November 30, 2007 by amanda.stebbins.

I know it’s long, but please read it….it’s wonderful.

The Lord says there is nothing you can do to make Him love you more. There is also nothing you can do to make Him love you less. He loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because that is what He is like. It is his nature to love, and you will always be the beloved. And his love is unchanging, and he loves you one hundred percent. He won’t love you any better when you become better.

He loves you one hundred percent right now. And even if you have no plans to become better, he will still love you a hundred percent because he loves you because that is the way He is. And even if you don’t want to change, he will love you one hundred percent, even if you have no plans to walk with him, he will still love you one hundred percent because that’s his nature. He loves all the way, all the time. His love is unchanging. “What will change,”says the Lord, “is your ability to receive my love. And this evening, I want to cram some more of that ability inside you.”

“So I challenge you,” says the Lord. “Open your heart to me. Open your heart to me and you will receive more of my love than you ever experienced before. I dare you,” says the Lord, “open your heart to me. Give me your heart, give me whatever your obstacle is, I’ll take it. I’ll remove it out of the way. Because I love you as you are right now. I love you one hundred percent as you are right this moment. I love you as you are.” So be loved. You are the beloved.

“It is your job,” says the Lord, “to be loved outrageously. It is why I chose you. That is why I set my love upon you, that you would live as one who is outrageously loved, that you would receive a radical love, so radical it’ll blow all your paradigms of what you think love is. And now,” says the Lord, “I will love you outrageously all the days of your life because I don’t know how to do any differently. This is who I am and this is who I will always be. This is the I Am that I promised you. I am He that loves you outrageously.”

“And you may love me back with the love that I give you. You may love me back outrageously with the outrageous love that I bestow upon you. And know this, says the Lord, you can only love me as much as you love yourself. So my love comes this evening to set you free from yourself. To set you free from how you see yourself, to set you free from the smallness of your own thinking about yourself. My love comes to set you free from rejection, and from shame, and from low self esteem, and from despair, and from abuse.”

“Because when I look at you,” says the Lord, “I see something that I love. I see someone that I can love outrageously. And I have so much to bestow upon you, so much to give you, so many places to take you in my heart. But you can’t go there unless you allow me to love you. And my love for you will break every barrier, bring every wall crashing down. And know this says the Lord, my love damages fear. My love hates fear. My love will fight fear, it will fight fear in you, it will fight fear around you, and if you have fear this evening, says the Lord, then know that you have a treat in store because my perfect love casts out fear. There is no fear where I am present because my love casts out fear. Beloved, you are my beloved. You are my beloved. And in my love I want you to feel good about yourself.”

This is my God’s heart towards you. I’m about to leave on outreach, and I don’t know how much communication I will have while I’m in the Solomons, but I want you to know before I leave that you are loved. Not just by me, but by my Father. More than you will ever know, and He desires to know you. He desires for you to desire Him. He wants time with you, not your leftover time, but your best time. He always gives you His best, without reserve. And thus He loves you. So much He would die for you. My hope for this Christmas season is that you would come to understand how He loves you. And I hope that you will see that through so many ways this Christmas, but most of all through just spending some time with Him, listening to what He is speaking and singing over you.

Merry Christmas to you all…may you find joy and peace this season in the middle of chaos and a heart of love towards all you meet.

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November 12, 2007 by amanda.stebbins.

Sitting here, listening to music and conversations of who knows how many different people, smelling hot tea, and thinking. Such is life on Monday night. I should probably be in bed, but I’m thinking, so that automatically nullifies any sleep that I would be getting.

I love people watching. It reveals a great deal about what people value. I’ve determined that you can learn a lot about a person within the first thirty minutes you know them just by observing how they act. I also think that I can get a pretty good profile of a person within the first 15 minutes of conversation…actually, that first 15-30 minutes becomes ingrained in my head, so I try to get as much information as I possibly can. I love people. And I also love being alone. Healthy balance in everything.

I have not felt so drained in such a long time. I can’t exactly pinpoint why I feel like that, but I know that that’s exactly what it is. I’m going to be thrilled when the feeling is gone, though. The constant tiredness is no fun. I’m realizing as well that I’m not able to focus as well as I was able to at one point. I don’t know what that’s about either. I suppose you could be praying for that to pass.

