So week 3 we learned about Father Heart of God. I know it is said over and over, but God's love is greater than we can ever possibly understand. He is the ultimate father. He never stops loving you, it is just a love that doesn't even make sense most of the time. You might ask, "Why do you still love me?" and the answer is... well I'm not sure, he just still loves us though. An interesting thing about God though, is that he isn't impressed by our attempts to act spiritual. His level of perfection is far greater than we can ever achieve so it makes sense right? Anything we try to do pales in comparison to God's perfection. And he doesn't ever call us to be perfect either. He just calls us to have that relationship with him so that he can love us like a father. In Jeremiah 3:19, we see God's desire for us to call him our father. Despite this love though, there is one big thing about grace that has really stuck out to me. Grace does NOT negate consequences. I have been learning that more and more over week 2 and week 3 but it is SO true. God gives us grace so that we have hope to live, but that doesn't mean there aren't consequences to our choices. The consequences shouldn't be looked as punishment I don't think, but instead repercussions. Sometimes when we sin, we feel guilt or shame, but God will NEVER project shame in our lives. It just isn't something he does. On the first day of lectures in Father Heart of God week, we had an opportunity to listen what God thinks of us. It is really important to understand our identity in God. If we can understand this, and become totally rooted in what God thinks of us than nothing anybody else will say can ever hurt us. It is like building a house on stone; when the storms come it will stand firm. I really felt like during this identity time, God was speaking into me my identity in areas that I felt I wasn't very strong. For example, I feel like I am afraid of a lot of stuff and God told me I was courageous. It is interesting when things like that happen... and AWESOME!!
So the second day of lectures, I learned just as much as the first. We talked a lot about ways to get rid of sin in our lives. First, we must acknowledge it, second we must take responsibility for it (don't analyze it or make excuses), third we must ask God for forgiveness and fourth, we must receive God's forgiveness. Sometimes the fourth is the most difficult. Satan tells us that we AREN'T forgiven, but we ARE! Forgiveness is a CHOICE not an EMOTION. We don't always feel forgiven but that does not mean that we aren't. As soon as we ask God for forgiveness, we are forgiven. We just need to come to terms with this amazing thing called grace. One of the interesting things we talked about was our Body, Soul and Spirit. Imagine three circles, all overlapping in one middle area, lets call this the "center". The body is our physical senses, the soul is our mind, will and emotion and the Spirit is our connection with God. I talked a bit about shame and guilt earlier. Shame and guilt effect us in this area of our body. God wants this stuff out though. He wants to deal with it once and for all. He may work slow, or he may work fast but is important to realize that God IS helping us. When we let him help, we are accepting the reality of what Christ did on the cross. We sometimes don't understand Christ's sacrifice and his love but I think as we wait for him to help us and see what he does in our lives, we more easily understand the love.
On Thursday, we had a chance to share with our entire school things in our lives that we felt were holding us back or getting in the way of our relationship with God. I think there were a couple really important things that this allowed us to do. First, acknowledging our sin allows God to help us get through it. Once our sin is out in the open, Satan no longer has ANY power on that sin in our lives which is super awesome. Another big thing I thought that came out of this experience was that I think our entire school got a LOT closer. We all accept each other even though none of us are perfect because of love, and because we know we all sin.
So that was basically the way the rest of the week went. Just going to leave you with a quote.
"He claims all because he is love." - C.S Lewis
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