The purpose of this class is to:
1.Discover the power of the gospel to provide purpose and mission to every area of our lives.
2.Discover that we are already greatly and uniquely equipped to be on mission for God.
3.Discover that we live in a unique and challenging mission field right now, every day.
Our first session was last week and the focus was on:
The Gospel Changes Everything. We started by discussing what the gospel is:Jesus Christ, the son of God, died on the cross to pay the penalty for sin, and rose again from the dead to offer forgiveness of sin and eternal life by his grace, through faith in Christ alone.
Then we worked on having a 3 minute testimony to share with others. In our testimony we talk about how are life was before Christ, when we truly trusted Christ as our savior, and how our lives have been changed because of Christ. It's important for us to make Christ the hero of our story, not ourselves or anyone else.
Our homework was to take a SHAPE Test, Spiritual Gift Assessment. I realized the same problem I had in school. If the question isn't extremely detailed I have a hard time figuring out what it is really asking. For example one of the statements you had to rank how likely you were to do the following:Give use of my car for the youth retreat.At first I checked "No Way!" because I'm not comfortable with a group of teenagers taking my car etc, but then if it meant I would drive them to the retreat I would put "Love it!". Too confusing for me :)
We also had to read a chapter about “the opposite of wasting your life is to live by a single, soul-satisfying passion for the supremacy of God in ALL things”. It reminded me of the Francis Chan quote:
“Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
It made me think of all the time I've wasted in my life trying to please everyone, getting others approval, and succeeding in things that for the moment seemed like a big deal, but really don't matter nor make a huge impact in my life. How many opportunites did I miss to share with others and grow personally? I should have been looking to please Christ and trusting in Him. So glad I am following Him now! Life is much sweeter! Even if I had everything this world could offer, it would mean nothing without Christ. He is my single soul-satisfying passion!I actually read the chapter while on the elliptical because the font was large :) I ended up going faster and for a longer time period than normal because I was so caught up in the reading! Hoping we keep getting chapters with large font… learning about Christ & burning extra calories all at the same time works for me!
Our second session was last night and the focus was on: Spiritual Gifts.We learned that our spiritual gifts are not talents, personality, or fruits of the Spirit, but are a “God given special ability, given to every believer at conversion by the Holy Spirit, to share His love and strengthen the body of Christ”. What really made me think though was when we discussed the traps of the spiritual gifts. Two that stood out were that we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others 1Corinthians 12:21-22, and we shouldn’t expect others to do things the same way we do because we all have different spiritual gifts. We ended last night sharing our 3 minute testimony with a partner.
I could not be more ecstatic about this trip! It has everything I could hope for: Christ centered, awesome group, Brazil, and a boat! I can already see growth in my walk going through this journey, and it is awesome! Thank you for reading this and being apart of my journey!
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