Deuteronomy 31:6

Deuteronomy 31:6
"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."

To start this story, I am going to go back to last Sunday.
Last Sunday, I very much felt the sense that this comming week was going to be a great week. One of my dear friends had decided they were going to get baptised the following week, two Christian Union Evangelical events were also going to happen. It was fairly obvious that the Holy Spirit was planning something special for the next week. That Sunday evening, I found myself absolutely drunk on the Holy Spirit (for those of you have are yet to have this experience - it is amazing, so I definitely recommend you praying for it!).
I also found myself watching a documentary about George Muller - he was a man who, to cut a long story short, built and ran an Orphanage by asking for the resources through prayer. This was a man who raised equivelent to £4 million, through prayer (watched the documantary at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9906mDprd_k). The point was that he never doubted the Lord, and because of this, he always received (Matthew 17:20 says, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.).
Cut to two days later, and it feels very much like the world is working against me, and Satan is trying to attack me – something which would continue for the rest of the week. I remember on one occasion in a work situation where I heard someone people talking about me, getting stressed out at me with no real reason to, and making false assumptions about they way I was working. In the instance of it happening, it really got to me... But then in my head Jesus revealed himself to me, on the other side of them room to them, just watching over me. It was as if he was reminding me that he was there protecting me. I then remembered the faith that George Muller had had, and in that instance, any doubt I had about my ability to do the job evaporated, and I prayed to God to give me strength and get me through. I prayed to God that if he wanted me to do well, then to guide me and help me. I now have absolute faith that, as long as it is of God, I will be absolutely fine.
By Wednesday, I could really feel Satan trying all his tricks on me. I remember at one point during prayer seemingly coming face to face with him in my head – something which really isn't the nicest thing to do! But again, God was there, giving me guidance and protection. Through the Bible, he gives us the knowledge that we actually hold complete authority over Satan. The Bible says:

“Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you” (Luke 10:19).

By the end of this prayer, I felt that Satan had run away from me. I also got guidance from God as to what I could do as my next personal step to move further away from Satan's clutches. He had also provided me with two other Christian friends to pray for me.

The next day I was in a situation again where it seemed like Satan was trying to attack, where a man who didn't know me, or know about my faith suddenly started shouting and cursing about the Church, for no apparent reason. For a few seconds I felt very uncomfortable about this, and wasn't sure what to do, especially being with a group of people that I didn't really know. But I felt that God had given me insight about Satan's tricks this past week, and that he was trying to attack me. Instead I got the urge to be cautious but to love him, but also to be weary of him. Rather than being confrontational with him, I listened to God, and five minutes or so later, gently brought up that I was a 'man of God'. This then got him asking me questions, which I was happy to answer, and we got on fine. God kept me very aware though that all was still not right. Without going into any more detail, this was later proved to be right.

The point I am trying to make through telling these three stories is that although we have this constant battle with evil through our lives, we have a God who wants to protect us and guide us, as long as we listen and accept his love. It became very clear to me that on that first Sunday, God was trying to build up my armour for the coming week. We have a god who wants to equip us, protect us. It's a cliched question, but if God is for us, who can be against us? To repeat the quote I started with, Deuteronomy 31:6 says
"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."

P.S, just to add another story, on Friday, there was a Christian Union meeing that I wanted to go to, but couldn't, because it had been moved to a time when I was in a class. Not entirely coincidentaly, the teacher decided to see us one by one, wich meant I would be free to go to most of the meeting. It seemed to me that God wanted me to go to this meeting. In the end, my time ended up getting pushed back untill literally a minute after the meeting ended.
During the meeting, we talked about having Jesus with you, and being able to pass things onto Jesus, because we can't do everything without him.
When I came out of the meeting, I used that extra minute to pray that Jesus come into my private singing lesson with me. When I went in there, it was so obvious that he was in there with me, I could just feel him so strongly. The singing lesson btw only ended up using about half of the time, because we got everything done so quickly, and the singing teacher loved what we had done!
The only other singing lessons where I have known anything like this to happen to me since I have been at uni, are, not coincidentally, the only other singing lesson I have prayed before. Just goes to show more how Jesus wants to help you if you ask for it.

Walking With Jesus: My Journey To Faith

Walking With Jesus: My Journey To Faith: "Ok, I don't know where any of you guys are on your journey's through faith - or wether you are even Christians. If you aren't then you are s..."

My Journey To Faith

Ok, I don't know where any of you guys are on your journey's through faith - or wether you are even Christians. If you aren't then you are still more than welcome to post your views and opinions, but bare in mind that I will always be coming from the hypothesis that God is real, and around us all of the time, because I believe this very strongly, just as much as I beleive the voice that I can hear upstairs at the moment is my housemates. Let me start by giving a bit of testemony as to how I actually came to know Jesus.

My journey to Jesus has covered most of my life. My father is a Buddhist, and when I was about 5 or 6, it was arranged that I would be 'empowered' as a Buddhist, and this was something I had asked for. The night before it was due to happen, I had a really strong image of Jesus in my head, and I realised at that moment, that although I would have to go through with it so as not to let people down, I was not going to be a Buddhist, I was going to be a Christian.

Although I believed in God, I never really tried to build a relationship him after this, aside from going to Sunday school with some friends every now and then as a young teenager, I never really 'practised' Christianity. Eventually, it got to the stage where I was saying 'Yeah, okay. God doesn't exist.'

Then when I was working in care, I was asked to take some clients to church. Completely unexpected, God started talking to me. I remember, during a prayer at one of the services, feeling this rush through my body, like electricity, as he gave me an answer to something that had been pulling me apart for weeks, in such a way that it could only possibly be him. It was at that moment that I knew for certain that he existed. About a year after this, I moved to Cheltenham to start Uni, and at this point, I was still not going to church for myself (as in, not with clients). I had planned to start going to Church down here, but for some reason or another just never got round to it.

One evening, me and some friends had been having a fairly big argument, because I had decided to forgive someone, and they couldn't understand that, and it was an argument that got quite personal. I decided at that point that I was going to go to church that night. The church that everyone had recommended to me was Trinity Cheltenham (http://www.trinitycheltenham.com/). When the services started, I felt as if suddenly God was wiping everything clean in me. I felt a massive white light over the place. One of the main themes of the service that night was forgiveness. Since then I have been fortunate enough to feel god's connection getting stronger and stronger, and I can safely say that I have never had a prayer unanswered in one form or another.

For anyone wondering why I have started this Blog, it actually came out of an argument I had with my mum earlier, who, God bless her, was only concerned. She was concerned about how much I was posting about my beleifs on Facebook. My view is very much that Christianity is something to be shared, and that this is in fact what Jesus calls us to do - to spread the good news. We do it, as Christians, out of joy and love, not out of hate and condemnation.