China on the Horizon

The Day has finally arrived and I will be heading off to China with a team of ten other people on Sept. 23rd at 4am. Much preparation has gone into this trip and I know God is going to move in more insane ways then I can even imagine. We are going to be gone for ten weeks, nine of which will be spent in mainland China, the other week will be in Hong Kong for our debrief. It is becoming more and more evident this team has been divinely assembled by God for this season and has been anointed to do the Lord’s will and work in China.

We are going to be doing many different kinds of ministries and I know we are going to see many Chinese come to Jesus. Sadly though, I will not be able to update my blog while I am in China, but you can be sure I will have many stories upon my return to Kona. I would like to ask all of you who read this keep me and the team in your prayers as we are definitely going to need it. China is still a closed nation and Christians are still persecuted in some areas. Please pray for safety, team unity, and the moving of the Holy Spirit; thank you so much for all of your prayers, they do mean so much! If you would like to contact me you can email me securely at cbergus@fastmail.fm

As sweet as Honey

Many times we hear comparisons of God’s love that I think are absolutely ridiculous, to be completely honest. God gave his only son, Jesus, to come and die for all of our sins. Do you realize that those who haven't even be conceived yet have already been forgiven for the sins that they will commit once they are brought into this world? As Christians we seem to think that people who are 'non-believers' are so far away from us and how could they ever get to our level, they are such 'sinners'. While Jesus died for their sins and your own sins at the exact same time, people who aren't saved yet have already been forgiven and the only thing separating us from them is that we have believed with our hearts and spoken with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord. Even sinners are moved by the Holy Spirit, conviction is only brought through the Holy Spirit and conviction is how you are lead to Jesus.

We don't even know what the full love of God is like though we get a small picture of it from scripture. Thankfully scripture is written and God is always new, every aspect of God's love couldn't be captured in one book if you tried. The even crazier thing is we are called to love each other and love our neighbors like Christ loves the church. He became man, from God and displayed His love for us in dying on a cross to set us free from the punishment of sin. How do we start to even love each other like this? I think the best display of this is looking at the gospels and at 1 Corinthians 13. Jesus displayed His love for all on this earth in many different mediums and 1 Cor. 13 gives us the next best set of guidelines to follow on how to love others.

Jesus tells us in the gospels that the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves, which is done in many different ways. I want to take a look at John 13: 34-35, Jesus gives a new command to his disciples. He tells them that people will recognize the disciples by the way they love each other, not by the miracles they do or by the way they act or even the attitude they have; but by how they love each other. If we started to display our love for one another like Jesus displayed his love for the church, Christians wouldn't have such a bad reputation all over the world. We need to let our actions do the talking and not our words -1 John 3:18. I challenge you to read the books and passages I have included in this blog and meditate on them and ask God and yourself how you can better love others. I will be writing a blog next week about what I am going to be doing for the next three months and will be including ways you can partner with me in prayer for the China team as we go forth in God.

As always, I want to be able to pray for you specifically, so please contact me with any need. I look forward to hearing from you.

Leadership

The students I usually talk about doing the DTS are not the only students around base. The staff of the DTS are also taking a class at the same time. We are involved in a school called BLS (Basic Leadership School), it is a school that runs alongside a DTS, except it's for the staff. It helps us to develop as leaders as we prepare for leading an outreach team and lead small groups during the Lecture phase of the DTS. A few of the requirements for the course are, keeping a journal, two book reports, and lead a week of DTS. Leading a week of DTS means that we take on the roll of the leader of the school and prepare for the week, get the speaker set up and do all of the announcements in front of the class. My week to lead is in late September, I am actually really excited for it and a little bummed that I only get to lead one week as I want to have more practice at leading the class.

For the first book report we read "Developing the Leader Within You," by John Maxwell. It was a great book and it had a ton of great tips on how to lead. Some of the best tips were that leaders are not managers and one of the most important skills a leader can have is to inspire, because if he can't inspire then he won’t have people following him. Attitude was the second largest aspect to a good leader, a good attitude will change how you act and react to your surroundings and conflicts that may arise. The second book I read was "The Leadership Paradox," by Denny Gunderson. It was a great book and I loved it. One of my favorite parts was that Denny takes stories from the gospels that display how Jesus leads his disciples and turns them into narratives, expanding on the dialogue and highlighting the leadership qualities of Jesus. He then takes the qualities that he has highlighted and expands on the concepts, making for a great model to base our leadership off of. The greatest thing about the book is it is all biblical and all of the leadership concepts are blatantly modeled by Jesus.

God is really developing me as a leader and I am looking forward to our outreach time in China and everything the Lord has to grow, mold and change me into!

China's on My Mind

Outreach teams were officially announced on July 23rd and Erica Gustafson and I are will be leading a team to China! It is still early to be talking about outreach, but outreach is the practicing ground for everything the students learn during the lecture phase of a DTS. My co-leader and I have taken some time to start planning our trip. We are expecting great things! The Lord has assembled an amazing team to China, and we are taking 9 students, eight of them are Korean and one is Taiwanese. I will be continuing to update as more is decided in the area of our outreach.

