Awakening

I’ll be real with you; blogging for Awakening isn’t easy for me. The feeling of inadequacy crept up a number of times as I attempted to write this.

I had an idea of what God put on my heart to share, but the journey of doing something new is a bit like dancing for the first time; learning to trust my dance partner – Jesus – and following his lead. I don’t always feel like I’ve got what it takes. But regardless of how I feel, He waits for me to take each step with Him.

Sometimes when the journey gets difficult, kind of like tripping up during a smooth waltz, I’m inclined to sit down and just sulk. That’s when my flesh screams against doing what’s right, and I start to think, “It’s not fair! I’m hurting! Why should I do what He asks me to?”

But why shouldn’t I?

I’m one of those people who would go to great lengths to ‘do something’ about a cause if the vision gets me passionate. But emotion doesn’t necessarily precede action; in other words, you don’t always have to feel to do–especially when love becomes part of the equation. Does God ever have a day where He doesn’t ‘feel like it’ and denies us of His love? How could I then, having received His unconditional love, choose to withhold it based on my emotions?

I already hear you asking, what’s love got to do with any of this? Well, put simply, it’s the love of God awakened in us all that will drive us to live for our fellow man–-to see justice done for the least of God’s creation. And we will never have to wait to feel the rush of being called to a cause. We will simply act because His love compels us to.

Although injustice currently appears to have the upper hand, justice and righteousness will nevertheless prevail. God echoes this promise throughout His Word:

And He will judge the world in righteousness (rightness and equity); He will minister justice to the peoples in uprightness. (Psalm 9:8, AMP)

It takes acts of justice to bring about righteousness in this world. God is and will be the divine minister of justice, the one that brings us towards a world of righteousness. But as He works, we can also be part of making it happen–-we can be ministers of His justice.

The leaders of C3 have a vision for Awakening to be just that. It involves partnering with local and international ministries so that the Body of Christ can reveal God’s heart for creation in a tangible way. As a ministry that releases children from poverty in Jesus’ name, Compassion has been chosen to be the international ministry partner. Since 1951 Compassion has assisted children born into poverty and nurtured them in all areas of their development. Compassion’s holistic child development has restored the dignity of children and helped them break free from the vicious cycle of poverty through the love of God, not just in their own lives, but in the lives of their family and wider community.

You’ll get to learn more about Compassion’s Child Sponsorship Program at Awakening, but in the mean time I’ll say this much: partnering with Compassion allows you and me as individuals to bring justice to the ends of the earth.

However you are called to challenge injustice for the long-term, whether it’s through a ministry like Compassion or your own personal calling, don’t forget that you also have an opportunity to do something about it on a daily basis; be it by saying a kind word, making a fair decision, lending a loving hand, or even blessing your enemies. Don’t wait to feel. Just act.

I find it fascinating that our Lord Himself is a lover of righteousness and justice. It’s His desire for us really, to show His love for all of Creation:

            The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love. (Psalm 33:5, NIV)

There are so many people hurting and going through what seems like the toughest day of their life, with no one to fight for them. Whatever valley they are in, I pray that because of you, they may know of God’s unfailing love and his desire to see justice poured out in their lives.


Irene Kao
Compassion child sponsor & employee of Compassion Australia

Where do i begin? Awakening 09....passion.alive.broken.blind.alive.FREEDOM.breathe...ok.exhale...alive.selfish.bitter.hearing.listening.crying.deeper.embarresed.intimacy.hard heart.shattered.soft heart.....still alive...wanting to run, wished i could hide...scared.MY GOD IS BIGGER...He will never leave me..born to cause change..VISION..determination..TRANSFORMED..still alive..smiling....AWAKE AWAKENED AWAKENING!!!! i felt....i fought....i lost the battle to keep my hearts walls up from being broken for this world.....God won my heart once again, he opened my eyes, my heart, my being to his perfect love and to the love WE MUST SHOW TO THIS WORLD...i didn't walk into every Awakening conference thinking id walk out the way i did, London,New York...especially Sydney all shattered the core of my walls that i brilliantly built up to stop me from seeing the pain and disfunction this world owns so well...but now i have a set of brand NEW eyes.....and before them the path God chose for me to walk.....NOW I SEE!!!
Lv Brooke Dillon

