Relationships

This week we had the topic of Relationships and our speaker was Jesse Mesa, the Captain of the Mercy Ship Ministry within YWAM.  Jesse, whom is originally from the Philippines and comes from a background that wouldn’t be wished upon the greatest of enemies.  Jesse was a person who has made a huge turn around in his life from the ways he used to live and now is living a life that is making a difference around the world.

Our verse for the week was Ephesians 4, which talks about how God has called us not to be His slaves but to relate to Him and bring unity to the body of Christ.  When we break down the word “relationships” we find that relation means to carry back or have a reference point as ship is to carry something or to embark on.  When we take the word as a whole we find the definition is the reference point to embark from.  When we take this with Ephesians 4 we can understand that God want us to relate, as that is what He has created us for.  If some of you are doubting this go back to when God created man, it is the only time in the Bible when God created something and didn’t say it was good.  So then God created woman to be a help meet to man as an equal partner.  In our relationships our reference point is God and if we carry everything back to Him then we will be successful in the adventures we embark upon.

So how has God created us to relate to others and how do we go about doing so?  Matthew 22: 37-40 tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and then to love our neighbor as ourselves.  God didn’t just give us these commands and expect us to know how we are to love, so He gave us the 10 commandments.  The first four commandments tell us how to relate to God, the fifth tells us how to relate to authority, and then the final five tell us how we are to relate to others.  Through understanding these commandments we can do our job to expanding the kingdom of God.  In expanding the kingdom we have to know that first someone Belongs to the kingdom, as we are called to love our neighbor.   Then by loving our neighbor they will become Believers in God.  By believing in God they then become aware of how they are to Behave as a follower of Christ.  This is something that many of us struggle with as Christians as we fail to make people feel accepted before they actually believe as they act in ways that we see unfit.

Loving our neighbor is something that can become very difficult at times as we see people as unfit to enter the kingdom or they might happen to be our enemies and how can we love them?  This is the question that many of us tend to ask and if we are in a true loving relationship with God then we know we can trust Him.  In trusting God we no longer let circumstances rule over Him and make us a Victim, we now let God rule over circumstances and become the Victor.  Our way to have a successful relationship is by strengthening our relationship with God and our knowledge of Him.  By doing this we can let God guide us as He is our true north.   Unsuccessful relationships are usually caused by pride and as Christians we are called to live in humility.  Through living in humility we can be united as the body of Christ and as Psalm 133 states, “in unity I command a blessing.”

Of course with relationships we also talked about male and female relationships and how we seem to think that feeling of romance can be a sin.  Well, they can be however we have the ability to control them by not entertaining them and continuing to have the right motives toward the opposite sex rather than making them an object.  Love also is a choice that we have and we can choose to fall in love and out of love.  By doing this we allow our mind to be entertained by sexual immorality and then by letting our mind entertain them more often it makes our conscience week and we choose to fall in and out of love for the wrong reasons and fall into the categories of lust, rather than love.  So in dating we need to get the right motives, we need to be honest and real about whom we are, we need to give our rights in dating to marriage, we need to develop non-romantic relationships, and then we need to get ourselves free from sin.  By doing these five principles we can be successful and have these amazing relationships among opposite sexes.  God’s goal is for us to have attractions and romance among the two sexes as He created both in the beginning and gives us the formula on how to do that within His will.

Relationships are great and there are times when we find it hard to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbor as ourselves, yet usually that is because we are carrying some type of pride in boosting or bitterness.  However, when we do His will we will receive heaps of blessings.  I have seen these blessing personally as I was a person who tended to judge people and rule them out of the kingdom before I even knew what  they were going through because I saw them unfit compared to me.  In this respect I was very arrogant thought I was better because I was further along in my journey than they were and I pushed them down rather than building them up as God calls us to do.  Over the past year I have found myself now building others up within schools I have volunteered at and have seen many blessing in the relationships with other.

My relationship with my girlfriend Rachel is one of the greatest ways that I have seen God bless me and through that today I am still living in that blessing.  So last year I was at a point where I was in idle with my relationship with God and I was treading water just staying in one place.  God then called me do missions work and I put it off and then out of nowhere God brings this amazing friend into my life to help me get over the fear of man.  Rachel had just come back from a DTS and had all these amazing testimonies about what happened while on DTS and then you could just see her fire for God as it was blazing.  It was her blazing fire that ignited mine and got me over the fear of man to actually commit to doing a DTS and growing in my relationship with Christ.  As I continued to make these commitments to God and letting Him guide me I started to grow closer to Rachel in our friendship. 

