KINGDOM OF GOD!!

What a beautiful day in Colorado! Today was just perfect weather and a great day all around ( : This week our DTS joined the boarders DTS at their base which is about 20-30 minutes up the mountain. It is so gorgeous up there with the fresh snow and pretty trees and such! Well this week was a real eye opener for me and I know for a lot of other people as well. We had Don Stephens as our speaker and he taught us on "The Kingdom of God." It was such a powerful teaching and God really showed up and revealed new and awesome things to me! There is so much to share about this week, but I will try to pick out some of the highlighted points that stuck out to me!

-God's glory is EVERYWHERE!!
-God created me to reflect His glory, I am made for HIS GLORY.
-Our goal is to bring the glory of God to people
-Are we living in a relationship with God or are we living with the view that He just judges us?
-We are called to live in the love of Jesus..am I loving God, am I loving others?
-If I truly love God, I will WANT to obey Him.
-Don taught us about many different worldviews including Islam, Post-modernism, pantheism, new age, Marxism and gnosticism and lastly the biblical worldview
-What is the Kingdom of God??...
*Every place where the will of God is being done
*Jesus reflected in anything (movies, books, art, conversations, homes, etc)
*Anything true, anything that glorifies God
-The Kingdom of God grows by little things like buying a meal for a homeless person, holding the door for someone, surprising your friend with a gift, feeding an orphan, etc.
-Satan has twisted this world to a world of darkness when we do things to glorify God we bring that dark kingdom CRASHING DOWN!!!
-Our agenda should not be to make "converts" it is to LOVE. And by our LOVE they will see Christ's LOVE.

This week was crazy awesome. I realized I was perceiving the world through a lens. God wants us to see the world through His lens. It was so awesome to have Don come speak. He is a very smart guy and really awesome. On Monday, we had our small group time. My small group decorated journals and ate popcorn and just hung out. It was so fun! On Wednesday we watched a documentary called "The Finger of God." If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It is a very powerful documentary about God's power and the Holy Spirit. After the movie ended, one staff member, Temp, stood up and said "if you need healing, come over here." "We have the power to heal and the authority to do these things because Jesus has given us that authority when He left Earth." So many people got healed on Wednesday! It was so amazing and awesome to see the God's power working through my own hands! I always thought that preforming miracles was something that Jesus did in the "bible times." I never understood that as Christians, we have that power too! It was such an amazing night and I had a revelation of God's amazing power and the power of prayer!!

God is so good, so amazing, so powerful, so merciful and so gracious. Everyday I am just renewed by the fact that He loves me, just as I am. He is awesome and everything He made and everything He does is so beautiful and so glorious! Thank you Jesus!!

"Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven..."
Thanks so much for your prayers everyone!
Be blessed!
-Amy