Another 4 weeks of awesome teachings at the YWAM Kona Crossroads DTS are now behind us and we are just 4 weeks away from arriving in Hanoi, Vietnam along with a great team for our outreach.

While the core message of the teachings has been the same as last year the presentations have been different enough that I have rarely been able to follow along in my old notes, and I am finding myself taking many pages of new ones. Being staff also gives us a different perspective as we help others through their experiences with the teaching. I posted summaries of these teachings when we were at Crossroads for the first time in 2014 and you can read those writings in the Archives.  A quick overview of the teachings… Darlene Cunningham and David Hamilton taught Family Week with 500+ students in the Ohana Court class; Dr Bruce Thompson taught Divine Plumbline; Dave Bryan, of Glad Tidings Church, Yuba City, shared from his many experiences of Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare; and Gord Whyte spoke about and introduced Holy Spirit.

The first weeks of DTS concentrate on our relationship with God. These middle weeks are focused more on our relationship with ourselves, and the last weeks will be more about our relationship with others, as we a take look at Outreach, Missions and Evangelism. If we don’t love ourselves we are not able to love others.

I will share one of the highlights from the weeks since our last update. After the Divine Plumbline teaching and ministry time  we went to The End of the World where the whole class threw a rock, or rocks, into the ocean to symbolize the wounds and hurts that had been released. This rock throwing demonstrates full healing as it is practically impossible to get them back, although a couple of the guys jumped in and tried. Afterwards we shared Holy Communion with each other, as we received the body and blood of Jesus, overlooking the vast expanse of the ocean, listening to the roar of the breakers on the rocks below, standing in the trees with birds singing in the open air. It reminded me of Brian Doerksen’s words “A singing bird, a mighty tree, the vast expanse of open sea. Gazing at a bird in flight, soaring through the air. Lying down beneath the stars, I feel your presence there. I love to stand at ocean shore and feel the thundering breakers roar, to walk through golden fields of grain with endless bloom horizons fray. Listening to a river run, watering the Earth. Fragrance of a rose in bloom, a newborn’s cry at birth. How could I say there is no God? When all around creation calls!!” It was a very moving and meaningful Eucharist. We closed this time by reading 2 Cor 6:1&2 from The Voice Bible “As for those of us working as His emissaries, we beg you not to take the grace of God lightly. For God says through Isaiah, ‘When the time was right, I listened to you; and that day you were delivered, I was your help. Look, now the time is right! See, your day of deliverance is here.'”  

Deliverance — we have seen so much over the past few weeks. Many of us are blind to the damage that has been done by our past: rejection, abandonment, betrayal, un-forgiveness, oppression and other abuse built up over the years. Few have been released from all that holds us back from living at our full potential and becoming the person we were created to be. In Luke’s record of history, Jesus quotes Isaiah 61 (ESV) in “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” and as was foretold “He (Jesus) heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds” Ps 147:3

As ambassadors for Christ whom He said would do more and greater things than He did we need to find Liberty! Freedom! We talk about it, a lot, and we sing about it, but few of us really experience being free. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom” then there we are “No longer slaves”. So many churches fail in the area of getting people well, delivered, released from old wounds, bondages, prisons, and oppressive spirits. Getting them to a place from where they can love themselves so that they can love others, so that they can as Jesus commands “fear not, and love your enemy.” Then as believers the signs and wonders will follow us.

The Thursday Night Gatherings in Ohana Court have been excellent this year. Looking back, one week Michael Ketterer, of United Pursuit, a worship leader and adoptive father then Dr Benny Prasad, musician, inventor and evangelist, who is the fastest man to travel to every nation in the world (245 nations in 6 years 6 months and 22 days), he has invented 2 musical instruments and opened Chai 316 a teahouse in Bangalore where university students sit and drink tea. The servers and hosts are Christian missionaries who bring tea and then sit and chat with the students. Benny also spoke at our Tuesday staff meeting, he shared his testimony, the fact that he has never slept in a bed, never had any debt, never earned a paycheque or sold anything, and many stories of how God has provided all of his needs. Another week had David Brymer leading us in worship and Kris Vallotton of Bethel Church spoke an awesome word about our need to find our people. Click on Thursday Night Gathering link to watch any of these events.

This weekend we were helping with the “Beyond Freedom” seminar hosted by our guest speaker from this last week, Gord Whyte. Then we go straight into Thanksgiving (US) week with Evangelism. We are on the go for God and loving it.

Scripture from The Voice Bible unless otherwise noted.
The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.

We have been here in Kona more than 6 weeks already. Now I find two weeks of teaching slipped by without an update.

The first of these weeks saw Jean Norment “Unveiling the Cross“… We sat under Jean’s teaching last year and it was excellent.(Clicking that link will take you to my post from last year on this teaching.) Her message definitely unveiled all that the Cross, and the blood of Christ, did once and for all. There is so much depth and meaning in this mystery that Glenda and I continue to see the veil being removed. One of our big takeaways last year was reinforced this time, we are even more certain that our unbelief is our greatest sin. I will come back to this later in this blog with an example.

Our Outreach locations were announced this week and preparations have begun. This year our school will be visiting: Battanbang, Cambodia; Penang, Malaysia; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Need I say that Glenda and I are both very excited to be heading back to Hanoi? We haven an awesome team of fully-equipped people who are ready to share their gifts with the people of northern Vietnam as Cultural Exchange and Volunteer English Teachers. There will be more on this in weeks to come.

