standing up, speaking out...

What I learned this week...

Posted by Amanda , Sunday, February 7, 2010 9:20 AM

Speaker: Matt Rawlins/Students

Topic: Understanding the Nature and Character of God/Child Development

This week our teaching was on the nature and character of God. How you can possibly describe something like that in words, I’m not really sure. The basic concept of the week is that it’s all about God. God is big, He is good and we were created for Him. He is worthy of my life.

You would think that these are all foundational concepts that you may have heard of before, but they are life changing. This week brought so many new questions about God to my head and so much new revelation about the selfishness of my own heart and how much it affects God.

I think one of the most impacting things that I learned this week came out of a quote. The end of the quote stated: “I am not the point, God is. I exist for Him. He does not exist for me.” So often, I find that I put myself at the center of the universe. Everything revolves around me. God needs to fulfill my desires. I’m hurt, I’m upset, I’m happy. Me, me, me, me, me. Well…the point is not me. The point is God. He put me on this earth so He could enjoy me, spend time with me, love me. But the point is that my focus should be on Him and using the love that He pours into me to give out to others.

Another thing we talked about this week was understanding value. As human beings, we tend to put our value in other human beings, in what people think and say about us, in our material possessions or our looks. But it’s funny, because the God is so much larger than man. He created billions of billions of galaxies, knows every single star by name and knows every single hair on the head of every single person on this entire planet. But instead of finding our value in this huge God, we want to find it in imperfect, finite, limited human beings. What is wrong here?
Something else our teacher said that was pretty impactful was that the “essence of sin is finding your value in anything else other than God.” So this hit me pretty hard, because, well…how many times a day do I find myself looking for value in things other than God? The answer is…a lot.

So I’ve been asking myself a lot of hard, challenging questions this week when it comes to God and myself. Things like, “Where do I really place my value?” and, “How can I let myself exist for God?” These are easy questions to formulate, but hard questions to actually answer. The challenge I’ve placed in front of myself is to remind myself of these questions everyday and to be constantly asking God more and more questions about His character, about who I am and what He wants to reveal to me.