What Went Down–7 November 2010

Today we did a very interesting session in determining our spiritual gifts. Now the way that’s put makes it sound like “speaking in tongues” and radical stuff like that, but what we actually mean is the talents and skills God has given you. The moment you use these talents for the glory of God is that it becomes spiritual gifts!

CLICK HERE to access the PDF file of the survey we did. You can download or print it from there if your browser supports the Adobe plugin. If not, you can just download the PDF.

Alex talked a little about the survey we would do to figure out what our spiritual gifts might be, and reminded us that as teens, we wouldn’t have complete or concrete ideas about ourselves just yet…and so we went through the survey, consisting of 80 statements, and each of these had to be rated from 1 to 5 where 1 is “not characteristic of me” and 5 is “very characteristic of me/all the time.”

When we’d answered all the statements, they had to be tallied into a table and separated into the main headings:

• Leadership
• Administration
• Teaching
• Knowledge
• Wisdom
• Prophecy
• Discernment
• Exhortation
• Shepherding
• Faith
• Evangelism
• Apostleship
• Service
• Mercy
• Giving
• Hospitality

Once we’d checked out what each of us saw as our spiritual gifts, we had a chat about them, and realized sometimes you may very well have some gifts God has blessed you with that He wants you to use for his glory!

Check out the site of LifeWay Christian Resources:

• CLICK HERE for the article explaining each gift
• CLICK HERE for the PDF if the other link didn’t work

What Went Down–15 September 2010

After a quick “tea-party” in the garage, Sue Fuller took us for youth today, in Alex’s absence. We discussed the topic “Battlefield of the Mind” and started with a reading from Philippians and a Proverbs passage after that. Here’s a quick summary of what we discussed:

• Thoughts are like seeds, if watered they will grow and flourish; this means both Godly and ungodly thoughts: if we “sow” Godly seeds, things like love, forgiveness, humility and service will then flourish. If we “sow” ungodly seeds, we’ll get unforgiveness, anger, rudeness and selfishness.
• The New Age way tells us that if YOU believe it, you can do it, God’s way is completely opposite; He says if you believe HIM, by HIS WILL will you do it.
• Our words and actions come about as a result of our thoughts, as the Bible says, “Whatever the heart is full of, the mouth overflows with.”
• Past pain cannot justify bad thoughts and words about those pains today. In the words of Joyce Myers, “Our past pain may explain why we are suffering but it must not be an excuse to stay in bondage.”
• Jesus promised he would se the captives free, that includes those who He destined to be freed from bondage and evil influences.
• The Holy Spirit reveals God’s wisdom to us, the question is do we hear? We beg God for direction and decisions in our lives, but then we’re so busy that God’s words never reach us: we’re just too busy to hear his answer! Satan wants to overload and overwork our minds so we can’t hear God: that’s Satan’s biggest tool against God: our busyness.

There are 6 different types of “mind” we need to make sure we get back to reality from if we get stuck in them (and boy do we!):

The Wondering Mind: When we’re talking to someone, in church or even praying, our mind wanders to wondering other things, usually inane stuff like what the weather will be tomorrow, and the like.

The Confused Mind: When we hear something from God, we reason against the logic of His statement (God can’t seriously mean that?) and wonder what he “really” means by what He’s telling us.

Doubting Mind: Similar to the Confused Mind, but this happens when a person doubts that their faith is good enough to do something;  they pray for healing for a terminal cancer patient, yet that patient dies. They begin to question their own faith, but they don’t realize that death for Christians is the ultimate healing!

Judgemental Mind: Just like the Bible passage regarding you trying to get a speck out of your brother’s eye while you’ve got a plank in your own eye, we need to remember God is the ultimate Judge, and we are not God.

Passive Mind: We need to keep our minds active in God, else we’ll end up like this, being lukewarm, and we read in the Bible the Jesus “spits out” lukewarm Christians.

