After being sent off with tons of love from my family and friends, I’m now happily settling in to the YWAM Ships base in Kona, HI. I’ve been here for a few weeks now and they’ve kept me busy, which has been a wonderful way to get integrated with the group right off the bat! It’s interesting being here because this is the first time in 8 years that I’ve worked with YWAM at a base other that the primary UofN campus. We are still on the same island and in the same town, but about a 25 minute walk away from the campus I have long considered my second home.
Sadly I missed the first two weeks of DTS, but I’ve gotten to jump in on the rest of the classes since then and they’ve been fantastic so I thought I’d go back and summarize the highlights. For “Freedom Week,” we had a local missionary named Alissa come in and spend the week walking our class through the tools to walk in a lifestyle of freedom. Our schedule called it freedom week, but it was really all about identity. She covered the importance of walking in forgiveness, tools to break off the lies of the enemy, and strategies to hold onto your identity in Christ even when the enemy does everything he can to drag you back down into old mindsets. When we walk in bitterness and unforgiveness because of injustices that others have done to us or our families, we only continue to give them power to hurt us long afterwards. To hold onto bitterness is “like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies” - it will eat you from the inside out. To walk in unforgiveness is to sit in judgement of that other person rather that giving that responsibility back to God - the ultimate judge over all of us. At the end of everything, “we have all sinned and fallen short of the grace of God” (Romans 3:23). We have all been forgiven by God, and we insult that gift by refusing to extend it to a fellow sinner. (See also Matthew 6:14 and Matthew 18:21-35) There are many ways that the lies and traps of the enemy can come to hold us down, but they all separate us from living in the fullness of God’s goodness. Those lies will find any opportunity to take root in us, whether we knowingly come into agreement with them or simply leave an empty space in which they can grow. And as long as we are believing something false about our own selves or about the world around us, our eyes will be closed to the truth that opposes them. For example, when I used to believe that I was a nuisance, I couldn’t believe that anyone would want me around no matter how untrue that was. We can’t accept the beautiful truth of our value in Christ until we break away from the lies that the enemy has strategically placed around our lives. And he will always very predictably attack those things that are in fact your strongest traits or areas of potential. It is always the person with the wisest counsel who comes to believe that they don’t have anything to say, and it’s the people with the softest and most nurturing hearts that can be tricked into believing that they are toxic or harmful to the people they love. Those strengths that God has designed us to operate in are always going to be the first things the enemy tries to cut down and diminish, and that’s why it’s so critical to have God be the only one who defines our worth and our identity! One of the most powerful moments in class this week happened when we corporately came into agreement to renounce the lies of the enemy over our lives. One by one, we took turns publicly declaring “I break off the lie that...” and then the rest of the class would echo that declaration. This was so cool because it allowed us to stand in support of each other as well as recognize that we all get tricked into believing the same predictable lies. It gave courage for those who were the most afraid among us to hear others renouncing the very things they also needed to renounce. There was so much freedom and breakthrough in our class that day!! The only day that was more impactful was the one in which we replaced those lies with godly truths. We took all of the lies we had broken off the day before and asked Holy Spirit to tell us what God’s truth was instead. There was so much breakthrough and victory in the room, and it was so powerful to see our students standing in support and agreement with each other! We can usually see the truth over others’ identities even when our own identities are hard for us to grasp. Standing together in agreement of the truth is such a powerful way to feel the love of the body of Christ, especially in those moments when we are walking out of the lies of the enemy. I love seeing that breakthrough for our students and to see the transformation in each of them since them!!
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March 2023
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