Passion 2012

I prepared a lot for Passion this year – a lot of prayer meetings with the church and with my servants team, staying after late for the weeks beforehand practicing with the band. I was really excited for a weekend of great worship and had really high expectations. Although I wasn’t disappointed, as always I was surprised by the way God chose to speak to me; the worship was powerful, but I felt like the real breakthrough for me came through the messages – they honestly turned my worldview upside down and made me consider living in a way I had never imagined.

The first night the speaker spoke about giving God costly worship. And this really struck a chord in me because it had actually been something I had been thinking about all summer and semester – if I serve, what will I have to give up for God? What will it cost me? Is it worth it? So it really hit me when Dr. Murray said that the question was not whether it’s worth it, but whether He was worthy – a subtle difference but one that turned the analysis of whether what I was doing was worth the sacrifices of time, energy, money etc. into a simple answer of whether God is worth my life. It definitely challenged my faith, and this first night really showed me that God wanted to speak to me in a way that would change the way I see everything – not just church or my personal worship to Him, but the way I see my life.

The third night Dr. Murray talked about our work for the Lord, and how his desire is to see the evangelization of the entire world. He spoke about how if we’re not evangelizing right now wherever we are, nothing will change when we try to go somewhere else on missions. This again was another point that I had been convicted of before Passion, but hit me very strongly; I had been struggling with how to be a witness in my workplace, how to be Christian and how to show Jesus to people who are clearly lost without Him and searching for something more. And I realized during this message that I have been such a coward, so concerned with not being intrusive or bringing up sensitive topics that I didn’t consider that their souls were hanging in the balance. This led to a realization that the root of all this struggle is truly my own fear – another recurring theme from the summer, when I realized how much fear I have worshiping in front of others; although I have begun to break through that barrier in worship, I realized it continues to pervade every aspect of my life. And I need to learn how to overcome that fear in order to make my entire life a reflection of worship – to profess my love and devotion to my Lord not just during corporate worship, not just during my personal QTs, but in my public life; I realized that if I didn’t reflect the genuine passion I have for God to the outside world, it cheapened my worship and made me into a hypocrite. P.Young prayed over me, declaring that God would give me the compassion and strength I need, and to be stubborn for the Lord; I felt like these also were related to boldness in evangelism.

Then on Sunday at service, Dr. Murray spoke for the last time about signing our lives away to God. He challenged us to sign a blank sheet of paper and then allowing God to fill it with whatever He wanted. This sermon really made me feel like I was coming full circle as I reflected on the first time I gave my life to Christ, declaring that He was Lord over my life and allowing Him to do whatever He wanted with it; but it also brought to the surface more fear about what that really meant. Physical danger, living outside the US, being far away from friends and family – these were all things that came to mind as things that I didn’t know how I would be able to handle; but as I prayed, God reminded me that He would never give me more than I could bear, that if these were things He wanted from me that He would prepare me and train me for them. And so I committed to not fitting God into my neatly structured plans for the future, but to unconditionally allow Him to write my story – to rather ask Him for His vision for this world and to fit my life into His kingdom work; I still have much fear about it but I’ve begun to consider for the first time things like living outside the US for missions and I feel like God truly opened my eyes to begin to see greater things He wants to do through me.