So to fight these negative “minds” we need to:

1. Read God’s Word more
2. Praise Jesus often
3. Establish a relationship with Christ through prayer.

Lastly, right thinking has nothing to do with Salvation. Yes, once you’re saved it helps, but IT WON’T GET YOU THERE.

Remember, words are a powerful thing, your mind perceives what you say as truth, that’s scientific.

Thanks to Sue for a very engaging session while Alex was away this week.

What Went Down–5 September

DVD session was the order of the day; we watched a very intriguing DVD entitled “UFOs, Aliens and the Bible” by Gary Bates. [click the link to read the article on the topic at AiG's site.]

We started off by giving our own impressions of whether UFOs and aliens existed; some of us said it might be simply American tests, others said maybe, maybe not; all in all we were generally indecisive. However, the DVD firmly set out that yes, we ARE alone in this universe on this Earth, because God created the heavens and everything to let us see how great He really is. As Gary Bates noted:

• Interstellar space travel is impossible if using the laws of Physics.
• People claiming to be abducted by aliens are usually found to be involved in occult activities or dark supernatural groups or cults.
• The statement that “If life evolved here, it must have also done so in this universe” immediately disproves aliens because we all know evolution is a dud; thus evolution on other planets is also impossible.

These and the many other things outlined by Gary, such as how crop circles are a hoax (there is a professional company that actually replicates these in one night…just the way “aliens” were supposed to have done them.

Having just heard this conclusive evidence about aliens and UFOs, we all felt quite enlightened [in the Christian way!]. Check the above link for more on the associated book with the DVD.

What Went Down–15 August 2010

If you’d like to see the framework slideshow we discussed, click the link to download the PPT file: Love: Us vs God [clean].

Today we discussed how both the world and God sees love, and, after watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2LhI-RLX84 we realized that the world has a very warped idea of love, and how to deal with it.

The emotions that came through from the Eminem/Rihanna video were mostly of anger, hatred and most of all, deceit. We discussed how the world sees relationships and how to build on them, and then read this passage from 1 Corinthians about God’s views on love.

That passage was so different to what came out in the first video, a point which we chatted about, plus how we know if God is speaking to us of our relationships and how we can prevent ourselves from being taken for a ride by someone we care about; all of this is easier with God’s guidance!

Discuss the slideshow with family and friends, feel free to use it and think about the world vs God when it comes to love!

What Went Down–30 May 2010

I’ve managed to get clever and alter the publishing date, but yes, caught out, I’m sorry for not posting this one earlier…

So according to our plan it was the Armour of God we’d be discussing and looking at today, so armed with Bibles in laps we started off…or not quite, because our first obstacle was where exactly in the Bible the passage about the Armour of God actually was…this drew blank stares from most of us because we actually couldn’t quite remember it’s location…luckily, it was Ephesians in which we found the passage, and so we began dissecting the different meanings of the different parts of the Armour of God.

I’ll briefly summarize the points that we talked about:

• Belt of Truth: Truth stops you being embarrassed by lies or probing questions, stops your “spiritual pants” from falling down
• Breastplate of Righteousness: Protects your heart and keeps you right with God.
• Shoes for the readiness of the Gospel: Take the gospel and be ready to share it with everyone!
• Shield of Faith: Keeps you believing in what you believe, that Christ is Lord, stops bad things in life from shaking your faith (note: doesn’t stop bad things from happening to you though)
• Helmet of Salvation: Keeps your mind safe so you keep knowing you’re saved!
• Sword of the Spirit: The only weapon you actually have, God fights your battles for you, you must be stronger in defence.

Also, we each got a worksheet in which we went back to our younger years and used aluminium foil to make each element of the Armour, along with our little explanation of the pieces. Below I’ll upload Alex’s artwork to let you see how that went…alternatively you might like to download the blank version and fill it in  yourself: we got a lot of insight from reading just this small passage, and if you do and write your own explanations, it does help you understand the love of our Lord better!

One last point to consider, that we only have one attacking piece of Armour in the entire list, so it shows us that God will fight our battle for us if we truly believe in Him!

The uploads will go live soon, so keep checking here for details!