I would really like to write more, but I cannot focus for the life of me. There’s too many conversations going on, and I’m fairly ADD when it comes to attention span. I think what I can pull out of my head right now are just opposing ideas. I’m really wanting to travel a ton right now, and yet at the same time I want to just go home and be with my family. I want to sleep and yet I want to stay up. I want Christmas to be here and yet I’m surrounded by summer, which is odd. I want silence and yet I find comfort in noise. I want to be made uncomfortable and yet I feel stuck in a rut. I want to cut my hair and yet I want to grow it out…the growing it out wins…I want to go as long as possible without cutting it…til I get back home at least. I want to work as hard as I possibly could and yet I want to do nothing at the same time. I just don’t understand the way my mind works sometimes. It’s a beautiful mystery. And thus I leave you, having even less understanding of my mind than I do. Isn’t it wonderful that our minds are so complex, that everything that makes up who we are has such a specific job (except the appendix but I’m sure it has some job somehow), and that I am not easily understood?

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September 21, 2007 by amanda.stebbins.

So in update to the last post that I wrote, I was summoned by my friend, Ramesh (who is a 49 year old Fiji-ian man that hangs around the base a lot) immediately after I finished the post…he asked me to go for a walk with him (he had a stroke last year and has been unable to walk on his own very well since) so we went for a walk. On the way, in the middle of another thought, he reaches over to a bush and picks a flower for me….and it was the very picture of a flower that I had in my head that I spoke about in the last post, with a few colors changed. Such an amazing God… to give me a flower, one of the simplest and smallest things, and to tell me that he hears me immediately through another person, one of the greatest and most amazing things ever.

I’ve experienced a great deal of brokenness this week…. how to explain to someone what you see with spiritual eyes. I saw a need to put myself on an altar before God, to allow him to see everything about me because I show it to him and not just because he’s God and knows everything. Humility, I keep learning, is just being honest about who you are- your strengths and weaknesses- and living in that continuously. There is pride on either side, where you can be haughty and boastful and then the other extreme, where you underplay your skills that you know you have and don’t live as the person you were created to be. So I stand before God now….with exactly who I am, no more, no less. I think that it’s an incredibly vulnerable place to be, to face the Creator of the entire universe and to tell him to use the strengths I have to bring Him glory, to work through my weaknesses to do the same, and to offer up my entire being to be burned up, so to speak. God is a consuming fire. He also stands forever. I offer myself as a sacrifice to Him, laying it all on the altar for him to burn up. And only the things of Him remain, because He lasts forever….nothing can destroy God. Even the ashes of the past things are completely removed in light of the fire that God is….there are no remains of the former ways. I think that’s probably one of the most amazing revelations I’ve had all week.

1 Corinthians 4:5-Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God.

I’ve also learned a lot about the power of darkness in our lives. Things that are secret…those deep inner things that we want to hide from everyone else, even sometimes from God… are the things in darkness and of darkness. And the things that are hidden and kept in darkness are the things that Satan can use as footholds in our lives…the concealed sins not just of action but of the heart. All sin originates in the mind…the mind is the gateway to our thoughts and our actions. Usually we think about what we’re going to do before we do it.

So sin that remains in the dark is where Satan will speak shame, doubt, fear, and inadequacies into our lives….things like “Who are you to think that you’re good enough to do (insert whatever here)”, “You know you messed up in (insert something here)- you cannot even think that you can do that”, “You remember (insert something here)? What would people think of you if they knew who you really are?” These are things that I’ve heard, so I know others have heard them as well as many others as well. We are hindered in sharing who Jesus is if we have shame, doubt, and fear in the way. We are hindered by not knowing who we are according to God…instead we draw who we are from circumstance and feeling, which both change constantly.

All things will be brought into the light anyways, so I’m starting to learn that by voluntarily bringing them into light, by living in humility before God and not being afraid of showing Him all of me (since He knows it all anyways), the act of walking into the light nullifies the power Satan and darkness have in my life. Once things are in the light, Satan cannot use them anymore. And the greatest part is that when those things are brought into the light, when we bare ourselves before the Creator of everything, his Son has taken all those things upon Himself to wash them off of us, and we are clean and pure before God. That humility will bring us freedom. Sacrificing our pride on the altar of God is no sacrifice in hindsight when we see that we’ve been released from the power of sin that entangles us to the point of suffocation.

