YWAMers have historically been known as a people who walk closely with God in all that they do, encapsulating our motto “To Know God and Make Him Known”. But Jim Stier reminds us this month that neither history nor the legendary stories of missionaries of the past are enough to sustain this starving generation of YWAMers. We don’t need to know more about God; we need to know God! Moving in faith and trust unlocks this treasure, so that we no longer hide behind religious patterns and independence. True holiness is not a list of prohibited activities but our response to a close relationship with God, and is the subject of the June 5 Prayer Day. We’d love to hear from you about your prayer day experience. Just log on to www.prayerday.org to post your comments; you can also reach us at prayerday@ywam.org with any comments or concerns. To receive these prayer guides via e-mail, please register at www.ywamlist.org/prayerday. Have a blessed prayer day!
青年使命團團員向來被公認是凡事與神親密同行的人，概括在我們的格言裡＂認識神並宣揚神＂。但在這個月，Jim Stier提醒我們，以前宣教士的歷史或是傳奇，都不足以餵養這飢渴世代的青年使命團團員了。我們不需要知道更多關於神的事，而是需要真實的認識神。靠信心而行，並信靠這已顯明的珍寶，以至我們不再隱藏在宗教的模式裡。真正的聖潔並不是一長串禁止去做的列項，而是以與神建立親密關係作為回應。這也是６月５日禱告日的主題。我們很願意聽到任何有關你在禱告當日有的感想和經歷，你可以在www.prayerday.org網站寫下你的建議，也可以在prayerday@ywam.org網站上寫下你的意見和想法，而如果你想要接到禱告指引的電子信件，請在 www.ywamlist.org/prayerday. 網站註冊。
願你有一個倍受祝福的禱告日！
June Leader’s Letter by Jim Stier, YWAM Field Director of the Americas
來自Jim Stier六月份的領袖信函青年使命團美洲區主席
Dear YWAMer, 親愛的青年使命團團員
If YWAM is to be anything it seems to me that it needs to be deeply committed to holiness and authentic Biblical spirituality. The bulk of our authority in any ministry or sphere of influence proceeds directly from the authority of Jesus. “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Mat. 28:18-20)
如果在青年使命團所有事工中對我而言最重要的是，需要更深的委身在聖潔和聖經的真理中。在所有的事工中，我們最主要的權柄都應該直接源自於耶穌。耶穌進前來對他們說：＂天上地下所有的權柄都賜給我了。所以你們要去，使萬民作我的門徒，奉父子聖靈的名給他們施洗，凡我所吩咐你們的，都教訓他們遵守，我就常與你們同在，直到世界的末了。＂（馬太福音28:18-20）
If we are false, teaching one thing and living another; if we are powerless, unable to win victory over evil and weakness in our own lives; if we are preaching fulfillment while living barren lives… then we have little to offer and our teaching becomes something hypocritical and loathsome. A religious person who doesn’t practice what he preaches is one of the most hated icons right across global society. God has spoken to us through the years to first do and then teach.
如果我們是虛假的，教導是一回事，活出來又是另一回事；若我們是無能力的， 無法在生活中勝過罪與軟弱；若我們教導生命的滿足，卻活出貧瘠的生命…，那麼我們所能給予的只有一些些，我們的教導變成虛偽和可憎的.在世界上，最令人憎恨的就是，信仰者沒有將他所傳的實踐出來。神早就告訴我們，身體力行之後再教導他人。
I have asked YWAMers all over the world if they want holiness. The response has been one hundred percent positive. All of us want to be holy, and I believe by the tenor of the responses that this is a very real and deeply held desire.
我曾經問過在世界各地的青年使命團團員，他們想要成為聖潔嗎？百分之百都是正面的回應。我們都想成為聖潔，而且我深信這些回應都是人們真實且極深的渴望。
When I ask what holiness is, though, or how we get it, things get confusing. Usually the response consists of lists of things that a holy person doesn’t do. People are describing a vacuum, a nothing. The way to get there seems to be generally described as some version of trying really hard. If this view of holiness is pursued we end up with emptiness and frustration. We can see the results of this confusion right across our mission around the world. We need to get close to God and see this changed.
