We come home bearing good news for the local church… that Jesus is alive and the gospel is spreading and infiltrating into even the most challenging of places through the lives of humble servants who are offering themselves as living sacrifices for the furthering of His Kingdom, and what a privilege it has been to partner with them...
We laughed, we cried, we lived and died all to find that He was breaking and building, shaping and molding us into a masterpiece designed to praise and worship and serve with purpose. We got down and dirty in the pouring rain and sweltering heat digging up sewage lines, building fences and homes, digging foundations and wells, plastering roofs, mixing cement and even planting peach trees. We were challenged physically as we hiked in the mountains of Peru, walked and hitchhiked kilometers with our backpacks and ran endlessly after children in India. We have become acquainted with many airports and have found the most interesting places to sleep (including a sidewalk outside a train station and a floating dock in the amazon). We have preached, taught, sung, prayed and lived the word of God and as a result we have experienced the blind see, the deaf hear, the sick healed, captives set free and the most beautiful of all souls being united with their Creator!
YES! Jesus is alive!
I have experienced this the most this year through observing the transformation in the lives of the people around me. Yes it is epic to see God do incredible miracles: healing and provision beyond one’s imagination. But man Jesus Christ is passionate about people and seeing them walk in the promise of a life of abundance! What a privilege to be involved in the lives of 13 other people and to walk a road with them in entering their promise lands. To remember who they were in the beginning of the year, then to see and know them now: people changed by the revelation of the grace of God and in response pouring out their lives in honor of this! That is breathtakingly beautiful, more beautiful than any mountain or ocean, because it is the face of Jesus and it proves that He is alive! but hey, just like you can never walk away from being hit by a truck unchanged, how much more when encountering the Living God!
There are so many things that the Father has taught me this year and established within me that I feel I could quite honestly write a book (who knows maybe one day I willJ). I believe that all of God’s truth and revelation changes who we are drastically if we truly walk in it, there is so much that I wish to impart but there are four things that I would like to highlight in this letter (for the rest we can have coffee)…
Grace. Yes what a loaded topic and though I have much to say and more to live on this I would like to emphasize that it is the foundation of everything that the Lord established within me this year. A fuller revelation of grace is what catapulted me into a new depth of relationship with our Glorious Father, Friend and Lover. Through a profound work of the Spirit whilst reading Ephesians 2:1-10, God began an incredible labour…an ongoing process of showing me the disgustingness of my sin and the beauty of His character in other words revealing who I am in perspective of who He is. And from this, from a revelation of His character as a Holy, Loving God and the stark contrast of a life lived in sin, God reveals His perfect, costly and most beautiful gift of His Son, Jesus…Grace! Oh am I undeserving and oh how much more does that spur me on to live a life worthy of the calling that I have been given. Mark Driscoll puts it so aptly: “grace does not only forgive us of our sin but also empowers us to live an abundant life!”
Faith. Another big one but again just this… that faith is practical! That it is about every single tangible and non tangible element of life, from our next meal to salvation, EVERYTHING. And I would be so bold as to say that if it is not practical then what is the point? The most real explanation of faith that I have is this…complete and total dependency on the Father. It is believing God, and believing is a verb i.e a doing word, it is actually walking in the truth, nope it’s not just good enough that we know it but that we actually live it…and that is why I say dependency! Because it means to lean heavily upon, to put all your weight… to trust! But dependency does not only speak to trust but also to intimacy, for those who know the Father trust in Him. And somehow this seems like the most impossible thing…but the more that I walk with our Jesus the more I realize that it is possible, first because Jesus not only died for us but lived by faith and in total dependency on the Father by the Spirit to show us that it is possible and second, because I have first hand experience that it is when you live and walk in the word that it truly comes alive. Jesus is the word! And if He is not the foundation, the center, the reason and the outflow, If He is not everything then it is all, meaningless! A life lived independently of God is a life that is meaningless!
Identity. From grace and faith flow an incredible revelation of identity…who I am! If I were to summarize this year in a sentence I think it would be this: “ our Father broke me, ripped out all of me and everything insecure that I was standing on and living in and then molded me, built me and established me in Him. What a miracle! I found myself by loosing myself in my Creator. I have come to recognize that if we cannot acknowledge and know who we are in Christ then we will not be effective in His Kingdom, doing what He prepared for us to do. How are people to believe that Jesus is alive if we do not acknowledge who He is in us and what He is doing in and through us, for we are the way that His Kingdom comes to earth.
Significance. I am nothing in compared to Him but that I am everything to Him!
And so with a heart transplant and new eyes i enter into 2012, excited to worship and serve our Living God! I have the privilege of serving with the Global challenge family in Jeffrey's Bay for the next three months and am excited to be challenged and chucked out of my comfort zones whilst walking a road with the new challengers:)
So please continue to pray with me for God's provision and direction in this crazy adventure
Blessings