We continued to progress in our relationship as we realized it was something more than just friendship, we then had to discuss boundaries in our relationship.  Boundaries are the foundation for our motives and help hold us accountable in not giving into sin.  As we set these boundaries we had to open up to each other and be real about what things will make us stumble so each of us could hold the other accountable.  In our progression of friendship to dating we failed to hold each other accountable to the boundaries of friendship over dating and with that we had to be checked by others.  By others realigning us we were able to live in humility and be convicted and correct our motives.  Today I am in love with this blessing, Rachel, and thank God for guiding me, as only true successful relationships can come through Him.  This week I began to totally see how putting God at the center of this relationship is the only way it has and will continue to succeed because He is our true north.  If we can’t understand His love then how can we begin to understand how to love another?   Every day I thank God for His love and grace because it is only by Him I have been blessed with such a wonderful relationship.

                                                     

Outreach Finally Decided

So this week we figured out our outreach locations and the choices that we had to pray about.  While today our choices that we all had prayed about were due and I found out my outreach location was approved and also whom will be on my outreach team.  So I will be going to Coffs Harbour for two weeks helping out at a rehab center and getting involved with a church that has connections to our other location, Borneo.  Borneo is part of Indonesia and that is the part of that island we will be doing our outreach in.  So I have limited information at this time as the details of the trip aren't really finalized yet.  When we get to Borneo we will be going into the Jungle which is about a two day drive in a truck that we will be taking.  In the Jungle we will be going into villages and helping out at schools and just joining in the community of these people and reaching out to them showing Christ's love.

Holy Spirit

This week we had our Holy Spirit week and it was a topic that was totally new to me and we covered a bit of it the previous week, yet our speaker hit us with a revelation of how to look at the spiritual gifts that God can work in us through the Holy Spirit.  Our speaker was Raf Shaw from Adelaide, Australia and there he has a ministry that works primarily in healings each and every week.  The healing rooms he has are similar to ones in Spokane, Washington and actually are run very similarly to that if any of you are interested in looking up some of that information.  So Raf comes from a background that is not very admirable, yet he is one of those guys whom had an encounter with God and now is totally sold out for the Lord and letting Him work in his life.  Raf had many stories of healing and miracles he has seen as he has truly been blessed by the Lord through spiritual gifts and is a guy truly led by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and how He works is something that we don’t learn much about in our society today and it was stuff that was very interesting.  Romans 12: 1-2, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in views of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.  Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”  There are nine spiritual gifts given to us by God through the Holy Spirit which can be found in 1 Cor 12: 8-10.  So we have these gifts and we have given our lives to Christ and died to ourselves for Christ love and want to change the world, but how do we do it? If we don’t use these spiritual gifts we are unable to do God’s perfect will, we are able to do good and pleasing works but not the perfect will of our Father.   

These Spiritual Gifts are a choice for us to accept and use in God’s perfect will, they are freely given to us by God through the Holy Spirit just as Father determines.  We have made a choice to follow Christ with our lives and that is where we then take it to the next step to know God with our hearts.  To do this we have to know the truth and it isn’t dependent upon time and place the absolute trust is God’s word.  God wants His will to become our will and we do that by giving up our spirit to have the Holy Spirit fill us and giving all our control over to God because its Him not us.  With this we are the body of Christ and we all are a part of the body, which is our job/plan/purpose, and if we don’t fulfill our purpose then we are unable to do God’s perfect will.  Through not giving in we live a life that is in fear and God can’t bless our fear, He can only bless our Faith.

So when we move in an act we need to wait on God to do His perfect will as He will guide us, teach us, comfort us, and equip us to share His word and glory.  This is where the Holy Spirit comes in, God sent the Holy Spirit.  John 14: 15-16 tells us how Jesus promises the Holy Spirit and although we can’t see Him we as believers know Him because He lives in us as we also live in Him.  When we truly make it to this point where we believe this is our minds and hearts then we can go out into the world and do God’s perfect will.  So what is God’s perfect will?  1 Cor 12: 25-28 explains how there are 8 functions in the spirit that allows us to edify the kingdom.  The functions of the spirit that gives us authority are; Apostles, prophets, teachers, workers of miracles, workers of healings, helping others, administrator, and tongues.  These jobs help to build up the kingdom and through these we can expand the glory of God, yet we also have to fulfill these jobs through God’s perfect will we will fail to bring the proper glory to God.  So we need to be in prayer and pray through the Holy Spirit because if we aren’t led by the Holy Spirit then we fail to be led by God because God sent the Holy Spirit to be the perfect Counselor for us here on earth.

