Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas!!!
Sorry it’s taken me this long to put an update up! School just keeps getting busier so it’s been harder to find the time to journal out my thoughts even for myself.
Now it feels impossible to summarize what I’ve been learning, but I’ll do my best.
They’ve focused a lot on identity in the last couple of months. They want to make sure we know who we are in Christ before they send us out to do more ministry.
I went on my first ministry trip over the Thanksgiving break. A group of us went on a surfing/ministry trip to Santa Cruz. A couple of second year students came and it was such a blessing to be under their guidance and leadership. We went out to one of the main areas of downtown Santa Cruz and asked God who He wanted to bless. I was with one of the second year students named Chris. He’s learned to be extremely bold and so it was great having some of that boldness rub off on me. As we were standing there, he asked God to highlight people for us. One guy was highlighted to me and Chris asked me what I thought he needed prayer for. The first thought that popped into my head was back pain. Chris said he was thinking the same thing. We went up to him and asked him if he had back pain and he said he did. We asked if we could pray for him and after we prayed he said he felt better. Another guy came up to him and “he’s got pain in his hands” popped into my head. I asked him if that was the case and sure enough he was an artist and said he suffered from hand cramps. What Chris taught me from this experience is that God can speak to us through what we think are our own thoughts or imagination. I’m learning that if I get a picture of something as I’m praying for someone, it could be God giving me that picture. I’ve been more bold in telling the person I’m praying for what I’m seeing and they have been really blessed by it!! We are all practicing getting words or pictures from God so I’m not always right especially when I try to get specific details about their life but people who are more experienced than I am have told me you get better with practice. It’s just learning how to be more aware of God’s voice and taking the risk to share it with someone even if you’re not sure you’re right. Learning this kind of thing has been so exciting for me because it’s something I’ve always had a desire to do. I just didn’t know how to grow in it. Next year I’m planning to dive into as many ministry experiences as I can so I can get the mentorship of people who are more experienced that I am and grow in the gifts God has given me.
We’ve just started our Christmas break and I’m in Tennessee with family for the holidays.
I hope all of you have a wonderful Christmas!!!

If you want to keep reading, here are some highlights from my notes. They are in random order and from many different messages. I hope you can follow them.
Like a dance, you just need to look at Jesus’ face. You don’t have to know the next step because Jesus is such a good leader.
A good leader makes us look like a good dancer, but we have to remember that it’s because of Him that we know what to do next.
We can’t control what happens to us but we can control our response to it.
The greatest measure of breakthrough comes when you get past the point when it’s comfortable.
Acts 5:15-Peter’s shadow healed people. Why? His reality was 3 years of hanging out with Jesus. Our reality has been so watered down. Peter saw the transfiguration so when he prays, he knows what it’s supposed to look like.
He loves you just the way you are but he loves you too much to leave you the way you are.
How we see God is how we do ministry. The more we see how good God is, the more miracles we’ll see.
God told Chris (a staff member) that if you want to see more people healed, pray for more people.
It’s not our responsibility to heal a person. If you feel that, you will get burned out.
Many people have an offense against God for what He hasn’t done. That blocks the miracles.
Our prayers can be short. Jesus’ were. Chris found the most results when his prayers were quick.
Everyone is called to greatness, but not everyone will achieve greatness.
Don’t be willing just to take the good road, but take the higher road. Taking the easy road will rob you of the life you’re meant to live.
It takes character and perseverance to stay at the top.
Your faith will be tested if you want to be someone great.
If you want to be a whole person, don’t run from adversity.
If you settle for only the things you can do in the natural, you’re setting yourself up for second best.
Being thankful opens up doors to new dimensions of God. Thankfulness is the main component of our spiritual warfare. Prayer without thanksgiving is often faithless begging.
Capture worry by saying thank you for something that happened in the past.
Pray less and thank more.
Courage is fear that has said its prayers (everyone has fear)
Religion makes rules that God didn’t make.
God is looking for people who are not looking for commands but permission. He’s already given us commands. His spirit has already come. His power is already here. We just haven’t discovered what’s already here. We need to step into what God has already released.
Persistent prayer is not to change God, it’s to change us.
Do things based on Christ’s identity when you don’t feel your own.
Satan uses fear to stop you from ministering to people.
Look at what the enemy is doing to see what God wants to do. For example, people are drawn to the supernatural when you look at books like Harry Potter and TV shows that involve psychics. That shows that God wants to show up more supernaturally. The New Age movement started when people were looking for the supernatural and it wasn’t in the church.
You can’t handle more freedom if you’re not willing to take on more responsibility.
What are the restrictions that you have confined heaven to?
If you don’t have the paradigm of royalty, you’ll be afraid more often that you should be.
You can be a Christian and expect nothing from heaven.
Giving is not losing. It is sowing.
God doesn’t mind you having stuff. He minds when your stuff has you.
A lot of our prayers are just to avoid pain. God is after something more. God is interested in helping us grow.
If you want to have joy, rejoice first, then the joy will come.
Feed your heart on what God is doing and has done, not on what he hasn’t done.
God doesn’t want us to do stuff for him. He just wants us to love Him.
I don’t want a God that is my size.
People are aching for hope and we have it!

