Greg's DTS summary...weeks one and two

Hello everybody. Greg here. Farrell does such a great job of getting all of the stuff up on the Blog I thought that it would be nice for me to put some stuff up here. So for the next week or so I am going to be catching you up on the things that we have been learning while we are here. There are some amazing stories and we will see how those get interspersed amongst the teachings. Suffice it to say, we are growing in leaps and bounds. So here in a nutshell are our first two weeks:

Week 1 – Andy Byrd – Andy is a staff person here a bit younger than Farrell and I with some kids. He is a fiery red head with a great passion for God. Andy was here to “prepare the soil of our hearts for what God wants to plant.” Here are some of the things he talked about:

-          He had a vision for us, he said God saw us as generals. God was going to give us new marching orders. God was going to use this time to rekindle the flame, and to refresh us. This all sounded great to us.

-          He talked about the first line of the Lord’s prayer: “Our Father in Heaven.” And pointed out that the intimate “Father” was connected to the infinite “heaven.” Intimate and infinite together, both personal and powerful. This is our relationship with our God.

-          We should not seek to honor and obey God because we love Him. This is works based salvation. It is a striving, that I must serve God more and more because I love Him so. That is trying to make God love us. The true way comes clear when we realize that God first loved us. Out of this great revelation of His love for us everything else flows.

There was so much more but this is only meant to be a short summary of the week. God really gave us two pictures of Himself this week. One was of God Himself dancing with abandon over us in Zeph 3:17 and the other was having breakfast with Jesus on the beach like Peter when we mess up.

Week 2 – Bill Payne – Bill was here to talk about the Nature and Character of God. Here are some of the things he talked about:

-          We all have “truth boxes” through which we judge every passing thought. What if those “truth boxes” have falsehood in them? Let’s pray for a fresh revelation of the true character of God and ask Him to clean out our “truth boxes.”

-          We will wrestle with some sort of deception until the time of Jesus’ return. Some of what is in our truth box is actually a lie.

-          There are two areas in our truth box which are paramount in our view formation: our picture of ourself and our picture of God.

-          No one has a problem with God, they have a problem with their perception of God.

-          The Word of God must replace our truth box.

-          God created us for relationship with Him.

-          Understanding how God sees things: His love for the lost, His compassion for the hurting, His grief over sin and death, will spur on our own compassion, love, grief, etc.

-          I am not valuable because Christ died for me. Christ died for me because I am valuable.

-          We are not priceless. We have a price tag. It reads “every drop of Jesus’ blood, every stripe upon His back, every bead of sweat, every tear…”

There is obviously more. I have eight pages of notes from Bill and they are full. The one big thing I am taking from this is asking to receive a fresh revelation of God’s vision for the world, His vision for me, and the power to do something about it.