當我問他們到什麼是聖潔？或如何成為聖潔時，便會開始產生混淆。通常人們的反應是，列出一長串聖潔的人不會去做的事，但這是空談，普遍說來，這些方法只是要讓人認為已盡力而為了。但這種對聖潔的看法，最後會令我們感到空虛和沮喪。我們可以看見這種混淆不清的結果彌漫在我們全球的事工當中。我們必須更親近神以至看見這情況被改變。
Many of us have pondered the word that Dr. Atef gave to the Global Leadership Team at the Viva event in
回想在2005年巴西Viva的全球領袖會議中，Atef博士對我們所說的話。之後，Lynn很快的在全球事工中分享。當Atef博士說出預言性的話語時，我也在場。他首先說到數十年前，有人從遙遠的地方到埃及，也就是他的家，來探望青年使命團的團隊。然後他注意到，在這樣的情況已不再有了，他列出幾個原因。我認為結論是因為我們不再有屬靈上的吸引力。這是令人心碎郤很真實的說法，我們應該怎麼做呢？
I am optimistic. There are many signs, including a persistent prophetic encouragement from established and respected prophets that we’re on the verge of something greater than we have ever known. Certainly, if we are to fulfill our calling as YWAM we need a deep and powerful move of God that can bring a more authentic and compelling spirituality than we have yet seen. We need to pursue Him by faith. This is our prayer and our hope. I submit to you that this desire to pursue Him must be strengthened and acted upon as our heart commitment in the coming weeks, months and years.
但我是樂觀的，由許多事情都可看出，包括從幾位我們所知且尊敬的先知而來的鼓勵性預言，說到我們正處於一個比我們所知更遠大的情況。當然，如果我們想要完成神給青年使命團的呼召，我們需要被神更深和更大的改變，以便帶來更真實和屬靈是我們過去未曾見過的。我們需要用信心來追尋祂，這是我們的禱告和盼望。我深信在未來的歲月裡，我們這渴望尋求神的心更堅定更持守。
In Him, 在主裡,
Jim Stier
June Teaching: The Nature of True Holiness
Very early in the history of YWAM God spoke and set the core of our identity. YWAM exists to know God and to make Him known. This is possibly the most central, enduring and all-encompassing of the foundational words of the Lord to our mission. Before any other priority we are to know Him and make our relationship with Him central to our lives and our work. This is our pedigree, but, as John the Baptist powerfully reminded Jewish leaders, we need present reality and not just history (Luke 3:8).
In 1974, Pam and I were leading a team that traveled through
Our little team was desperate. We set aside a tent for prayer and spent all of our free time there, asking God what to do and asking Him to move. Saturday went by and there had been no breakthrough. On Saturday night we showed our slide series. It had a cassette sound track. It was good and ended with a picture of salt being poured out and an appeal to dedicate yourself to God, with moving music in the background. I got up to make the altar call and the pastor interrupted. He wanted to show slides from his last vacation. When he finished showing the slides some thirty minutes later, any interest that our slides might have created was long gone.
I was so lost that I just bowed my head and asked God what we could possibly do. A girl on our team that was usually very quiet in public meetings suddenly began to sing a chorus in an unsure, quivering voice. As soon as we recognized the tune, we joined in to save her from humiliation. Things were dismal.
Suddenly the most rebellious young man, the natural leader of the youth group, started to hyperventilate and fell to the ground, groaning. It took me some time, but finally I recognized that this was the conviction of sin that I had been reading about in accounts of revivals. I went to him and helped him to find Jesus. God graciously gave him the faith to believe and he broke through, immediately manifesting great joy. I looked up and the entire youth group was on the ground! Our team went from one to the other until all but one had come to the Lord. The one person who was holding back had tickets to a rock concert and didn’t want to miss it. I tried to talk with him. He started to tear at his hair and ran away into the woods. The presence and dealing of the Lord was so powerful that night that it was nearly impossible to resist.