As the team has formed for outreach we have been spending a lot of time praying into what our trip is supposed to look like and what is on the Lord's heart for the areas we will be in. Our whole class has taken time to intercede for each of the outreach locations, to receive prophetic words and prophetic pictures to encourage each of the teams and to give them an idea of what the Lord has in store for each of them. The Lord has started to place His heart for China on me and I am spending a lot of time seeking Him and what He has for our outreach to China.

Thank you for your prayers, emails, letters and financial support. I would love to pray for you in any way I can, so please contact me so I can lift you and your needs up to the Father. Please pray for me as I continue to seek His face and direction, along with Erica for our outreach team. If you feel lead to support me financially please see the sidebar for more information on how to do that as I do need outreach funds. Until next time…

Intimacy

This past week Matt Rawlins spoke to our DTS about The Fear of the Lord. If you would like to listen to his teachings you can go to www.awakendts.com and they are available at the left side, mid page. He spoke on a lot of different things, but all of it led back to the topic of the week, Fear of the Lord. It had to be one of the best teachings on Fear of the Lord I've ever heard.

This past week has been full of brand new revelation. I've been meditating on John 15 this week and what it looks like to abide in Jesus. Out of spending time with the Lord I have been taken deep in Him, knowing Him more and more; not the kind of knowing most of us think of. When we hear the word “know” most of us think of knowledge, but when the word is used in the Old Testament it can be translated to understand and to be vulnerable. Like it says at the beginning of Genesis "Adam knew Eve and she conceived." I'm now coming into a deeper knowledge of who God is and how He is vulnerable to us, that He would let us know Him. God is constantly blowing me away with His greatness. I challenge you to spend more intimate time with God this week, you will grow in deeper understanding.

We also announced outreach locations to the students this week! Our DTS will be going to seven locations; Oman, Azerbaijan, South America, Thailand/Cambodia, India, Haiti, and China. Erica Gustafson and I will be leading the team to China! The teams were announced yesterday after class and we had our first team meeting. Let me tell you, the Lord’s hand is all over our team! It has been so divinely assembled. I have a high expectancy for the amazing things God is going to be doing in the next couple months and during outreach, which is still two months away. Please begin to pray for Erica and I, as well as our team.

I look forward to writing again next weekend. I expect the Lord is going to show up in even more amazing ways this week than we have seen yet and look forward to telling you about them! Please keep me in your prayers and I would love to hear from you!

Glory

How appropriate is the title of this blog entry! Honestly people, God has been showing up in amazing ways in my life and there is so much to write about with such little space. I want to start by saying that the God of the entire Bible is the God of today and that is something all of us need to get in our understanding. God is pursuing us more than we are pursuing him, He wants to encounter us more than we want Him to encounter us. He is after us with such a passion that if it was revealed to us we would probably die. GOD LOVES US!
God is showing up in ways that I never thought were possible or even still active in the church today. He started to show His Spirit more to me in the past month and a half than He ever has in my life and it is perfect for the season I am going through. His perfect timing is always perfect for our life and we shouldn't ever be trying to rush God. Onto what I really want to address, God is showing up with scents and manifestations of His Spirit that are blowing me out of the water. Holy Spirit laughter will fall in a group of people and they will start laughing uncontrollably, it's glorious. The scents that we have been smelling are the scents of Heaven, things like smelling vanilla in a corporate meeting, or the scent of a brush fire ( there wasn't a fire anywhere near us). I asked God what the smell was and He told me that it was the smell of "the burnt offering." There is so much to write about. I will be posting another blog this weekend about the amazing things God has been doing in the DTS. There is so much passion in my heart right now. GLORY! I pray that the Lord will encounter each and every person who reads this.

Deeper Place

The Lord has really been blessing me a lot lately. My mom came to visit me here in Kona from June 1st-8th. We had a great time snorkeling and seeing the island. I also got a chance to send out a whole ton of support letters with her by my side, helping me by addressing, putting on return address stickers and stamps and oh, the fun of licking each envelope! Thank you all for reading it.

Lately the Lord has been taking me into deeper places with Him. I am discovering what Jesus meant when he spoke of knowing his Father. Intimacy, which in Greek means "to know," is a huge theme of the New Testament whether the word is used directly or not. Jesus often spoke of how he only did what the Father did and he spoke of his closeness with the Father, both of those things hit really deep on intimacy. The Lord has been showing me those places, reading his word and discovering the character of God and what it means to be like him or 'part of the vine.' This next season is going to hold a lot for me in regards to knowing Jesus better and becoming like Him in all aspects of life. I can explain it like this, when you hang out with your best friend a lot you start to pick up their traits, mannerisms and characteristics, it is the same when you spend a lot of time with Jesus, you know Him and start to become like Him.

The DTS I am staffing this summer is starting to pick up speed. The staff for the DTS went on an advance (we don't retreat) this past week where we shared testimonies and then prophesied over each other to encourage each other. It was probably the most amazing time I have had during my time with YWAM. The presence of the Holy Spirit was so thick in the room we were in we didn't want to leave. We went with our own agenda and ended up doing what the Spirit wanted to do, which was ministering to one another for almost 48 hours. The result of that time was a heavily united staff, this is so evident from all of the response from people on base saying how bonded our staff is already and it isn't even 2 weeks before the school starts. The summer is going to hold many amazing things. The Spirit is going to be moving in new ways this summer that are going to break people’s boxes and paradigms. I can't wait to share with you all the things that are going to happen on this campus.