So week three of my lecture phase focused on the character of God and how we need to be able to live within that character as the disciples of His Kingdom. We talked about Gods character, nature, and ways that help us to have a better understanding of Him and what He does. Our teachings can be summed up in one statement, “God is a personal God with a distinct character and nature. He is a spirit which transcends the entire world order through the order depends totally on Him.” This means that we need to live out the truth as Christians because as we look to God, the world looks to us.
To start the week we talked about having a relationship with God and what that means, this really is the foundation of Christianity and everything that we learned this week. We talked about how one comes to believe that there is a God and that no matter what we believe we have to believe that something created what was the beginning. It is interesting to think about how people believe in evolution yet don’t think about who created the things that makes the theory of evolution possible, where is the beginning. Self-image is a huge part of how deep a relationship we can have with God as we believe what we are told and see in ourselves. With our self-image we have three parts; our spirit, soul, and body. Our spirit is our conscience and our ability to know God as our soul is our personality which includes our mind, will, and emotions then we have our body which is the physical self including the senses, appetite, and desires.
The Godhead or Trinity is the three parts of God that we know and as we are constructed in his image we also are a triune being. This is something that we don’t necessarily talk about a lot in the church and is something that is very complicated to understand. The basics is that God is one and is indivisible, yet God is three and distinguishable. This sound to be very contradictory, however, the trinity is the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. The Father is God and he is the beginning, the designer, the promise keeper and is the 1st mode. The Son is Jesus and he is the mediator, the redeemer, the eternal word that we can find in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is the comforter here on earth that God has sent to us to be the revealer, the teacher, and the communicator. To understand the Trinity is really impossible because we have nothing here on earth to compare it to. The closest thing that we can find is a triangle, because each side is valuable and equal yet if you take any of them away it is no longer a triangle.
To understand the character of God we have to break them down into two sets of attributes, essential and moral. Essential attributes are that God is eternal and that God has and will always be around because He is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. God also is self-existent because He exists in and from Himself and He creates us out of an abundance of who He is. God also is immutable which lets us know that He is eternal and unchanging yet the way He communicates with each of us will be different. God also is all powerful, all knowing, all present, and has infinite understanding. Those are the things that make God who He is, perfect. The moral attributes are the characteristics that God has that we can have as well as we are moral beings. We are called to perfect Holiness, the ability to be set apart from the rest of the word because we are disciples of God. We also are called to be in Perfect Righteousness as we need to understand justice and take action against sin, which Jesus can take away as He died on the cross from our unrighteousness. We also are to have Perfect Love, to love so much that we can be the spirit the soul and the body in one unity to love as the Trinity is love. We also are to have Perfect Faithfulness as we are to be trustworthy, reliable, true to His word and be able fulfill the purpose He calls us to. Our purpose at YWAM is to go into the world and to make disciples of all nations and with being able to understand this we will be able to exemplify these same characterizes as we reach out to the unchurch people.
During an activity in our lectures we were instructed to go outside and see if God will reveal anything to us and then to come back 30 minutes later and discuss. In my walk I came across a flower, a yellow flower that had fallen of the tree that it had come from. There were several of these flowers that still remained on the tree, but there were also several that had fallen to the ground. These flowers on the ground had not yet blossomed and still were beautiful although wouldn’t be able to grow as they no longer had roots. This is how God spoke to me saying that the tree is the Kingdom and many of us had fallen from the kingdom and all of us at different points. The only true way for us to fully blossom is to be a part of that tree or Kingdom and stay intact to the nutrients or else we won’t be able to receive the true beauty. The tree also needs three things to be able to survive; the sun, soil, and water. These things can be seen as the Trinity and if we fail to understand these we are unable to blossom to our full potential or beauty. So also the color of the flower, yellow, demonstrated the core teaching of the week which was relationships and yellow flowers symbolize friendship.
So this is a lot of material to take in and yes I know I just tried to sum it up in a blog post, yet that is impossible as growing is God should be a process that never ends and one in which we continually make ourselves vulnerable because those are the times when we will hear God the clearest. So with all this character and being able to hear God we were able to stand out and as we should be different as Christians. We went to the mall here on Thursday night, which is the big night for shopping in Australia as it’s the only night the shops are open until 9pm. We were able to talk to heaps of people about our Youth Street we run on Saturdays and just start relating to others. This was a good start for us to prepare ourselves for the things that we will have to do when on outreach. The people in the mall were eager to talk to us as we asked them questions and as Americans we really have an advantage to make a difference as we are seen to be very interesting and everyone loves to talk to us about things that happen in the states.
This next week we are going up to Tahlee, a resort/camp that the owners are going to be giving to YWAM for free in the next couple years. They have had a ministry up there for decades and last week it hosted a youth conference for 800 youth that are a part of Hillsong Church, which is the largest church in Australia. We will be having our lectures up there this week with the other two DTS’s that are a part of this base and will be learning about the Fatherheart of God. We will focus on forgiveness and coming clean with God, which is an extension of our second week, Clear Conscience. This will help us to see the love of God as a perfect father and many of the other DTS’s haven’t been able to go through our experiences so we will be continuing in learning about forgiveness, which is growing in our faith and that is a never ending process.
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