This is my sermon I just developed based upon the information we got this week, didn’t mean for it to be that way but I guess that is being led in the Holy Spirit.  So this is the life that Raf, our speaker, has lived since he had an encounter with God and totally surrendered his life to him.  Raf has lived through these values and understanding that is totally guided by the Holy Spirit.  So Raf is traveling the world healing people as God leads him from place to place.  He has seen healing happen by the Holy Spirit working in him as he has become totally obedient to the voice of God that He hears during prayer.  He has the gift of healing and prophecy and with that He can know stuff about nonbelievers and bring them into the kingdom as God reveals something to him that he can use to get their attention and let them know God loves them.

One story that was the greatest testimony he gave of God being all powerful and miraculous was of a guy whom would come to his construction site about 30 years ago that had several deformities and issues that made his body hunched and twisted.  This guy would walk by the construction site each and every day for three years and would ask for money so he could go down to the shop and buy cigarettes each day.  Raf heard God tell him to give the guy $2 if he could say, “God thank you for healing me.”  So each day for the next 2 years this guy would come by and he wasn’t stupid so he would say, “God thank you for healing me,” and would get $2 everyday.  Then one day when Raf was in prayer before work God told him to give the crippled guy the real thing today, to reveal Gods power and glory to him.  Well, that day the guy came to the site and said, “God thank you for healing me,” then asked for his money and Raf said that today you get the real thing.  At this point the Holy Spirit began praying through him and this guy started to straighten out and stand up straight and he was healed by God’s amazing power.  Wow, how amazing it that right? 

Many of you are probably thinking that is crazy and that it just a story and how can you believe something life that if a guy has been crippled his whole life and then be healed in an instant?  I thought the same thing at first then I thought about it and why would I think the God who created us and the magnificent and intricate creation we are then why couldn’t He heal someone to the great creation that He created them in.  So this is the ultimate level of doing God’s perfect will and it is all based upon patience and timing, but we need to know that God has a plan and purpose for each and every one of us and if we believe that in our hearts He will reveal Himself to us.  So, today I am totally committing my spirit to God and asking Him to work in me and through me to reveal a glimpse of His glory to me and others so that I may make disciples of all nations.

God can’t bless our Fear; He can only bless our Faith.

Okay so this week was very challenging for me as it was new information and I am sure it is to most of you, so feel free to comment and ask me questions as I am still trying to fully comprehend the magnitude of God and all that He is.

A little taste of the past couple weeks

Professional Rugby League Game, this is what you call a scrum

This is the local team, The Knights, against the country of Fiji. (it was the game that never was really a game)

This is a wallaby, which is a small kangaroo, that was seen at Tahlee. (I also saw kangaroos just didn't take a picture)

This is the sunset when I was at Tahlee from the boat shed, wow beautiful huh?

 

This is the sunrise from the top of Prayer Mountain at Tahlee, woke up at 5 a.m to hike up to see this and it was well worth it

This is Tyler, in case you forgot what I looked like, by the ocean at a place called Tahlee

Update Information

We still don't know where we are going to go for our outreach phase, it is in the works and has to be approved by different levels within then YWAM orgazation.  I think we should know by the end of this week and as soon as I know anything I will let all of you know via my blog.  I also don't quite have enough funds to pay for the entire phase as I am still about anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 short along with about everyone else here.  I do not know what the cost will be as I am unsure where we are going, but if any of you feel led to donate or to send me a letter or anything of that sort my address is listed below.  You can write a check out to YWAM and they will send you back a tax  reciept, if you have any questions don't hestitate to ask or to send me an email at: tylerlucas2@gmail.com.

Tyler Lucas
Box 162
The Junction, NSW 2291
AUSTRALIA

Bible Study/Prophesy

This week we had the topic of Bible Study, which turned out to not really be Bible Study.  Our verse for the week was Proverbs 24: 3-6, “By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.  A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength; for waging war you need guidance, and for victory many advisers.”  This was the way we were told to approach our studying the Bible.  We were told to look at the word study in the Hebrew language.  We found that the meaning was to keep going back to it and to go over it again and again as to search and seek for a way to follow.

