Blog 9: September DTS Lecture Phase
LECTURE PHASE
JANUARY 2024
THANK YOU:
I want to begin by saying thank you so much for supporting me and enabling me to serve God in this way. I am so grateful for the privilege to have such amazing friends and a church family that believes in what God is doing in my life and trusts me to steward their prayers and finances for God’s kingdom. Something that I have so much gratitude for is the love that I get to come home to every time I come to Canada. It makes me really miss home and you all.
I have so much gratitude towards God because I know that it was God that allowed me to meet you all and have you be a part of my life. I really appreciate how you desire to read about what I am doing, how I am feeling and what I am learning. Thank you for praying for me, texting me and reading my updates. My heart and hope with this update is to thank you well, bless you with testimonies of what we (meaning us or you & me) have done with God and invite you into a deeper revelation of this gift that God has given us as I share about what God has taught me and allowed me to help others grow in as well.
On school related note, something that has been a big theme in this school and in my life since my last update has been this theme of gratitude and a deeper revelation of the gift that is a relationship with our Creator. With in the school it has been described as “a gift that demands a response”. The aspect of this gift that I have been exploring more is the gift of having the Holy Spirit as our helper.
In our school several of our students have expressed to how the school has transformed the way they see and approach God. My reasoning with talking about what I have learnt and how it has changed how I see/approach God is to help you have understanding of what kind of freedom or transformation is typical in our schools. I hope you enjoy and my prayer is that God speaks to you through it.
Hi all and welcome back:
In the last four months my wonderful friends/staff team and I have had the privilege of being a part of the transformational journey of our 22 students. In this new school and new role as an assistant school leader the Lord also taught me so many new things and has led me to step out in new ways. I am very excited to share with us all what God has done and taught in this season.
Since my last update I stepped into a new role of assistant school leading, finished eleven weeks of lectures in Amsterdam and spent roughly six weeks in Mexico leading an outreach team. Before I continue with this update, I would love to share with us what God had been putting on my heart to share when praying for each one of you and this update.
When praying about this update I was reminded of Psalms 139, specifically verses 13 to 18. I really believe that the Lord is inviting us to be practiced at receiving and becoming more aware of His love towards us. When we love someone, it often brings us great joy to make them feel loved, valued and understood. I believe that it is no different with God, I believe that it brings God joy to watch us receive His love. I want to encourage us all and remind us all that the Lord delights in loving us and making us feel loved, so lets take a moment to pray and ask God to help us be more aware of the love He already has towards us.
After praying I invite us to read and let God speak through this section of Psalms 139 below. When praying I felt God highlighting verses 17 and 18 to us today. In these verses it teaches us that number of thoughts that God has towards us outnumber the grains of sand on this earth. What is amazing is that because God is Holy and can’t sin, these thoughts towards us/about us come from a place of pure love and affection. I believe that the Lord is wanting us to practice hearing these thoughts He has about us because He values us and we shouldn’t have a thought about ourselves that God doesn’t also have about us.
I also want to excite us at the fruit of practicing this daily and praying daily “God help me to be more aware of your love towards me”. I really believe that it will lead us into greater levels of gratitude, help us to see ourselves more from the truest perspective (His perspective) and allow us to love people better. This is because I believe it becomes so much easier to love from a place of being fully loved. This is what it has done for me and I hope that in doing this you would experience this fruit too.
Psalms 139:13-18 (ESV)
13 For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.[a]
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.
My Friends/The September DTS Staff Team
OVERVIEW:
My time in the September DTS
Testimonies
Outreach - Team Mexico
Prayer Requests
September DTS - Lecture Phase:
New Season & New Role:
I know I have already said thank you but I want to say thank you again. I really am grateful for this opportunity you have given me to serve God in this way. During this new season of DTS my understanding of what was given to us by Jesus’s death and resurrection has grown so much. And because of it I have had the privilege of growing in my ability to lead, disciple and point our students towards a deeper revelation of this gift as well. So again, thank you for giving me this opportunity to serve but also helping me to grow in my ability to serve. It has been a joy to be able to love better and disciple this new group of students better.
As mentioned above I have had the privilege of stepping into a new role of assistant school leading this DTS. In this new role I have all the usual staff responsibilities like facilitating lecture times, planning our outreaches, prepping teachings, leading groups when doing evangelism and doing one on one mentoring/discipleship with some of the students. On the left I have included our staff schedule to give us a better overview of what we do as staff during our DTS lecture phase. If you have any questions or are curious about any part of our schedule please let me know and I would love to explain and share more about it.
Something new that I have experienced in this new role is that I have been a part of leading the broader discipleship moments and been more involved in the many behind the scenes decisions. This has included leading/facilitating conflict resolution moments within the school, meeting with a greater scope of students, having one on one mentorship moments with other staff, deciding on which countries we will be going to, planning/budgeting next years school, etc.