I also read something this morning talking about a kingdom principle of service rather than power. In the Bible it seems that God tends to use those who are not great in the eyes of the world….farmers, shepherds, slaves, people that are paid no attention in society. These people understood service…they understood a life that may require a lot of patience and hard work to achieve even a fraction of their work set before them. Those qualities served them well throughout their life. I was reading the book of Daniel a few weeks ago and was amazed to see that Daniel’s life in service in Babylon started in his twenties, and I’ve always just assumed that everything that happened to him happened in his twenties. But he had years of service, years of living day-to-day, learning to walk with God, having foundations built into his life that he would need later on. He was much older when he was thrown into the lion’s den….at least a generation older than I am. There was wisdom that was built into him, a deep reliance on God that allowed him to serve in his ministry. But that came from living, day to day, year to year, just taking his time. He wasn’t anything “special”….just a young man captured to serve as a slave in a foreign kingdom. But he was faithful to his God and he sought God everyday…he lived in relationship with God. Looking back at my life, I have expected God to move and to build everything in my life right away…but how firm a foundation would that be? God takes his time to give me solid foundations like a good construction job would, and in the meantime He is teaching me about the principles of His kingdom….principles that go completely against those of this world. In a microwave society, I’m learning how to wait for the fire to heat up in the brick oven….the food is so much better out of the oven if you haven’t noticed before (microwave dinners are mediocre if not less than such).

Lots of learning, lots I haven’t even written here, but more to come at some point when I remember more of it Just some things to think about…

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September 12, 2007 by amanda.stebbins.

So I’ve been in a little place called Byron Bay for the past five days and fallen in love with it. Seriously the most beautiful place I’ve been…a completely clear sky with the ability to see almost every star imaginable, the ocean which is a shade of blue I’ve never seen in my life, people that are open to talk with you, and it is in Australia. I absolutely LOVED it! But even more than that, I’ve heard God speak, and He WANTS to speak…fancy that.

We talked about the Holy Spirit this week…a man named Kevin was our speaker, the director of the Byron Bay YWAM base. An absolutely passionate man for the heart of God, he talked about quite a few things actually. One that stuck out, though, is that we are a product of our environments. We are a result of the things that are taught to us. This also concerns the way we look at God, and I know for me, my society and culture has created boxes in my mind of who God is and how He works. Why do we not see miracles? Why do people not talk about hearing God more often? Why do we think God only works in a certain way? Probably because that’s the way our western culture has said it is….we don’t see these things, so how can they possibly be true? I don’t know if this resonates with anyone else, but I see it true in my own life. My mind interferes with my spirit and my desire to have a childlike faith. When I hear stories of people getting healed, my mind can’t fathom it, so I think “Hey, it’s a good story. That’s cool.” People talk of getting words of knowledge…a word that God gives them about another person that may not make any sense whatsoever to the person that gets the word, but may mean the world to the person that hears it. And once again, I thought that was cool but it may just be a lucky guess, up until last night.

Kevin, our speaker, hadn’t even had an opportunity to sit and talk with me one on one. He didn’t even know my name, and yet last night I sat in my seat during worship just asking God to give me a ring or a flower or something, just because I’m coming to a point in my relationship with God to see that He wants to date me in the sense that this is a dynamic relationship, and it is the ultimate relationship. Not even a minute after I had prayed that, Kevin comes over and tells me that He got a word for me while looking around the room…and it was one of a beautiful flower blooming. He also prayed over my life, and things were spoken out that I had been wrestling with, but the fact that God heard me want a flower and then sent me a person to show me that He heard my every word, my every thought, my every longing and desire blew me away and broke me. God loves me and you enough to listen to our every word and then he desires to give us the things we ask for. That’s another word I’ve heard more and more through the past 5 weeks…you receive not because you ask not. Ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking, and I (meaning God) will pour out even more than all you ask and can possibly imagine…..because I love you that much. I’ve learned quite a bit over the past two weeks that I’ve done the very thing I’ve been afraid of with all my other relationships to God….I’ve approached him as an obligation, I make time for him when I want him to do something, and I ultimately have tried leading my own life with Him technically there because He lives in me, but by pushing Him off to the side and only giving myself halfheartedly to Him. And yet He’s given me the fullness of His glory and His power in unlimited supply to enjoy constantly….He desires to be with me all the time and for us to enjoy life together.

Maybe it’s just me….maybe I’m the only one that saw this life with Christ as more of an obligation than a joy, but for some reason I don’t think I am. I think we don’t even comprehend what it could look like, what amazing impact we could have, what an absolute joy and honor it is to be able to love God passionately, unabashedly, and recklessly, knowing that who we are is secure in the person of God who never changes. His heart is always for our good, to bring us from glory to glory, to reveal himself more and more, to speak to us constantly, to tell us exactly how to speak to someone because He created every fiber of their being, and to be able to walk in a life of excitement because the Creator of the universe is absolutely in love with me. And He talks with me….and so I’m learning to listen.

So the life of living with Jesus in neat little religious boxes is over. God loves me. He loves you. He wants to talk with you. He’s given you access to the fullness of who He is, and He is absolutely ecstatic when we give Him full access to who we are….then He can move in ways we never would have comprehended. Jesus even said that we’d do greater things than He did. So bring it on Or as they say in Australia, have a go.

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