October 2010

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” Proverbs 23:7a. It is not what you do, nor what you say, but it is what you think about that makes you who you are. Then what you think about eventually comes out of your mouth and directs your actions. Our thoughts control us. Our focus directs us. Paul knew the human mind and character very well. He suggests that we need to think about things that are true, honorable, just, pure, virtuous, and praiseworthy. When we think properly and keep our focus on God, then we will be transformed into Godliness.

“Think noble thoughts if you would noble be;
Pure thoughts will make a heart of purity;
Kind thoughts will make you good, and glad thoughts gay,
For like your thoughts your life will always be.

“Whate’er is true and reverend and just,
Think o’er these things, and be like them you must;
Of good report, of lovely things and pure,
Think and your mind such nectar shall secure.

“Think much of God and you shall like Him be,
In words of faith and hope and charity,
Protect His image from all foul abuse,
And keep the temple holy for His use.”

By F. G. Burroughs

Notice in the testimonies below, how changing their thought life and focus through truth, changed their lives.

Communion with God Becomes a Family Affair

by
Barbara Bartell

The changes in my life, as a result of my encounter with God through Communion with God, have been amazing. The results have been to finally recognize that God is speaking to me and that He has been speaking to me throughout my life. I felt for sure that He did many times, but without confirmation knowledge of it. I allowed what I heard to be overridden, devalued, destroyed, and to have heartbreak again and again. I allowed satan to ruin and destroy God’s desires, plans, relationships, joy, and Godly self-value for me. As a result, I wandered in a wilderness of confusion and pain. By taking CWG, my life has been changed by knowledge and confirmation of these truths. I now enjoy being able to sit and talk with God and He to talk back to me. This is an example:

Father, what do You want to say to me this morning?

I love you.

I love You, too. Where do we go from here?

Can’t you see the tremendous change going on in your life?

I haven’t got it together yet. It’s a whole new world, and I’m just a little dot in it.

Oh, but what an important little dot! Remember the leaven in bread?

Why am I crying?

Because My presence is with you and in you.

Help me to have a greater understanding.

My presence with you and in you, but it isn’t just so you can find solutions to the world’s problems, or your personal world. It’s for you and Me to be together.

I see your face! I’ve missed You for so long.

Come home, Child.

Father, give me feelings to go with Your revelation of our relationship, because my heart and emotions have been cratered. Forgive me for believing the lie that it is wrong to show emotion. I confess my sin, I’m sorry, please forgive me.

I can and I have.

Thank You, Father!

Taking CWG has put me in contact with people who are on the growing edge of a relationship with God’s ways. It has given me great joy as well as helped me to grow in my relationship with them. I have recommended CWG to all my older children and have bought workbooks for some of them. After seeing my workbook and hearing what this course has done for me, my oldest daughter and her husband each bought a workbook and are working their way through them. They then introduced their relatives and in-laws to it.

My second daughter and her husband, unbeknownst to me at the time, were also studying the workbook together with some people in their church group. My third daughter began working her way through the workbook. I gave my fourth daughter and her husband the workbook; and now she is sharing it with a friend and her husband who were at their rope’s end trying to find the way to have a close relationship with God. They knew they had found what they were looking for when they read the workbook and the book, “Dialogue with God.”

When my fourth daughter showed the workbook to her step-daughter, who is a nun, she jumped in with both feet. She went back to her group, took her new workbook with her and has since been spreading the good news. This has all been a result of the good changes of my encounters with God from taking this course.

Vision has shown me how to handle many situations around me, even such simple things as how to create crochet patterns to finish projects because of faulty patterns in a book; how to handle an oven fire; how to cut my daughter’s hair in a different hair style; and how to handle a situation about our cows. Vision has helped me see beyond the disasters of our nation by helping me to not panic and not live in fear. This is a powerful help because from the churches to the media, fear is the underlying subliminal product. Vision has helped me to know how to handle personal situations that have come up.

I’ve allowed the Lord to come closer and closer to me, and as we’ve worked through each new level, fear has been dissipated. I’ve learned to trust Him more, and this is having a tremendous effect on me. For one thing, it has reduced my stress level. I’m not yet where I’m going to be, but I am going to be where He wants me, where I can be glad in it, and with no fear of Him. The dark dungeons in the deepest part of my soul that God and I have been working through will be gone with no longer having cells of fear from wrong thoughts, feelings, and emotions which prevented me from walking in faith. Now there will only be clear water flowing from the river within.

All my life, I’ve felt that there was more to walking with God than I was experiencing. Before CWG, in nearly every avenue I tried, I was met with rejection, animosity, and condemnation, but the teachings from CWG have become like water in the desert to me. They have confirmed many of the truths that I felt in my heart were truths from God through the years. I am grateful that God led me to where I learned about CWG and how He has helped me as I’ve taken the course.

From Phariseeism to Christianity

by
Sally Tsai

I took Communion with God only because my parents urged me to try out this online class.

In the process of my first year in graduate school, I was alone for the first time in a secular environment with no one to tell me right from wrong. Having grown up in a Christian context all my life, I always had people forcing me to attend church or judging my behavior by the law. Now in New York City, no one cared if I did not attend church, or if I was not behaving like a saint. In fact, this was the life I had always wanted – so I thought – until I experienced intense loneliness, brokenness, and confusion. The course Communion With God not only brought me back on track with God, but also began my transformation from Phariseeism to Christianity.