The Prayer Help:
In this season I have done a lot of new things and led in new ways but something I feel to highlight was the Holy Spirit’s faithfulness to equip, teach and help me in this new season of new responsibilities. In our school we talked a lot about the Holy Spirit as our Helper, (John 14:26). And during our lecture phase a speaker mentioned that by listening to someones prayers you can figure out who in the Trinity does that person interact with the most. This of course peaked my interest and I decided to pay more attention to how I pray and I realized that I didn’t interact with the Holy Spirit as much as I did with Jesus & God, the Father. I realized I rarely asked the Holy Spirt for help, which was weird because the bible teaches us that He is our helper.
In my times with God I decided to ponder, why do I interact with the Holy Spirit the least if He is the one that lives inside of me. In one lecture, the teacher said this “God doesn’t want our polished or filtered prayers, He wants our honest prayers”. In that moment a thought came into my head, and I feel it was God saying, “I enjoy being needed by you Cliff and your neediness will never push me away. I welcome your needy prayers, so please don’t filter you neediness away from your prayer life”.
This was significant to me because in this new season I needed a lot of help with the many new things I was doing. Also in this season I began to notice more and more that obedience and the calling that God has for our lives will often take us to places of deeper reliance rather than greater independence. Do you recognize this in your own life too? I recognized this too but because I didn’t interact with the Holy Spirit often enough in my prayer life I hadn’t built a habit of praying help. So I started praying help more often and began discovering the beauty and intimacy found in reliance.
Beauty & Intimacy Found in Reliance:
Through this habit The Lord taught to me that He does in fact welcome our neediness. He taught me that our desire for His help and our desire for Him to participate with us is something that He desires. He desires to participate in every aspect or part of our lives, not just when we are at our limits. This was hard for me to fully comprehend because something that I have struggled with in the past, along with our students, is this fear of coming across as too needy or this fear of being a burden to others. I knew that I had this fear to some extent when it came to other people but I didn’t realize to what extent I have also had this fear in how I relate to God. Have you ever experienced this too?
I don’t know if this is the most correct way to interpret this passage of scripture, so if you disagree with it is totally okay. But my understanding of Matthew 18:2-4 below, is that when it comes to approaching God, God desires for us approach Him as someone who recognizes his/her need and without a fear of being rejected for his/her neediness like how a child approaches his/her parents whom he/she knows is good.
But In this season I felt the Father saying to me “Cliff I love being needed by you. When you declare your desire or need for me, it makes me feel so loved and wanted by you. Your want/need for My help, My love and My affirmation will never be burdensome for Me. Trust that I am a good, gracious & patient Father. I will disciple you as you express your needs and requests to Me.” When someone you are in love with, expresses their need for you in their lives doesn’t it give you this warm fuzzy feeling? I want us to remember that God is so in love with us that the Father watched His Son endure the most painfully humiliating death so that He could pay our debts, give us a gift (His Spirit) and be in a relationship with us. He died for us to give us a gift. To me that blows my mind. He loves us and because of the magnitude of His love, He is not pushed away by our neediness but draws close to us in our neediness and disciples us as we express our neediness.
Matthew 18:2-4
2 And He called a child to Himself and set him among them, 3 and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you [b]change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 So whoever will humble himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
I don’t think God was saying to me that He was promising to answer my every request or grant every desire I had, because that would be terrible. I know that I am flawed and that not all my desires are actually good for me or what’s best for me. I believe that God was just simply trying to teach me that He delights when I choose to trust/rely on Him and invite Him into more aspects of my life as I pray “Help” more often. I believe that He wanted me to know that my wants and needs are not a burden to Him. My desire for His affirmation, love and involvement in my life will not push Him away.
Because I originally had this fear of being a burden to God or a fear of being too needy with God, I came to God more often when I was at my limit or when I didn’t know what else to say/ do or when I had a big life decision to make. Do we see this in our own lives? When I think about it, I don’t think that God wants to only be involved in our lives in our moments of need. He loves us enough that He wants to be a part of our lives all the time. I recognize now that this fear caused me to miss out on more regularly experiencing God and His discipleship in the ordinary and mundane.
If you relate:
This understanding that God welcomes our neediness towards Him has led me to have so much more regular conversations with God, hear His voice clearer and experience His leadership more frequently in my life. Simple because I just invited Him into things more often and because I asked for help when I could have done it on my own. This journey of removing this fear from my life has taught me that an amazing conversation or question we can ask God is this;
“God is there a fear in my life that is limiting me from experiencing you more in the ordinary or mundane? Is there a lie that I am believing about you that is limiting you from having more of me? Holy Spirit what truth do I need to hear and learn to experience a greater level of intimacy with you.”
In the same way I have invited my students to ask God these questions, I would love to invite us to also ask God these questions.
In the beginning of this update I talked about how God delights in loving us and making us feel loved. One way we can become more aware of the love that is already available to us is by taking the time to ask the Holy Spirit if there is anything we need to hear or learn from Him to experience a greater level intimacy. If you related with me in this fear or if reading my testimony of what God did in my life made you think “do I have a fear like that?” I would encourage you to try and pray the prayer above. It blessed me a lot and it had led me to greater levels of gratitude and joy in my daily conversations with God. My hope and desire is that it would bless you too.
