This is the start of a weekly journal we’re told to write, to help us remember and reflect on the things we’ve learned during the lectures/prayers. For this week, we’ve been learning a lot about how much God loves us. Now this is an overused phrase in Christianity, since Sunday school, so most people take it lightly and blow it off. We’ve heard it so much that it’s started to lose its significance, and lose sight of the deeper meaning of this.
Now, as Christians in the church, most of us have built our religion upon the foundation of “How can I be a good Christian?” and have built pillars of “If I read the Bible, go to church, follow the 10 commandments, pray before every meal, etc. then I’ll be a good Christian.” The problem with this mentality, however, is the fact that we are making Christianity into a faith by works religion. It’s like saying, “if I do these things, God will love us even more. He’ll forget about/ forgive us for the sins I have committed in the past.” But in the end, it’ll be a struggle over doing these things to not feel the guilt inside of “I’m not a good Christian because I don’t do this…” Many Christians live like this because they don’t know there’s another way.
How we should live our lives is to create our foundation on the simple truth that “God loves you.” Now the part I love about this is that all the pillars that we build may be the same as before, but is not our attempts to receive redemption, but instead is our response to God’s love. We do this not to gain God’s love or make Him love us more, but we do it because, as Andy puts it, “He loves us, He loves us, He loves us!” It is virtually impossible to expect God to love us even more than he does because even in our lowest point in our lives to the highest point, He loves us the same. His love is never changing.
This kind of shocked me when I just heard it because I find that most churches actually preach a more work-based religion than one of love. It makes me wonder, “How many Christians actually know what it means to be a Christian? How many are living on a cracked foundation instead of the solid rock of God’s love?” Suddenly the simple phrase “God loves you” holds so much more power once we know what it truly means. My whole perspective of reading the Bible seems to have totally changed now. I’ve already read 2 weeks worth of the reading homework because I just feel so hungry for the Word. I just want to learn more and more, or even some of the stuff I knew before and see it in a new light. It’s really amazing how changing the foundation of your faith can alter your whole mindset about Christianity.
I feel like going back home and sharing this with my Bible study students back at home because it seems like I’ve been teaching them all with the wrong mindset. I want to start teaching with God’s love as the main focus of the class, instead of “do this and this and this and you’ll meet God.”
When I went on the community outreach, to be honest, I was really nervous. I’ve never done anything like that with my church before, so I had no clue what to do, and approaching random people and asking them if they knew God seemed kind of…invasive I guess. I just prayed that someone skilled in this would be in my group, and surely enough, I was paired with a guy named Dave who’s been doing evangelism for 5 years. We only talked to one guy the whole time we were out and he took the lead with the whole evangelism thing, while I watched their interaction. It was really neat to see how he went about with the whole thing, and I think I learned a lot from that experience. It kind of was a wake up call that I might know a lot about the Bible, but I’m terrible at applying it in situations such as these. After praying for the guy and him leaving, I was talking with Dave and he gave me an awesome site that teaches some steps on evangelism. This is a totally new experience, but I’m thankful for the opportunity I guess.
This week has been pretty crazy spiritually. Never prayed for like 3 hours a day before, so it’s pretty crazy to think about. Usually when I can’t pray anymore, I just take out my Bible and start reading it while everyone else is praying intensely. I’ve never really been into the whole jumping during praise or dancing thing, I find that I start thinking too much about the action and lose sight of God. Ha ha. I’m more one of those kneeling/sitting while praying intensely in my mind kind of people. Usually when I pray out loud, it’s quieter unlike others who pray at the top of their lungs. A lot of people, I know, aren’t doing it for the attention, but are just so overflowed with the spirit that they can’t help themselves, so I respect that, same with the jumping and dancing stuff.
I’ve always been at a pretty good place with God, even if I don’t show it so much openly. I’m kind of excited to see what’ll happen in this coming up week because even after a few days of classes, we’ve seen people’s lives totally change, people dancing and praising the Lord, people crying in prayer, people doing things they’ve never imagined themselves doing before, etc. and this is only the beginning. I wonder how much more passionate everyone will get. If people will turn to the Lord when troubles come their way, and to remember the things they have learned instead of it all melting away once something horrible happens to them or a loved one. In the words of one of the staff members, “Lord, bring it on.” Ha ha.
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