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.