Romans 1:1-6 – BELONGING to CHRIST
The Gospel is introduced right up front. Quickly reveals and explains the overarching theme of this letter and the reason for this letter.
Paul - a servant of Christ Jesus – Belonging to Christ was something that Paul truly understood…before his salvation and his meeting of Jesus he was a devout Jew who believed he had a special revelation that the new Christians were deceived by following Jesus – so his belonging was defined by being well known in his religious circles. But once he meets Jesus, the people he would of belonged to disowned him and were now his enemies from their perspective. So where he once had a life defined by what he did and his status and belonging was dependant on being accepted by how many Christians he put in prison. Paul would of felt like an orphan, a child without a family, totally vulnerable and with no answers within himself.
His salvation experience was so full on he was even physically blinded by the light of Jesus. It’s like God wanted Paul to understand how much he now belonged to Jesus and no one else that he blinded him so he could see no one or nothing he used to belong to. All he could see was Jesus, nothing else, Jesus became his everything.
Paul gets radically saved by the sovereign will of God and his whole world is rocked, he loses all his old friends, his world is turned around 180 degrees and now he only belongs to Jesus. Even the existing Christians were not very accepting initially, understandably. So Paul has no option but to belong to Jesus. This is not a burden but Paul discovers that this is the greatest place to be in, to just belong to Jesus…a massive weight of pressure is lifted off of his shoulders.
If you remember when you first met Jesus and said you will radically follow Jesus you would most likely remember certain people in your world disowning you. Although this is painful it is also allowed by God so that we would learn to belong to Jesus and Jesus alone. Where before we belonged to the things and the people that surrounded us in our world we now belong to someone that is beyond this world, our heart awakens to our true belonging in our Father and creator through His son Jesus. Do not be afraid that when you meet Jesus that people that you used to hangout with disown you. Its not that you don’t love them or that they can’t also belong to Jesus it just means that you are no longer defined by people that love this world, but you are defined by someone greater. You may even go through a beautiful experience of being blind. Not physically necessarily but things that used to matter to you don’t anymore. It is not unusual to give away things, or give up things or quit things, because they just don’t satisfy anymore. This doesn’t mean all those things are necessarily evil, it rather means that the love of those things or belonging to those things are evil.
Therefore these first verses are not just good theology they are coming out of a heart that has experienced the feeling and reality of not belonging and then discovering true belonging to Christ. It reveals that Christ chose us before time began, we have been elected and now belong to Jesus. This changes everything. We live different if we understand that we belong to Jesus and not this world, we belong to someone who has paid the greatest price, he paid the price of Death for my sins, not his own sin, but my sin through shedding his blood. The penalty for sin is death so we must understand that through the death of Jesus we have been set free from the penalty of death and now belong to Jesus and has given us eternal life. Martin Luther calls this the ‘Great Exchange’.
What Paul is saying right up front is all we need is Jesus.
Romans 15:13 – May the God of Hope fill you with all Joy and Peace in believing…
It is believing that we belong to Jesus that we are filled with Joy and Peace.
We don’t need to try and belong to anything else but Jesus. We don’t need to prove our self in anyway. We can’t earn this belonging, we can’t prove to God that we deserve it by our good works, this belonging only comes through Jesus Christ.
This is freedom, this is peace, this is the great joy that we belong and we do not have to strive to prove ourselves any more, we can now live differently, we can serve with everything we have, we become humble through this revelation, we suffer and endure differently, the spirit of God gains access to our life through us belonging to Jesus.
This happens because Jesus lived the perfect Holy Life and gave his life up freely so now there is no separation between us and the spirit of God. This means we can now live out this belonging to Jesus through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit fulfilling the will of our Heavenly Father.
We now belong to the Family of God. This is not a family that will disown us, it is an eternal family motivated by true love, the head of this Family will never leave us nor forsake us. He will not divorce us, he will not disown us, he will not doubt us, he believes in us and eternally loves us. It is the greatest family that has ever existed.
Eph 1:4For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

So Paul reveals to us that this is the good news, the Gospel, that although we deserved to be separated from God for all eternity because of our sin we now eternally belong to Jesus through His Death on the cross. This is not sad news but the most freeing and joyous news. We can now enjoy this life that God has given us and freely give this love that we have freely been given.







BECAUSE WE BELONG:
• We can love our enemies
• We can love our Christian brothers and sisters as we are now part of the beautiful family of God.
• We can serve others and not ourselves
• We can bring justice to others because we understand we don’t anything else beyond belonging to Jesus
• We are righteous not through our own works but through Jesus
• We are therefore free from guilt forever
• We can live radically
• We are truly generous as we have been given everything we need through belonging to Jesus
• We are not takers in life but givers
• We can forgive others as we have been forgiven
• We can resist temptation because we have access through belonging to the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead
• We are victorious because Christ is victorious over sin and death itself
• We are fearless
• We are bold and courageous - because greater is he that is in me then he that is in the world
• We are secure
• We can live for His Glory, we can respond to this belonging and the amazing sacrifice of Jesus to give us access into the family of God by living for His Glory and giving all of our lives.
Food for thought and Discussion – Questions to Wrestle with this week and live out…

1) What does it mean to belong to Christ?
2) What security do we have in belonging?
3) How should we respond to this belonging?
4) How does our life speak that we belong to Jesus?

Something powerful has happened - Awakening has become a global movement. That's easy to say, and probably sounds like hype. But it is real.

We have just finished the first ever Awakening conferences in London and New York. Both weekends were incredible, with so many highlights. But what struck me more than anything was the significance of so many people from different countries uniting for the one cause. People attended the conferences from the UK, US, Canada, and countries all over Europe. It was clear that people from all of those places have caught the Awakening vision. Awakening has become much bigger than any one church. And that is what is so great - the focus is on God, not on religion or any particular church. This has united people, even though different types of churches were represented.

Do not miss Awakening Sydney, it's going to be epic. And invite people from everywhere - because that's what it's all about.

Rob Kerr

Awakening for me was by far one of the most eye opening experiences I have had in far too long. And I don't mean in the way were God showed me  few cool things and then I forgot about them within that next week, I mean that  the my spirit and my heart were forever impacted and that God really used the two weekends to make a massive shift in my life.

Francis Chan's message on the last night of Awakening NYC, combined with some of the most powerful worship moments were just some of the highlights for me through out the two weekends, and as God moved my eyes were opened to the truth of what it means to love God, to love
His people.

I was so honored to have been apart of what God did over the two conferences and I am so excited to her about what He is going to do in Sydney.

Dylan Thomas