“I’m Already Pleased.”

Do you want to have your mind blown over and over again over the course of a week? Do you want to hear story after story of God working miracles and doing huge things through His followers? Do you want to be wrecked in your understanding of just how much God wants to work through you?

Well, if so, just invite Jono (pronounced like John-o) and Mary Turner in to teach you about the Holy Spirit. They came to teach us this week, and I cannot believe how much happened over the course of 5 days – so much that it’s hard to know where to begin. Jono and Mary are long-time YWAMers, missionaries, and ministers with incredible stories to tell and wisdom to share that will probably turn your ideas about following Jesus almost upside down. At least, that’s what happened to me.

After telling us some of their own stories, Jono and Mary began their teaching with Peter’s words in Acts 2:38 (which they came back to many times during the week): “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness [remission] of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Jono explained that repentance really means totally changing the way you think, and remission of sins means their complete annihilation (and our complete freedom from them), not just forgiveness. Coming to Jesus transforms our thinking as we repent and Jesus frees us from all condemnation and shame because He died for us and absolutely cancelled the record of our wrong! We are qualified to be just as good as Jesus in God’s eyes, and God himself comes to stay in us as the Holy Spirit.

To be free, we do nothing except believe and confess, then let go of ourselves. Being free is all about completely surrendering ourselves to God. You don’t have to try and be an awesome Christian – you already are an awesome Christian. You are God’s son or daughter. And you don’t cease to be a child of God even if you aren’t a very good one. You don’t have to try to be spiritual – you already are spiritual.  You don’t have to work yourself up to have faith because God is the One who gives faith. All we have to do is ask Him for it! You don’t have to try to do anything because Jesus has already done everything to make you a pure, unblemished, and precious one of His children. None of your doubts or questions and nothing in your past offends God. He is not a stingy God; He is a good Father who so delights in healing His kids and giving them good gifts (maybe even more than you thought you needed!). He loves to give you grace and faith even more than you love to receive it. So stop fighting! Just surrender to Him! Let go of control.

As usual, there’s no way I can do justice to Jono and Mary’s teaching and God’s wisdom in a blog post, which bothers me because it’s so ridiculously life changing. There are massive truths here that really do change the way we think. So if reading this doesn’t change anything, maybe you should read it again, and ask God to transform and renew your mind. If you ask Him, He will gladly do it!

On Tuesday, we took some time in lecture to just come before God and surrender to Him by praying, listening, and resting before Him. During that time, God’s spoke in a still, small voice in my thoughts, and what I heard most clearly was,

“You don’t have to do anything to please me – I’m already pleased!”

This word from God fit perfectly in the journey that I have been on since I got here, so as people shared after the time of surrender, I spoke up and told about what God has been doing in me (it was quite a bit shorter than this):

When I decided to come on a DTS, part of the reason that I wanted to go was to learn how to hear the voice of God, particularly because I wanted Him to tell me what to do with my future. Little did I know just how much God wanted me to learn and how much He wanted to work on me in this time, far beyond just telling me what to do with my life. In fact, I think now that growing God usually means a lot of things happen at once. It is a relationship, after all.

God began His work by exposing all my insecurities and trust issues where He is concerned, essentially telling me that it’s no good for Him to tell me my future before I can completely trust Him with it. He is right, of course, because with just about every future path I think about my first inclination is that my skills, abilities, and knowledge are inadequate to get the job done, and I won’t really be able to do it. God replies, “Of course you’re inadequate on your own! But you’re not on your own, are you? I’m right here with you – I’m right there in you – and I’m so ready to work through you to do amazing things. You just have to stop trusting yourself and trust me.”

The very first week God began his work. Even as I was pretty sure I would not really hear God’s voice, I asked him to speak to me, and He did! He continued speaking in the following weeks – words, verses, visions – and gradually I began to trust that this still, small voice in my thoughts couldn’t be anything other than God. He told me to read the book of James, which has perfectly fit with my journey here. During the second week, which focused on worship, He told me one night to go to John 4:23. It turned out that it was a verse that I had heard many times but could never tell you where it was, and it was exactly what we talked about that week – worshiping the Father in Spirit and truth. That same week, He began to tell me about future, or at least to get me prepared to hear about it. Through a vision He told me that He has a crazy adventure planned for me and Him, and that I should trust Him with it. He showed it to me like a backpacking trip, climbing a mountain with God walking beside me – which is, of course, the perfect illustration for me because I love the kind of adventure that comes with hiking up a mountain. After that, He even gave me the words and melody of a song to describe that vision (see my post “A Week of Worship” for details), and I have never written a song before in my life. Gradually, God was destroying my doubts, and I truly realized that hearing from God could be a constant thing (not a once-in-a-while thing) and that I could trust Him to tell me what I needed to know at the right time. He isn’t going to suddenly go silent if I keep asking for His wisdom in truth.

So God was (and is) getting me ready. He was saying, “This [your future] is gonna be big, so you’re gonna have to trust me before I can even tell you what it is.” And since then he has just kept preparing me, working on my heart. During week three, which was on repentance, I came before God and before my class and repented of my lack of trust in God which resulted in my fears concerning my future and my adequacy. Then the next week, Kristin Williams came one night and told us about being completely sold out for Jesus (see “Spirit Directed Worship Chaos”), and Dean Sherman prepared us practically for relationships, which is the foundation of following Jesus. And now this week, God brought Jono and Mary in at just the right time to tell us that following God is not about trying, it’s about surrendering, and when we surrender it’s ridiculous what God’s power will do through us.

So that finally brings me back to this word that God spoke to me on Tuesday, and you can see how it fits in my story. But still, it fits even better than I’ve told you. On Monday, the day before I received those words from God, I was spending some time outside just listening for His voice, and He told me to go to Luke 3:22. You might know that reference, but again, I didn’t know what verse that was until I read it. So I turned to it in my Bible and read, “and the Holy Spirit descended on Him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, saying ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’” I realized the next day that unlike other times in Scripture where God speaks from heaven about Jesus (“This is my beloved son”), here God speaks directly to Jesus (“You are my beloved son”). I knew for sure, then, that God meant this to be His word specifically for me, especially because now I am his son, just like Jesus! His Holy Spirit has descended upon me and He loves me dearly. He is pleased with who I am now regardless of what I do! I don’t have to prove myself to God or earn His pleasure but just let Him work through me. So many times I have hesitated to do something because I thought I might fail, but I don’t have to worry about failing! I don’t have to achieve anything, and I don’t have to prove anything before God or people. And strangely, the realization that I am not required to do or to prove anything makes me want to do more, not less. Yep, I’m free indeed!

I meant to add a whole lot more to this post about the Holy Spirit, but I think it’s better not to make them super, super long, so I’ll put it in another post. Before I end this one, though, I’ll leave with a little example of how all this has applied to my life.

As most of you know, I play the piano, and I have for almost 15 years now. Yet for all those 15 years of playing classical piano, I never branched out and played with a worship band. That was because playing based on chords is quite different than reading music and I had a silly idea that I wouldn’t be any good at playing anything other than what I could read as notes on a page. Of course, I always knew that I would never know how good I was unless I tried, but I never gave it a whirl until now.  I had been thinking about trying for a few weeks, but this week I finally got the push I needed to actually go for it. Cheyne, one of our DTS leaders, had seen me playing something a couple weeks back, so he asked me if I would play worship with Him on Thursday. I still hesitated, but he told me to at least practice with them and see how it went. In the end, I did play worship for the first time on Thursday, and it went quite well! I can’t do anything fancy yet, but at least I don’t mess anything up too noticeably :) .

More on the Holy Spirit in the next post!!

Surrendered,

Dan