Our three types of study for the Bible are Topical, Inductive, and Meditation.  A Topical Bible study is a study on a particular topic that the Bible will talk about in numerous verses and we can make a summary based upon those verses.  An Inductive Bible Study is a way to study the in which we read a particular verse in the context in which it is written and then ask questions to help understand what it means in that context.   Then with those questions we can pick out themes that will help us cross the hermeneutical bridge so we can make applications to what it means in today’s world.  Our other Bible study was Meditation, which is when you read a verse over and over and get something from God as He speaks to you through the Holy Spirit so you can apply it to your life.  With this we have to understand rhema, which means the active word of God and then also logos, the written word of God.  Through all these things we are able to hear God through the Holy Spirit

So we spent about 5 to 10 minutes on those Bible Studies and then the rest of the week we covered a variety of topics that seemed to be farfetched in relation to studying the Bible.  So we talked about the spiritual gifts of God and the power that He can give us to help expand His kingdom.  Our speaker was Diane Pierce, an older lady that has been given the gift of prophecy to come through her in the Holy Spirit.  This lady has a great testimony and one that spoke volumes to me as she had not only been through a life of constant struggles and injustices, but now she is living a life that is guided by God through the Holy Spirit.  Prophecy is something that is the combination of the heart, feelings, and emotions of God spoken through a spiritual person, not for the person but for the glory of God.

To many of you reading this I understand that it might seem far out to be talking about the Holy Spirit and it working inside of you and through you to bring a power or message to the earth through God.  We talked about the Lord’s favor in Isaiah 61 that discusses how we have been anointed to proclaim the good news to the poor and to bind up the brokenhearted.  This means that those who are poor in spirit and that Him anointing us is His glory and through that we receive the inheritance because He loves us and loves justice and doesn’t want any of us to suffer or have poor spirits.  With this glory that He has he wants us to be equipped to repair and restore nonbelievers to God’s Kingdom.  With this He gives us spiritual gifts so we can get a glimpse of our glory.  1 Corinthians 12 talks about the spiritual gifts and then chapter 13 and 14 tell us how to use them and when to use them as they are used to glorify God’s Kingdom.

So when we look at the New Testament, the covenant in which we are living under, we see that 21.5 percent of it is prophetic in nature.  So we look at the great gifts that God gives us and we see that the Bible states that prophecy is one of the greatest gifts in expanding the kingdom of Christ.  Prophecy is something that can be used to build up the church as people can see ways in which God can and will provide for them in the future as it gives us a way to see how we will be used.  With each of these 9 spiritual gifts we can possess any of them and there are no disqualifications, God will give you the power through Him when He sees fit and when His glory needs to shine out among the nations.

Our speaker this week who has the gift of praying and get prophetic visions and word for people, so she came three days early and started praying for each of us knowing only pictures and God gave her words for everyone.  My prophesy was Isaiah 49:8 which says, “This is what the Lord says: ‘In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances’.”  When she saw my photo she said she saw a big question mark and God said, “I will answer all of your questions and I will make you a covenant for people in whom you will restore desolate land and set people to be free because I am a man of compassion.”  The land was not just a metaphor either, it was a literal piece of land and there was a building and it was being restored and used to bring those in darkness to light.  She also saw that I was a coach and that it was a gift in which I could encourage people and lift up their performance from a 5 to an 8.  With all of these things God will use me to bring people out of hindrance and to walk beside still waters.  Jesus had compassion and miracles happened and I will see miracles happen.  She also said that we are called to hear these visions but also to wait upon them because they will be confirmed or validated by 2 or 3 people before you will see them come to pass.

This week was one that was very new to me as it really had little to do with Bible study, but with all this new stuff that I have never covered in the Bible I have burnt through numerous pages.  Spiritual gifts that seem to be covered to the minimum no matter where I go because I think it is hard for us to fully understand them and how to use them because it’s the overflowing of God’s love for us and it’s incomprehensible.  Some of you may be in the same boat and I want to tell you to look at it in the Bible and see what the law says and then also take it to God because He says when we call He will answer.  So in all we covered topics and we didn’t necessarily learn how to study the Bible yet we learned why we have to study it and also why we have to take our confusion to God as He will make our conscience clear.

Father Heart of God

This week we had the topic, Father Heart of God, which was presented by the leader of our base, David Stevenson.  We got to take a little trip up to a place that is an hour away and is right on the ocean, Tahlee.  It is an old Bible College and has been the place for a lot of ministry over the past decade and the owners of this are trying to give it over to YWAM, yet not leaving their staff stranded.  This is a beautiful place to find God as you can join in with the simplest things that God has created.  We dug into many areas of God as a Father, the perfect Father, and what that means as we continue to grow in our faith.

