, I went on an adventure night last weekend which proved to be one of the craziest and most fun nights I’ve ever had. God is a fun God and he loves to see his children laughing and having a good time! That’s a little revelation I had after that, that God doesn’t only want to be included in our times of struggle, worry and sorrow but also in our times of joy, triumph and FUN! He created laughter hallelujah!

Please pray for all of the YWAM Perth students this week as all of our staff are away on a staff retreat. The students are in charge of everything this week under the leadership of two guest speakers, John Bills and David Gava (who is speaking on Evangelism in our school this week). Please pray for a blessed, fun and refreshing time for us and for the staff as well and for God’s protection on us and the base. Please also pray for unity amongst the students and especially for unity in my DTS. Last week we sensed such great unity but since our outreach teams have been announced you can tell that the Enemy is trying to cause division between us. We are fighting this together because we know that God can’t move in our team and use us if we aren’t one body. 

Camping Trip

Siamese Banana Twins
Campfire
Mmh yummy dinner

Mud face
Eating Contest
Canoeing
Lectures out in the bush
These are some typical YWAM buses haha
Getting ready to leave

Week 4

Wow I can’t believe that a quarter of my lecture phase is already over! This week has been very refreshing. Cliff Wiener taught on Intercession and Worship this week and started out with focusing on hearing God’s voice and the Holy Spirit.

I’ve always had this hierarchical picture of the Godhead in my mind because I’ve never really fully understood who the Holy Spirit is. I got a real revelation on the Godhead and especially on who the Holy Spirit is this week. I now know that he is a person who wants to relate to me just as Jesus related to His disciples.

On Monday evening we had a worship time where we really invited the Holy Spirit to come and speak to us and He did! I was blown away by His presence and how much He spoke to me that evening.

Some other key points for me this week were the whole topic on the spiritual battle we are in, our responsibility to stand in the gap for others and that worship means total surrender.
Cliff was a great speaker who was able to make complicated things simple by telling stories. Tomorrow we’ll have our first real intercession time with the whole base (our base has set prayer intercession times twice a week and now that we’ve had teaching on it we can join them).

The main highlight for me this week was our camping trip over the weekend. I’ve never been camping before so this was quite an experience for me! We had our lectures out in the bush, slept in the bush, cooked in the bush and had no running water! It was great! Friday night we had a blast while playing capture the flag and running through thorn bushes in the night (some of us were so dedicated to the game that they even swam in the river in pitch darkness just to get the flag). After the game we had a spontaneous time of praise and worship as a team. It was a very, very special time for all of us as we were glorifying God under the stars and realizing how much we love each other. I have never experienced such unity in a group before, it is amazing and I feel so blessed!

Saturday we had a rally and as you can see on the pictures above the rally included eating a whole box of shapes and a jar of salsa, an egg walk, 50 push ups, sticking your face in mud (I did that one!), swimming a certain distance,… My team won in the end and the whole thing ended with a huge mud fight in the river!

As you can see we had loads of fun the past couple of days and really grew together as a team.
This week Ari Sloots, one of our base leaders, is teaching on the Fear of the Lord. We already had our first session this morning and it was incredible! I can’t wait to hear more on this topic.
We find out hopefully tomorrow where our outreach opportunities are and I can then tell you in my next update where I’m going on outreach! Please pray that I can completely surrender all of my hopes and presumptions to God in order to clearly hear from Him where I should go on outreach. I really don’t want to base my decision on my own desires or where my friends are going but completely on where He wants me to go.

Please also pray for me that I will gain a much greater Fear of the Lord this week. Pray that I will get a deep, deep revelation of His holiness and His immense worthiness and that I will learn to despise my sin. Also pray for conviction of the Holy Spirit on areas in my life that I haven’t fully surrendered to God and that He will speak to me and challenge me this week.

Thank you so much for your support in every way, it really means a lot to me. Next week I can hopefully tell you where I am going on outreach and by then I will hopefully also know if I'm still missing money for it. The exchange rate I got when I paid for my tuition fees was fantastic and I was able to save some money thanks to the Australian economy.