The second week the teaching was on our Identity in Christ with Ivan Roman… a revivalist and church planter (Empowered Life Church) from Medford, Oregon. His wife Erica was with him and they spent time together ministering to the students. Ivan taught us from a wealth of memorized scripture and his experience about who we are in Christ. Ivan has a prophetic ministry and spoke into everyone’s lives. This was an exciting week as many people discovered we were Unveiling our Identity, becoming who we already are. Again our unbelief is what holds us back from becoming all God has made us, and it prevents us ministering with the power that is available to believers walking in the Holy Spirit. The power to overcome evil, power to overcome sickness, power to overcome addictions, power to lives wholly Holy lives.

There were a couple of external affirmations that built on this weeks teaching. The first appeared on Facebook, I was struck by this quote from William Booth while speaking about the 20th Century. I am afraid that in much of the world it continues into the 21st…

Then as I went through Morning Prayer from the “Daily Prayer: The Official Common Worship App from the Church of England” on Saturday morning I found that the Collect for the Day just summed up this weeks teaching so accurately.

God, the giver of life,
whose Holy Spirit wells up within your Church:
by the Spirit’s gifts equip us to live the gospel of Christ and make us eager to do your will,
that we may share with the whole creation the joys of eternal life;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen

Remarkable! How did God know what we were learning all week?  Oh, and I spent some time wondering what the Anglican Church worldwide would look like if they prayed this prayer with real belief.

Small groups, one-to-ones, praying, technical support, giving thanks, preparing & serving snack, praising, planning outreach, interceding, attending staff meetings, worshiping, etc, etc and just “being there” is keeping us busy and out of trouble. We give thanks for the technology that allows us to FaceTime and Skype, blog email and text message with family and friends. The world truly has become smaller for missionaries taking the gospel to the nations.

Thursday night in Ohana Court saw Suze Chmell speak, a young German girl who went home after her DTS and started a new YWAM base in her home town, you can watch some highlights here  http://livestream.com/ywamkona/thursdaynight2015

Wildlife this week…

This out-of-focus centipede was over 125mm (5 inches) long-  still only half grown

Underwater Wildlife. On Saturday, many of the men met a 7a.m. and headed to Kapaluli Beach for a snorkel trip. We had a great time and several went for breakfast afterwards.  I had to borrow the photo here from Dan, one of our students, who took many underwater photos as we swam with turtles and many, many fish.including the Hawaiian state fish, humuhumunukunukuapuaa 

Our awesome CDTS Students are here and we are now settling into the teaching phase of the Discipleship Training School. This week saw our first few days of lectures presented by Warren Groves, he taught on the Nature & Character of God of God. Warren was a classmate of ours last year and he was part of our Vietnam outreach team.  He has almost 40 years of church and missionary experience, he is now staff of the Apostello School of Frontier Missions that sends people out for outreaches of 2 or more years. We learned how to know who God really is and what knowing Him requires of us, we learned that as human’s we need an operating system upgrade. When we become Christian we get a new OS altogether and it should be getting regularly updated as we align our worldview, that is what we see as reality, changes to come into alignment with God’s view of the world. Warren recognized that the Third Law of Theology is “for every theologian there is an equal and opposite theologian” so he stayed away from theological treatises instead he addressed questions like “Where does our view of God come from?”; “Who do I think God is versus who He is really?”; “Why should I study the nature of God?”; “How do we know who God really is?”; and “What will be required of me?”

Loren Cunningham was the ‘guest’ speaker at the Thursday Night Gathering at Ohana Court this week. It was a great reminder of how much YWAM does, over and above training youth and sending them out. He shared how his vision for having a Bible in every home, and scripture in every language by 2020 is moving ahead. He talked about the progress that has been made in Bible translation as YWAM has been working with Wycliffe, using story-telling volunteers to get translation faster; and about text and audio bibles on micro SD cards. He talked about Uniskript a new alphabet that can be used for every language and can be taught in just 5 hours. He shared about other YWAM ministries; CROWN Ministries (Christ Revealed on World Networks), YWAM Ships and an invitation by the government of Papua New Guinea.

IRONMAN World Championship  We were blessed to be able to volunteer as Security Race Officials in the Bike Compound at the Ironman again this year. You can watch highlights on West Hawaii news. The race starts at 6:25 am and the finish closes a midnight, it begins with a 2.4 (3.86km) mile swim, 112 (180.2km) mile bicycle ride and 26.2 (42.2km) mile run. This year 2,308 athletes started out, the oldest was 86 by the way, altogether 2,144 finished the 140.6 (226.26km) torturous miles in temperatures up to 40C, with the humidity, before the finish closed and they were declared Ironmen (and women, but somehow this brand survives without being gender-sensitive). The fastest person finished in 8:14:40, the last finisher took 16:49:24. As Glenda and I stayed cheering to encourage athletes until 10pm and heard “You a an IRONMAN!” many more times up until midnight, we were left pondering what Paul really means when he compares our spiritual journey to being in a race and finishing well. These athletes give everything they have. They invest thousands of hours training regularly for at least 2 years, they have to complete 2 Ironman races elsewhere to qualify to enter their name in a draw. They invest thousands of dollars, on entry fees, on equipment especially triathlon bicycles, airfares and hotels. Then, as we witnessed on Saturday, they push their bodies beyond all reason to gain the prize of being called an IRONMAN. Most compete to finish, not to win. It is hard to comprehend what drives a person to strive for the prize BUT this is how we are supposed to live out our Christian life in this world, glorifying God in all we do. Peter says it like this in his first letter, 4:10&11, remember life is a gift. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

Glenda and I are being kept busy, there is lots to do and we are really enjoying being here supporting Bob and Carolyn as they lead the school. We are truly blessed by their leadership and encouragement, and we have a supernatural peace as we serve God and his people in this place, especially when we are being stretched beyond ourselves.

‘Wildlife this week’

A Praying Mantis joins in the worship

Until next time, be blessed and be a blessing, A&G