Living the Journey

During my personal interview with Mr. Gothard at the start of the Journey, he asked me, “On a scale 1 -10 (10 being the strongest) how would you rate your relationship with God?”

I replied, “It would be a 1.”

On the outside, I looked like a pretty nice Christian young man who had a fairly good life. On the inside, I was headed down a path leading to destruction. My life was a total mess. I had a lot of bitterness towards my parents and I was filled with anger, malice, rage, hatred, lust, immorality, and moral perversions. I believed the lie from Satan that I didn’t need anyone else . . . God or parents.  So it’s safe to say that even though I had said the “sinners prayer” before, my relationship with God was pretty much nonexistent.

To be perfectly honest with you, I really didn’t want to go on the Journey to the Heart. However, it was my dad’s desire that I go, so I submitted and decided to go with an open heart. I also determined that I wanted to find God on this Journey.

Fast forward . . . to Tuesday morning – March 31^st

This was the first day at the Northwoods, up in Michigan.  I was lying in my bed doing my quiet time and wrote a simple prayer in my journal.  The prayer went like this:

Dear God,

I want to find you!  Help me to forgive my parents, Lord.  Help me, give me the courage to confess my sins and competing affections out loud to you on this Journey!  Thank you Jesus for making it possible for me to come on this Journey.  Bless the rest of my family today Lord.  In Jesus name I pray.  Amen

I want to share a verse with you that is found in Jeremiah 29:13: “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” This verse is so true. Literally one hour later the Holy Spirit came upon me in a way that I have never experienced before and I just broke.  I was on my knees/face weeping before the Lord confessing every sin that I could think of out loud to God and to my other teammates. I confessed my pride, my bitterness, my anger, my lust, my immorality, everything I could think of I confessed to God.  I told God that I forgave my parents for the hurts they caused me.

I began rebuking Satan.  I told him that I didn’t want him in my life anymore and commanded him to flee.  Then I asked God to fill me with His Spirit.  Our team spent two hours of praying and confessing hidden sins to God and to one another.  I can tell you I felt a lot better after praying this prayer.  This all happened on Tuesday and it took me until Wednesday sometime to realize that God had answered every single line of that prayer that I had written down in my journal that morning.

Wednesday – April 1^st

Wednesday was a day of discussing how to get rid of the hidden sins and secret lusts (competing affections) that hinder us from fully loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Earlier in the week we had heard the phrase:  “The power of sin is in its secrecy.”  This means that once a sin is exposed, confessed, and repented of, the sin has no more power over you.  This is why it is crucial when we confess our sins that we confess every detail of the particular sin so that Satan has nothing to fall back on. It is like when someone goes into surgery for cancer and the doctors performing the surgery must make sure they cut off every part of that tumor. Otherwise, what happens?  The tumor grows back.

Our leader, Chad, told us if there was anything we needed to confess to our parents that would be hindering our walk with the Lord, and hindering the one accord between the group, he would make it possible for us to use the phones over at the main lodge.  God had convicted me of a particular sin that I had been struggling with that I needed to confess and ask for forgiveness.

After dinner, we went over to the main lodge and I called my dad.  He wasn’t there.  I left him a message saying I had accepted Christ as my Savior and that I needed to talk to him so I would either call them back later or to just keep me accountable and ask me when I get home.  Later that night, I called again and this time I got a chance to talk with my dad and my mom.  At first I only confessed it to my dad, but I eventually decided that I needed to confess it to my mom as well.  After confessing it to both my parents and asking for their forgiveness they both said they forgave me. I am on a quest of desiring to fully confess everything to my parents and cleanse my heart of all impurities.

Before I left, I sent out a massive email asking for prayer that I would:

1. Go with an open heart
2. Meet God in supernatural way
3. Come home loving God more then I ever have before

God answered every single one of those requests! It just goes to show that if we seek God with all our hearts, we will indeed find Him.  If we seek Him, He will make Himself known to us in ways we could have never imagined.

~ Kyle
March 2009 Journey

6 Comments »

Come and hear, all you who fear God,
And I will declare what He has done for my soul.

A month before I came to the Journey to the Heart, life at my home was falling apart. Problems that had been discreetly covered over in public life were causing so much anger and pain that life was almost unbearable.

I grew up in the Philippines. I loved the people, loved the ministry, and loved seeing so much of God. His hand was working in troubled lives through the testimonies we shared with one another. He was ever present and always sufficient. As I got older, the cares of living caught up with me, people and relationships became more tangled and I began to put God farther and farther down on my list. He became so common that I took Him for granted.

Then our whole ministry came crashing to pieces.

Ugly problems that had been working in secret finally surfaced. My father sat me and my older brother down and said: “We are leaving.” The only thing that came to my mind was that this was some king of cruel joke.  It could not be happening.  It was not possible.

It was true.

In one month our entire lives were packed into boxes and I found myself in a foreign country (but my passport said it was “home”) where I knew little more than the geography and the language . . . and little of that.

For You, O God, have tested us;
You have refined us as silver is refined.
You brought us into the net;
You laid affliction on our backs.
You have caused men to ride over our heads;
We went through fire and through water;

The next year I spent much time working on my own to survive. I waded through the morass of teen life trying desperately to salvage some sort of meaning. The mission climate I had been accustomed to made “teen problems” seem shallow. I buried myself in books to find some life wherein I could understand people, where life had meaning, and where my wounds wouldn’t hurt so badly. I sunk so deep into depression that I would wonder why I even wanted to remain alive.  Into my vortex of pain, God began to tenderly turn me toward Him.