What will make YWAM and YWAMers spiritually compelling to those we seek to reach and disciple? What will give us a good testimony that attracts people to the Lord and to the
When we first come to Jesus it takes little effort to follow Him. We’re generally in the daily flow and joy of His presence. Most of us experience this as we begin a relationship with Him. Who hasn’t heard a Christian sigh and long for those days of his first love?
As we progress in our walk with God, however, a few potentially negative processes are at work. First of all, God begins to deal with things in our lives that need to change. He asks us to do things that we don’t want to do and we find out that He won’t let us do some other things that we want to do. God is loving, but also demanding and unrelenting. We can find it difficult to walk close to Him.
Secondly, God begins to expect more effort on our part in order for us to abide in Him. It’s necessary for our growth and development. As a result, it can sometimes be more difficult to sense His presence. His desire is that we begin to exercise our faith in a more intentional and energetic way as we grow. Too many of us then settle for second best by rationalizing this experience—we talk about how we don’t live by feelings and then settle into a dull gray spiritual life with little of the sublime relational dynamic that God intends for us to have.
The issue of who is in control is also at work here. If you walk very close to God, He will be in control and you will not. The human heart has a tenacious determination to seek control. This is how most of us cope with life in a painful and dangerous world. If we live close to God we must give control to Him. Many of us look for a way to serve God, who is worthy, but at just enough distance to allow for independence. It’s a lot easier to obey some rules than to relate directly to the living God.
In the end a lot of born-again Christians give up on God. Some abandon Christianity altogether and we no longer see them around YWAM. Many, though, slip away from their intimate relationship with God in more of a “religious” way. They build structures that consist of standards of behavior, codes of conduct, theological systems, dogmas, and religious cultural rules. They dedicate that whole thing to God and spend the rest of their lives trying to use it to serve Him. This is attractive to many because if we have created our own structures then we can control these same structures. However, there is no life to be found in such religious practices.
When I went to bible college, I reacted to all of my new knowledge by building a sophisticated religious system. It wasn’t the fault of my school, but was my own way of reacting to an educational system that was centered on acquiring facts and not on knowing God. Since then I have noticed that the same insidious process happens to many YWAMers. We start to live out of our accumulated knowledge of good and evil, and we lose the edge and mark of the person who intensely seeks and regularly finds God.
This way of life produces neediness. This neediness produces attempts to satisfy ourselves through other people and we become manipulative, trying to “wring” love out of others. We begin to look for counterfeit life. We compare and compete with one another. We try to impress. We judge and gossip because it makes us feel superior to others, which can in turn feel a little bit like life. False comforts like sensuality, greed, materialism and ambition exert a powerful attraction over us because of our fundamental lack of life.
The Bible says that Christ came that we might have life and that we might have it abundantly (John 10:10). We must seek life and grace by faith, not by the rule of law. We are purified by faith (Acts 15:9). We are sanctified by faith (Acts 26:18). We are to live by faith (Rom. 1:17). Christ dwells in our hearts by faith (Eph. 3:17). It seems that holiness, then, comes through faith and that faith is the secret to intimacy with God. Faith is also a gift from God and we are utterly unable to produce it ourselves (Eph. 2:8)
Faith is the capacity that God gives us to interact with and know Him. He gives us eyes to see and ears to hear. We listen to Him and we follow Him. This is very personal and interactive. It’s a dialogue. It’s relational. We’re in Him and He’s in us (John 15:4). Faith is the dynamic paradigm of how we know God and remain in Him. Holiness is to be full of Him (Eph. 3:19). It’s not a vacuum consisting of the things that we don’t do. It is ‘Christ in us, the hope of glory’ (Col. 1:27). It’s not an elusive duty, but a living hope and a daily experience that God intends for us to have.