More from my notes

All that I've been learning these last couple of weeks are in these notes. It might be hard to figure some of them out without hearing the whole message, but I hope you can get a glimpse of the amazing stuff I'm learning. I feel like God is becoming so much more alive in me as I discover who He is and who I am as a daughter of the King!! That's what it's all about: REALLY knowing how wonderful He is and then discovering that He wants to spoil us with His love.
I hope these notes encourage you to live more alive in Him!!

Every problem in this world goes back to people not knowing how much God loves them.
When Paul was in jail, he started praising God. That’s when God performed a miracle! Sometimes people get healed in the middle of worship time.
Love established true identity, challenges lies, and empowers us to focus on our calling.
Bill Johnson’s prayer was “I want more of You at ANY cost.” That’s when God came.
You’re hungry for God, He’s hungrier for us.
If you don’t live by the applause of men, you won’t die by the criticism of men.
Serving God should be fun!!
God doesn’t need our help to be good. He just needs us to allow him to be good.
The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is inside of us. We just need to be aware of that.
There’s no such thing as a hard place when we figure out what God’s doing and open up the heavens in that place.
We are millionaires in the Kingdom of God but we don’t know it. Satan is using what is ours.
Someone asked the question, “Why doesn’t God heal everyone?” Kris answered, “I don’t know. The number of miracles here has increased, but there are still people that don’t get healed. It’s still a battle... I’m just teaching the bible.”
We can’t make God love us more by DOING anything. He already loves us more than we know.
Joy helps us to diagnose our life correctly. Joy makes your faith alive. Joy leads us to the face of God. When you’re happy, you can love anyone.
Our call in life is to be a branch attached to God. (John 15)
Be controlled by the kingdom in you, not by the environment around you.
When fear comes, we react. For example, when our economy is bad, we get scared and stop spending. That causes the economy to get worse. Instead, break the cycle and give more to God.
If we don’t believe a miracle can happen right now, what is keeping us from believing that?
Jesus is better than Santa Claus!!
We don’t need to wait until we’re perfect for God to use us.
God wants to work through us more than we want Him to work through us.
When you hear God, act before you have time to think.
It’s love for the other person that releases the miracle.

A typical worship session during class

My first two weeks!!

I wish I could tell you all everything I’ve been learning and experience, or rather, I wish you were here to experience it with me!!!
But since neither of those is possible right now, I’m going to attempt to explain. Excuse me for mistakes. I’d rather write about this as if I were talking to you instead of trying to make it sound like a literary masterpiece.
I’ll tell you about some of the things I’ve learned and then I’ll share about an outreach I went on.
Last week they talked to us a lot about what happens when we do ministry. The ministry we do here looks different because almost everything we do can’t be done without God’s help. When we pray for someone, we’re encouraged to pray for healing or to ask God for a word of knowledge for them. They talked to us about when we do that to not expect one hundred percent success rate. We take a risk when we ask God for healing or a miracle to happen, but when we do that, God rewards us for our faith and he often does what we ask. In the past, I’ve always been afraid to ask God to do a miracle because if it doesn’t happen I’m afraid that I and the other people involved are going to be disappointed or more confused. Bill Johnson taught us that he thinks God is more concerned how we respond in a failure or success rather than being able to see the miraculous. When he prays for a miracle and it doesn’t happen, that’s when he sits with God and tries to figure things out. God wants us to do that. Someone told us a story of a group of kids who went to pray for someone who had already died to be resurrected. There were also adults in the room. She said that as the kids pressed in to pray for a miracle, they got more and more encouraged because they were connecting with God in such a powerful way. It was all of the adults that were getting more and more discouraged as they pressed in because they were afraid that it wouldn’t happen. In this case, the man was not resurrected but it didn’t bother the kids. They knew that God would do the right thing. They were just happy to connect with him. Bill Johnson also told us that we’re often more worried about OUR reputation than God’s. We don’t want to look bad in front of someone, so we don’t ask God to do the impossible for fear that He won’t and we’ll look bad. In contrast, we’ve been spending a lot of time just worshipping God and learning how wonderful God is and how wonderful he made us to be. Bill said worship is the best form of spiritual warfare!!
We learned a lot about getting over your fears so that God can use you powerfully. “The dogs of doom stand at the door of your destiny.” The thing that you’re the most afraid is what God wants you to do. When we get closer to the door, we realize that the dogs have no teeth!!! We reduce our life because of fear. I think this was a big thing for me to face because I have a lot of fear of man. I don’t want to look weird in front of people or I don’t want people to criticize me. I’ve often felt like God wanted me to reach out to someone or encourage someone but I was too scared to do it. This place is all about facing your fears so that you can do what God has called you to do.

