My Jesus Journal

Passion (Part 2)

"When You Move" Bethany Worship

Breath of heaven, fill this place
Let Your presence come invade
We respond to Your touch
We respond to You

Our hearts abandoned, open wide
The door is open, come abide
We respond to Your touch
We respond to You

Mountains shake when You speak
Chains will break when You move
Our hearts will melt in Your presence
When You speak, God
When You move
When You move, God

We invite You in, come and move
We invite You in, have Your way

As mentioned in my previous journal, Jack and I had to miss a couple sessions due to my little emergency. We tried that day to go online to watch the messages we were missing, but we were unable to. Lucky for us, the messages were posted on YouTube a couple days later, and we were able to watch them together.

The first message we caught up on was Christine Caine's (she is Jack's favorite). The awesome thing about this message was that it also had to do with shame. Christine started off by talking about how our culture heaps shame on us by telling us that there is something wrong with us. Shame gets its start in Genesis 2:25-3:13. Before the fall, there was NO shame! We were NOT created to know shame! This is where words come into play. There is life and death in the words that we speak. We see this in the scripture I just mentioned because Satan questions the authority of God's word. If you don't know what God says about you, you'll believe the lies of the enemy. To avoid this doubt, we can't enter dialogue with Satan. We need to know and live by what God says. And if you doubt the character of God, then it's going to be really easy to go against what He says. In the darkness, God wants us to bring His hope and light! Because Eve forgot that she was made in God, she was tempted to do the opposite. When you seek your fulfillment outside of what God tells you to do you will fall. This world needs Christians that are living by God's word to change the lives and hearts of others! When you know you're a son or daughter of the King, you won't be looking for that in other things! (I know I'm throwing a lot of exclamation points at you, but for real, this is all so so true) The enemy wants us to walk away from God and hide because of shame. To feel love, joy, and peace, we need to run to Jesus, because THAT is where we will find it. We will NOT find true love, joy, and/or peace from anything else. Are you willing to look like or be called an idiot?? Are you willing to stand out for God? Do not live bound by anger, bitterness, your past, or ANYTHING ELSE! If you are not listening to God, then you're listening to the lies of someone else! Replace these lies with truth! YOU get to choose what you want to believe.

Wow, y'all. I can't help but get emotional when I think of this message and the other messages from Passion. I LOVE how they go together, how they relate to shame, the lies of the enemy, and our purpose. There are SO many topics that could have been covered at Passion this year, the speakers didn't get together before Passion started to make sure their messages went together, it just worked out this way! Isn't that so awesome?? Isn't it awesome that God KNEW that people needed to hear the messages they did, that they needed to hear about these same topics, but each message revealing a different side of it? Like Christine said, this culture really DOES heap shame on us! The number of people that raised their hands to want to live a life without shame was overwhelming. God KNEW that this was what college students needed to hear this year, and that makes me emotional. How awesome is our God?!

Jack and I didn't end up listening to Sadie Robertson or Tim Tebow's interview until I got home, but I wanted to share the notes now since they all go together in some way.

The first interview was Sadie Robertson's with Shelley Giglio. Sadie gave some background on the past few years of her life. She was on Dancing with the Stars, she didn't know what type of schooling to do once she returned, and she was dealing with fear. She told us how obedience is more important than fear. You may not feel like you have everything ready, but when you step onto the battlefield, God will take over! Sadie was given the opportunity to give a message at Passion City a little while ago and told us how she prepared herself, how she opened her heart to whatever God wanted to share. She realized that if you want to see God be a radical God, then you have to be radical for Him. She started highlighting characteristics in the bible that she wanted to embody, something that I would personally love to start doing. The next thing in this interview really hit me because it's something that I needed to hear. Self-image and God-image. Self-image was something that I spent years and years struggling with. I used to wear makeup in hopes that people would think I was prettier. Then, while struggling with depression a couple of years ago I developed an eating disorder. Every time I was upset I would eat until I forgot about how broken I was feeling. The result of this over-eating was that I ended up gaining 30 pounds. It was then that my eating disorder flipped, and instead of over-eating when I was upset, I started to only eat one small amount of food each day. I was basically starving myself. This is a habit that even recently I have struggled with. Whenever I notice myself gaining weight again, instead of making the healthy decision to eat better or start exercising, I instantly cut myself off. I never went days without food, but there would be several days where I would barely eat anything. I limited the amount of food that I ate in hopes that I would have a flat stomach, in hopes that my body would look like the bodies of other girls. But doing all of this never made me happy; it still doesn't make me happy. Why? Because I wasn't trying to find my confidence in the Lord. While talking about self-image vs God-image, Sadie mentioned Hebrews 10:35. This verse mentions confidence IN THE LORD. We can't try to find our confidence in the things that can't provide confidence! My confidence is not found in my appearance, in my weight, anything like that. We have to find confidence IN THE LORD! Find confidence in God's view of you! Sometimes to achieve that you have to speak victory before you even see it. We can't experience the fullness of God with shame and fear taking over our lives. Shame and fear will still exist, but we have to believe that HE IS BIGGER! You don't have to be qualified, He just wants you to say yes and devote your life to Him.