One of the main points was that we all are the children of God when we come before Him and accept Him into our hearts that means we don’t have to have it all together He wants us to be childlike.  Childlike means that He wants us to totally be dependent and obedient upon His word and not care what the world thinks because our father knows best and has great plans for us to succeed.  We need to have a fear of the Lord rather than a fear of man in judgment.  This is great because the times when we are different are the best times for God to use us and speak to us.  We fail to do this because we as humans are prideful and arrogant and we find humans don’t like authority and they don’t like to be servants.  So we need to humble ourselves before God and live in humility as it strengthens our relationship with God and triggers our heart to love more as we are truly able to see Him as a Father.

Also forgiveness and obeying authority or loving your neighbor is a huge part of seeing God as the Father, the Ultimate Authority.  We need to live our lives loving God and our neighbors and that means that no matter what happened we have to take responsibility for ourselves and our own actions.  So by being humble and living in humility we are able to be convicted of our sin and repent and be righteous again.  The injustices in our lives are horrible yet we are only hurting ourselves and our relationship with God by not honoring His word and really we can only control our own actions and He is the great healer and when we come before Him, He will help us heal those wounds.  John 15:1-2 talks about how we are the vines and God is the gardener and that He cuts off all branches that bear no fruit and prunes the branches that bear so they will be more fruitful.  This is like a perfect Father, protecting His son/daughter and protecting them from the bad stuff and trying to multiply the good things.  Once you realize this we can then come back to our childlikeness and depend on God and not worry about the world temptations as God has made us whole and healed again.

God wants us to be the children of His kingdom through the process of supernatural adoptions and that we are a part of Gods family and we are called to love in adopted loves as anyone and everyone can be a part of Gods family.  God has a heart for lost people as w can see through the story of Zachius and that when we are humble before Him we will get our pride and dignity.  We also as His children become the children of favour as Jeremiah 3:19-20 states that if we commit to Him He wants to give us desired land and a great inheritance.  God loves us and we are His children and through that He wants to use us.

So basically we need to come to God and be transparent and live our lives in humility because if we are prideful or arrogant then we can’t be used as we have lost the childlikeness and the favour of God.  So after we learned how God wants us to b transparent and live in humility we got the opportunity to do ministry and confess our struggles and sin before the group as we all our children in Christ.  This was a great chance for people to be open and broken within each other and God and through that b freed from the sins and condemnation that many have felt in the past.  This gave many people like me a great chance to just take all the hurt and pain away and give it to God and be weak because that is when He is strong.  This was a time that was very emotional for many of us as we confessed deep dark secrets, but now feel so free.  Yes, this was a time where I cried like a little baby as I felt so open and out there yet so loved at the same time, quite an amazing feeling actually.

This helps many of us to know the others struggles and just become more of a close knit family of Christians living a life that see no judgment, which is what we are called to do as Christians and many of us fail to do that.  We also had a time at the end where we got to apologize for the way we had treated certain people or a particular sex in the past, this was amazing as I failed many times to treat girls with the proper respect they deserve.  Some others got a chance to hear words of affirmation as they suffered through insecurities and others got the chance to shout out what they know in their minds so they would be able to know it in their hearts, because what we know in our hearts is what will shine out.  Then of course we were able to come before God and pray for one another and just pray for God to walk them through their struggles and insecurities and love them in Perfect Love that only the Perfect Father can do.

The greatest part of Tahlee was that it was so easy to find God and to hear Him speak to you and to reveal great things to you.  On the first night there we were worshiping and in the woods because it was heaps hot with the sun beating down on us.  At this time I was singing praises to the Lord and just totally giving all my love to God through praise when I felt totally alone for a second and then I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit as I had the feeling of arms wrapped around me from behind cuddling with me.  I have had some recent struggles being away from home and just totally feeling weak at times because I am continually struggling with true forgiveness.  This was the perfect time as then I was led to the boat shed, just outside the wooded area, and I was able to see the beautiful sun set as I felt the embrace of God through the Holy Spirit.  This was perfect as God also gave me visions of the future and told me that I had to lead in being open in broken with the group as I did and it just made me truly understand that God has plans for me and that I have a purpose.  Jeremiah 29:13 says you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  This verse is so true and in doing that God has revealed great things to me and I can’t wait to see what He may reveal to me in this next week.

Wow, how amazing is God right?