In 2 Peter 1:3-4, the victory that God gives us is portrayed in terms that would seem to be an exaggeration if they were found anywhere but in the Bible. “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him...” We are to be “partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust”.
The Apostle Paul continually emphasized this and contrasted it with the religious practices of the Jews. There were teams of Judaizers that used to follow Paul around, going to his new churches right after he had established them and teaching the new believers to follow Jewish cultural practices and religious laws as the proper way of serving God. Paul was so intensely opposed to this religious approach to serving God that he even said, “Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.” The entire New Testament constantly emphasizes this theme.
When I first came to YWAM I was a mess. I was mostly living out of my knowledge of good and evil, with little happening in my relationship with God. YWAM pointed me to the person of God. We started our day meditating on the Bible, expecting God to impart life and wisdom to us through His word. We then had intercession, expecting to hear from God in order to pray according to His leading. Our classes focused on the ways of God. These subjects pointed us to encounters with the living God as the way to live and grow. At first I was unconvinced, but as I practiced what was being taught I rediscovered the joy of the Lord. I found spiritual brokenness, daily revelation from God, the fear of the Lord, and many other direct expressions of His grace. My whole life changed.
We can’t depend on the past. This generation of YWAMers needs to seek the Lord. We need to leave behind the trappings of impersonal religious dedication and consciously cultivate His presence in our lives as our highest priority. We need to repent of judging, comparison, gossip, and all of the expressions of neediness that come from not being “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). Let’s seek the Lord for powerful breakthroughs all over the world. As this happens, we will have and be able to manifest the authority of Matthew 28, and as a result we’ll be empowered to disciple nations.
Judgmentalism— A testimony
One morning I was reading about the Pharisees going around with their long lists of religious rules, self-righteous and judging others. Rather than love they delivered law. “Oh, I’m glad I am not legalistic. I’ve found the freedom that comes by obeying the Great Command: ‘Love God with all my heart and love my neighbor as myself.’ It’s that simple. Jesus said that if I live that way, I keep all the law.”
While it is a simple truth, it’s not easy. I was reminded minutes later as I walked out of the house. Heading down the street, I noticed an old man with tattered, dirty clothing riding his beat-up bicycle. “He’s probably an alcoholic, wasting his life….” In seconds, I, the judge, had evaluated the evidence and rendered my harsh verdict. Immediately the Holy Spirit convicted me—“Religious Pharisee.” My eyes filled with tears. “I repent! Please forgive me! Help me to love others.”
“You therefore must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) How intimidating! How can I ever be that holy? The great 20th century missionary to
Jesus tells me how to live a life of holiness. “If you obey My commands, you will remain in My love…. My command is this: ‘Love each other as I have loved you.’” (John 15: 10-12) It really is that simple…if I listen to Jesus and do what He says day by day.
Moving in holiness: A testimony
In 2004, we were taking the very first steps towards discipling our nation of
A few days later, I received a phone call from Dr. Colombo’s office asking if we were still willing to help her film the conference. Not surprisingly, many YWAM hands were ready and available to produce this video and serve in any way they could. We worked alongside the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Development, and government representatives from
Looking back over this experience, I believe that because we chose to move in holiness by seeking the Lord during every step of this process, God gave us the authority and the grace we needed to represent Him before national leaders. We listened to God’s voice and were willing to do His will with whatever we had at hand (in this case, a home video camera, a projector, a simple camera and a few cables). God took care of the rest.
Veronica Schaab
Communications Ministry
YWAM Argentina
Summary of June 5 Prayer Day
• We become needy when we substitute anything for God’s presence
• This neediness eventually drives us to live a counterfeit life
• True life is always available to us as we turn from our own devices.
• We must seek life and grace by faith, not by the law.
Key Scriptures presented in Jim Stier’s June teaching: Luke 3:8, John 10:10, Acts 15:9, Acts 26:18, Rom. 1:17, Eph. 3:17, Eph. 2:8, John 15:4, Eph. 3:19, Col. 1:27, 2 Peter 1:3-4.
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