So now about the outreach I went on yesterday. There was a group of about 10 of us. Before we went out, they had us write down locations, people’s names, prayer needs, and anything else that popped into our mind. Then we got into smaller groups and compared our answers. The idea was to find out who God wanted us to meet. In my group, most of us had Wal-Mart as a location so we set out for there. I ended up making a wrong turn, but one of the guys in my group had another location that we saw, so we stopped there. I saw a group of people doing a car wash and I had written down “car”, so I went over there with another girl. By the way, three of the people in my group were teenagers and more experienced than me at this. It was kind of fun asking them what I should do. It was a family that was doing the car wash. We told them what we were doing and if anyone needed prayer for anything. Thinking back, I can’t believe that I was brave enough to ask them that. I think God was helping me a lot.J The lady said that we could pray for her daughter. She was having a lot of relationship problems. One of the girls in my team, Susanna, had written down “relationship problems” so I asked her if she wanted to go over and pray for her with me. The daughter was standing over on the street holding a car wash sign. We went over there and told her what we were doing and asked how we could pray for her. She said that she had a lot of back pain (I had also written down back pain). We prayed that God would heal her and after we finished praying, she said the pain was gone!! Eventually she opened up to us that her boyfriend was very abusive (I had written down abuse!) We told her how much God loved her and that she didn’t deserve to be treated like that. As we prayed for her and encouraged her, tears were streaming down her face. She asked what church we went to and said she had been reading her bible recently and praying and trying to figure out what she believed in. We told her about Bethel and invited her to come.
We left amazed at how God had brought her to us, healed her and given her a glimpse of His love for her.
I think I’m going to continue going to treasure hunts on Saturdays. I’ll continue to share what God does on them. It does make you realize that God wants to touch people if we are willing to listen to Him and go where He leads!!
Well this all might sound crazy weird to you guys. I probably would’ve thought the same thing but when you’re here and you’re around people that are crazier than you are, it starts to rub off!! Crazy about Jesus, that is. J

If you’re not bored yet and want to continue reading, I wanted to share some highlights from my notes:

We are God’s royal priesthood. We are God’s princes and princesses. If our dad is really God and we have a good relationship with Him, we should feel pretty powerful. When we worry, it’s a sign that we don’t know who our dad is. I’m just going to type out some of my notes on this subject: We see the world the way we are. If we don’t love ourselves, it’s hard to love others. Unforgiveness chains you to the past. You know when you’ve forgiven someone when you allow them to be free.
You become what others thing you are. The more we see God, the more we become like him. When we don’t see God, our God looks like us.
A religious spirit (which is a bad thing) tells us that if we want to be more like God, we have to DO something. Religion is performing for what we already have.
Don’t believe you are a sinner. You are a saint!
Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less. It’s thinking more of your God than of yourself. They gave an example of a painting. Would you make fun of the painting in front of the artist? That’s what you’re doing when you think badly of yourself.
Having low self-esteem is costing the creation.
The source of greatness lies within God who lies within you.
We are born to be amazing!!
When people watch your life, they should say, “there must be a God”. If we do only what humans can do , people won’t see us as any differently than non-christians.
This is on another teaching about reason/faith:
The western culture is based on reason. Supernatural things look spooky to us at first because there’s no rational explanation for them. But when you have a God encounter, reason goes out the window.
That doesn’t mean reason is not important, but reason should be tutored by faith.
Faith builds when we have a relationship with God and spend time with Him. Expect God to do great things but understand that he is the authority.