Thank you for taking the time read about what God has been doing in my life. Everything that I have been learning in this season is what I have been also using to impact and disciple my current students. So in the same way I have grown more aware of what has been stopping me from experiencing more of the Love that was always available to me, my students have also been stepping into a greater levels of intimacy with God and it shows in how they talk about God and their desire to continue doing missions.
Testimonies:
Baptisms:
This September DTS we had the privilege of baptizing two of our students, Noah (from Australia) who is standing to my left in the picture below & Caleb (from Mexico) in the “watch me win” shirt.
The picture below and also shown in the beginning of this update is an important picture to me because it is a testimony of the multiplication that we get to be a part of thanks to your generosity and prayers. It is a testimony of multiplication because;
I was mentored by the other Noah, standing in the middle.
Then in September 2022, I had the privilege of discipling/mentoring Moises in far right. He is an amazing friend of mine and during his time in missions God gave him a greater heart for missions and a huge desire to evangelize to the unreached. Since his DTS he has preached many times at his church and even in the streets of Amsterdam.
Now in this years September DTS, Moises and I had the privilege of discipling and mentoring Noah (from Australia) & Caleb. Both of whom are currently in Japan on their 3 month missions trip.
It gets even more exciting becuase Caleb is already thinking going into full time missions by joining our staff team next year. This means this upcoming September DTS 2024/2025, Caleb will be mentoring and discipling future missionaries also.
So once again I want to say thank you because I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of seeing this multiplication without your generosity and without your prayers. This testimony and these baptisms are thanks to you too.
Multiplication:
In addition to the above mentioned baptism, we have also seen more multiplication be confirmed and more of our current students express interest in going into full time missions.
1 student from last years January DTS has joined us as a full time staff in our worship and prayer team.
1 student from last years January DTS did a 3 month bible school with us at YWAM Amsterdam and has joined the January DTS staff team where she will also be discipling future missionaries and leading teams to share the gospel in the Middle East.
3 students from last years January DTS are confirmed and are signed up to do our 9 month bible school called the School of Biblical Studies. If you are interested in learning more about what you have helped these students desire to do take a look at this link. YWAM Amsterdam - School of Biblical Studies
3 students from this years September DTS have expressed thier desire to step into full time missions by joining our staff team. One of them, Caleb, has already sent in his application.
Several students have expressed thier desire to continue studying the bible through either of our 3 month or 9 month bible school programs. I have had the privilege of walking closely through with some of these students, one of them has already applied to the SBS.
Several of our students who already had some background in missions, some of them are kids of missionaries and have been in missions their entire lives and some of them have done other short term missions trips. These students have expressed thier desire and interest to continue in missions in what every capacity God desires for them.
This is just a little taste of the fruit/multiplication from the most recent schools I staffed and I am sure there will be more testimonies to share on our graduation day.
Outreach - Team Mexico:
Meet Team Mexico:
Our Time in Mexico:
Since my last update we have completed roughly 6 weeks in Mexico. I currently have a WhatsApp group chat where you can hear more regular updates about my time in Mexico and if you are interested you can use the link below to join.
https://chat.whatsapp.com/I5Bc5RmRM2gIZO254wkaGo
In my next update I plan to share more detailed testimonies of what God has done during our time in Mexico, so please stay tuned!!! But for the mean time what I can say is that it has been an amazing outreach so far. We have had the opportunity to evangelize to many people within the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. We also were able connected those whom we meet up with again with a local church that we regularly partnered with/attended and with the YWAM Zapopan base which hosts regular worship nights open to the public. Our heart and aim when doing outreach is to introduce people to the Gospel and get them connected with a local church/base where they can continue to be discipled even after we are gone.
Local Church: Origen La Iglesia
Local YWAM Base: YWAM Zapopan
Below you can see some pictures of our time in Mexico and some of the people we got to share the Gospel with. During our time I have watched our students grow in thier ability to preach & share the gospel in a cross cultural context, grow in their desire to see people know God, grow in their love for Jesus and grow in their boldness to make God known. I am continually surprised by our students lack of fear of man and their initiative tell strangers about Jesus. Thank you for allowing me have this opportunity to grow myself and help these students also grow in thier ability of fulfilling the great commission.
Matthew 28:19-20 New International Version (NIV)
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Prayer Requests:
That is the end of this update. Once again I just want to say thank you so much for supporting me and enabling me to serve the Lord in this way. I look forward to what testimonies I will get to share with you all at the end of our outreach to Mexico and after this September DTS graduates. If you would like to keep prayerfully supporting me I would greatly appreciate it. You can check out some of the prayer points below. Thank you.
Prayer Points:
That we would continue to see God move in Mexico and that more people would get to hear/experience the gospel.
That God would help my students and I break free from the fear of man and that our outreach team would be unified in a love for God & one another.
Prayer that God give my co-leader and I the wisdom to lead this outreach team well and into a deeper relationship with Jesus.
Prayer that God would give my outreach team and I a greater love for the Mexican people.
Prayer that we would continue to see miracles and healings here in Mexico.
Prayer that I would continue to fall more in love with God, His word and fall more in love with those whom He loves.
THANK YOU FOR READING & PRAYING!!!!! Love you all lots, thank you :)
Enjoy these Random Highlights:
