Driven By Desire

Growing up in a Brethren Church, there is one thing that no one really talks about, The Holy Spirit. Now, I'm not entirely sure why this is not mentioned much in my church. I think partly because the power that comes with The Holy Spirit scares a lot of people and when you go to a conservative church no one really wants to talk about it. That is not to say that we do not believe in The Holy Spirit as Brethren's, because we do. And it is talked about, but only in the sense of we believe in the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Aside from that, nothing else is really mentioned. We definitely never talked about the cool things you can do through The Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues, prophecy, healings and so on.

So over the course of the next few months after my youth group and I had been introduced to true, passionate worship we had fallen head over heels in love with it and in love with God. We wanted to be in worship constantly and were driven by a desire to know Him more and see what He wanted us to be doing for His kingdom.

It was no longer enough to just stay confined to our church and be experiencing God's love and mercy there and keeping it all to ourselves. We wanted to spread His love. We wanted to be lights in our community and share with others. We could no longer contain the love we had for God and needed a way to share that. But not only that, we wanted to know more about Him. We felt this incredible love, but what could we do with it? We wanted to know how we could impact the world and make a change.

So Ryan felt that the next step in drawing closer to God would be to introduce us to The Holy Spirit. He started out by talking about it at bible study and giving us scriptures to read that talked about The Holy Spirit and finding our Spiritual Gifts.

After learning about this for a while he introduced us to some pretty inspiring videos. Now generally when we were told that we were going to watch a movie at bible study or in Sunday School no one was excited. We never looked forward to them because the movies we were shown were rather boring and cheesy. However, these videos were anything but boring, and far from cheesy.

We watched a series of videos put out by Wanderlust Productions. These videos wrecked everything for us, in the most beautiful and desirable way. The first video in the series is called Finger of God. This video was all about the miraculous. It is directed by a man named Darren Wilson who traveled all over the world recording miracles. That's not all it is though. The video is about the heart of God. It shows us how God is desperately seeking after us and how He wants to be close to us. It is about how God views each and every one of us and what happens when He places His finger in our life.

This is the cover of the movie case. If you ever want to go watch it this is what the front should look like.

One of the most incredible parts of the movie was when Darren went to California. He visited a college that on Friday nights the students who attended there would do "treasure hunts". Now let me tell you, these are not your average treasure hunts. They are Godly, Spiritual treasure hunts. They start out with a time of prayer and meditation. The students would all sit in a room together and just pray out and then listen to what God wanted to tell them. He would give them words and images. Then, everyone would discuss what they got from God and they would go off into the town and find people who fit the clues. When they found the people they would pray for them and sit and talk with them and just love on them. They weren't shoving the Gospel down anyones throats, they were just loving on them.

These treasure hunts inspired my youth group to do our own version of them. We have done quite a few since watching the video for the first time. However, you will have to wait until another post to hear what they were like and what all happened during them. But these videos have radically changed how we view God and how we think God views us. Each one of us now has our own personal very intimate relationship with Him and it is the most amazing and precious relationship to have.

If you are like I was and do not know much about The Holy Spirit and what is possible when you allow The Spirit to work through you, I challenge you to start to seek that out. However, let me warn you, once you seek out The Spirit you will be wrecked. That's not something that should scare you, it should excite you. It will give you a whole new idea of what it means to be a Christian.

If you are curious about the videos by Wanderlust Productions you can find them on their website, www.wpfilm.com. The other two videos that he has put out since Finger of God are, Furious Love and Father of Lights. They are incredible and worth watching if you desire to know more about who God really is and what He is doing in the world right now.