Hello! Me again!
It’s been a while and a lot has happened but I want to pick up where I left off last time…
Week 3 was ‘Repentance & Forgiveness’ week. An amazing lady from the base, Cristine Wiener was our speaker. We learned about sin & how it hurts God because it separates us from Him, how genuine repentance means turning completely away from our sin and puts us right in our relationship with God and with others and about how the forgiveness we’ve been given through Jesus’ death means we can and should forgive others.
The week finished with an ‘application day’ on Friday which was pretty intense and emotional. We were asked during the week to pray and write a list of the sins God was convicting us of (gently reminding us of them, never condemning us) to bring to class on Friday. So Friday we came to class and one by one prayed out our repentance for those sins and any forgiveness we wanted to express in front of the class. We were prayed for by Cristine and our school leader, Brontë, then we went and nailed the paper with our sins on to a big wooden cross that was made for the class. It was such a powerful moment of freedom from sin and reconciling ourselves with God. There are 50 students in my class so you can imagine it took us a fair while- we were there from 9.30 Friday morning until 1am Saturday, stopping only for a couple of toilet breaks and an hour’s dinner break! We were told we’d be splitting into 2 groups after dinner to get finished sooner but none of us wanted that! We all had cried so much for each other for the pain we’d been through and the darkness in our lives before and I had my heart broken for every single one of these guys so we all wanted to go through that day as a whole class, so 1am it was!
It was such a powerful day that really put right our friendships with each other in that there was nothing hidden, no shame, just total freedom in the fact that we all knew the worst of each other and loved each other anyway. Whilst it was other people’s turns we wrote them notes of encouragement that really added a sweetness to the day, I know I’ll treasure mine forever! That was the day YPDTS went from a class to a family in my eyes.
Our lectures that week were on Worship & Intercession (prayer on behalf of others) from Steve Warren, also from the YWAM Perth base. We learned about the power of prayer and how to go about intercession and had our first time of class prayer for whatever God put on our hearts. This week I had a fresh understanding that we weren’t made by God for worship- He doesn’t need it from us, we’re not His fangirls! But our response to God and the way He made us to adopt us to be His children and because of who He is, is that we worship Him.
katey crocodile 