Come and see the works of God;
He is awesome in His doing toward the sons of men.
He turned the sea into dry land;
They went through the river on foot.
There we will rejoice in Him.

In 2008, during a session with Teen Pact, they gave a time for personal prayer and meditation. For the first time in about 4 years, I was able to still my mind and I asked God if I could ever go back to the Philippines (my life goal, basically). Suddenly, almost like a physical touch, I heard the word “Here.” “Here?” I asked. “Why here? continue reading…

3 Comments »

Ever since my baptism last August, I had been striving to draw closer to God on a daily basis. Yet, at that point, I didn’t realize that I had allowed some affections to creep into my life and compete with my love for God. It wasn’t until this past September when I went on a Journey to the Heart that I was able to get alone with God and hear His voice as to what He had in mind for my life.

In Bill Gothard’s Basic Seminar, he describes a new perspective on fully dedicating your life to Christ. He uses the illustration of a room with everything inside representing the things that you do in your life. This might include each activity you have become involved in or every subject that you’ve mastered. In this illustration, when you become a new Christian and dedicate your “life” to Christ, it is like you are  inviting Him to come into the room and allowing Him the freedom to have control of all the aspects of your life. Let’s say there is a box in the room for each of your accomplishments. If there is something that you want to hold on to and don’t want you new Roommate to know about or take away, you might build a closet, put the box on the top shelf out of reach, and lock the door. Then, you really aren’t giving God everything because you are still withholding that one little box in your closet!

As I was searching my heart, trying to figure out if there was any particular area in my life that I had not yet surrendered to God, He revealed to me an area where I had allowed myself to be in control. At first, I was unwilling to give this up because it wasn’t all bad. Just some of it was, so the good outweighs the bad and makes it ok to live with, right? Wrong!

I argued back and forth with God about it, and finally agreed to give it all to Him. I was able to discover that God wants to be the center of my life, and I need to be willing to let Him be in control of all aspects of my life, including my future.  The Lord showed me that He is my fulfillment; He is all that I will ever need to be happy. He also revealed to me that now is the perfect time for me to focus on serving the Lord through my current responsibilities.

I Corinthians 7:34-35 says – “The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.”

These verses prompted me to rededicate myself to focus on serving the Lord rather than pleasing myself. That alone has been life-changing for me, and now I am able to fully trust God to care for everything I will ever need or want! As challenging as it was, after I completely surrendered everything to God, I was finally able to experience true peace in my spirit.

In closing, I will just share one of the verses that suck out to me during this time of my life: Psalm 126:2-3: “Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with joyful shouting; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad.” Yes, God has done an awesome work in my life, and I am very glad!

~ Grace
September 2009 Journey

8 Comments »

Before I went on the Journey, I was having a hard time reading the Bible. It was really becoming boring, and I was not enjoying it. When I went to the Journey, I learned about not just reading the Bible, but really meditating on it, and asking God to show me what it means.

When I read about having an “enlarged heart” (see Psalm 119:32), I realized that in order to have my heart enlarged I must fill it with things of the Lord, one of them being His Word. When I came home I decided to read the book of John, even though I have read it before. I wanted to get my love for reading the Word back into my heart. I also decided to start memorizing the Psalms, and have actually really enjoyed it. It is a challenge that helps me want to stay in the Bible, and meditate on it!

~ Carleigh
July 2009 Girls’ Journey

2 Comments »

Until the Journey, Joseph made decisions based on what his reasoning concluded was right or wrong. His life was controlled by his intellect. While on the Journey, he discovered the freedom of no longer “leaning on his own understanding” but instead dedicating his body to God according to Romans 12:1-2. Listen to how this one step opened up a new sensitivity to the Spirit of God and a firm trust in the promises of His Word.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 (6.5 min)

~ Joseph
October 2009 Guys Journey

1 Comment »

Last year in June I attended my first Journey, during which I had suicidal depression and was in rebellion to my authorities. God used the first Journey to change my life . . . and this second one to help me to overcome several major fears. I have been petrified of people, rejection, public speaking, and standing alone for the longest time.

Last year I wanted to be on a team of rebels. This year, I wanted a team of girls who all wanted to be there . . . and of course, I found out on both occasions, that God’s ways are opposite to ours, and that He knows the best thing for us.

Through a series of discipleship opportunities and many different occasions of praying for different girls, God helped me to overcome my fear of rejection from people and learn how to make Jesus my best friend. Not only did I learn how to love Jesus as a friend that sticks closer than a brother, but I learned how to disciple girls. That has been my dream ever since last year and I never had the courage to do it. I was always floating along with the tide, unable to swim against it. God gave me freedom over my fear of man on this Journey and filled me with a greater joy than ever before. Not only could I stand alone, I could do it with great joy.

During the course of the week, God answered some major prayer requests that I brought before Him and my team. He also gave me a greater love for my family and I missed them all even though I usually enjoy time to myself.

I want to be able to have an impact on girls outside of my family . . . so God laid it on my heart to first work on my ministry at home so that I will then be prepared to do that. Upon arriving home, I was overjoyed to find that my parents were giving me and my sister permission to gather a group of girls and return to the Journey in March/April. I am now looking forward to what God will do, who He will choose, and how He is going to use my life.

~ Hannah
September 2009 Girls Journey

6 Comments »