In the first chapter of the textbook, Mark Virkler said that God trains His students not in classrooms, but in the wilderness, as is evident in the lives of Moses, Jacob, and David. Not knowing this, I approached this course with a Greek mentality that I needed only to be good at memorizing, reading, and writing to pass this course with ease. Little did I know that I needed to apply it in my everyday devotional walk with the Spirit. This opened my eyes to the difference between understanding and knowing.

All my life in the Western educational system, I had passed courses relying only on my left-brain. I knew the Bible but never truly understood it. I knew about God but never truly understood Him. Mark’s description of the difference between the mind and the spirit helped drive this point home. But again, I only knew the diagrams but struggled to apply them. The journaling forced me to put all this knowledge into action. After a year of struggle and frustration, I finally began to understand the significance of journaling in my life.

First of all, I depended a lot on my two spiritual advisors God placed in my life: my mom and dad. My mom played a significant role in helping me move from rationalism to spontaneous thoughts. All my life, she had tried to show me the importance of the Holy Spirit in Christianity. But only until I took Communion with God did her words actually begin to make sense. God used this course as an appetizer to a new way of living and provided my parents to guide my efforts. My mom helped me to confess my sins of rationalism and unforgiveness and to surrender every area of my life to the Holy Spirit as expressed in Romans 12:1-2.

When I struggled to see vision, she worked alongside me to guide me into seeing Jesus. She would share with me her visions in order to give me an idea about the pictures of God. Because Mark said that one way to access the right brain was through speaking in tongues, I asked God for this gift. When it did not come, I had my mom pray for me, and in a few days, I had my own Pentecost in the privacy of my room. Then she showed me I Corinthians 14 and Acts 1:8 to guide me towards the next step in the use of the Spirit. Once in a while, she would continue to ask me whether I was speaking in tongues to access vision. She would even have me recite what I learned in the course every day so I would increase in knowledge.

With the help of my spiritual advisors, my method to coming to stillness includes sitting comfortably, having light music playing in the background, speaking in tongues, and imagining a scene with Jesus and me. Ever since I was a child, I had a habit of journaling to God, in which I would document my joy, hurts, and anger. Writing my thoughts down on paper helped me to vent, to process, and to still me.

After taking this course, the difference in my journaling was that it became more Spirit-charged. Instead of merely pouring out my frustrations, I learned from David’s psalms to offer them up to the Lord, who then would change my perspective. The latter half of my entries now include positive thinking rather than mere negativity and hopelessness. I learned to praise and to trust in my entries. Before this course, my journaling was completely self-centered; but now, my entries leave space for God to speak.

I have used vision to see Jesus and me spending time together on a beach or somewhere relaxing. Then I ask Him a question and imagine Him speaking back to me, which I write down. Usually the dialogue includes His perspective on me and on certain situations. This was helpful, because I tend to lack faith due to losing sight of God’s perspective. For instance: before vision, I never realized God was always smiling or so easy-going. But in my pictures, I always see Him smiling and having a good time. At first, I thought this was just my imagination, but my mom told me that He was smiling because He was pleased with me.

So this not only changed my perspective about God but also the perspective about myself. This changed my priorities and the way I behave. With the wrong pictures, I constantly tried to make up for the deficiency of my being which always resulted in frustration. Because I used to see Jesus as stern, I spent most of my time in performing and perfecting. Then I would expect other people to behave the same way. But the use of Spirit-guided vision has allowed positivity to dominate my thinking, which resulted in the increase of faith. And life with faith always is better.

Not only would I apply vision in my prayer life, but also in my sleep through dreams. While taking this course, I began recording my dreams and had my two spiritual advisors interpret them. They usually gave very different interpretations, but then I would ask the Holy Spirit for the interpretation. So far, my dreams all entail feelings towards present circumstances, including anxiety of the unknown and anger towards a person who hurt me.

One dream, however, convinced me of the importance of vision with prayer. While I was taking the course, the Holy Spirit began convicting in me of the areas in my life that needed growth. As I continued to allow the Spirit to change me, I became concerned for my friends, who were like the old me and falling farther and farther away from God. One night, I dreamed about a flooding that took place in my room. I tried to wake my roommate up, but she never even budged. So I attempted to stop the leak but only made it worse. It was a desperate and hopeless dream, and I woke up feeling depressed. I told my mom the dream, and she immediately thought of the verse from Isaiah 59:19: “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.”

First, she interpreted the dream by relating it to my fear for my friends’ spiritual well being. She told me that the roommate sleeping represented the friends falling away as if they were unable to wake up from the danger consuming them. I tried to save them through confronting the problem but was immediately blamed for being “too judgmental.” My dream expressed this through the sleeping roommate despite my efforts to wake her up. I told my mom that I felt helpless to save them.

Then my mom used the verse to encourage me—that despite the hopelessness of this case, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against the enemy. After referencing the verse, she asked if I wanted to pray for my friends. Now that I had a picture and a verse, I knew how to pray. This was when I realized how vision, God’s promise, and prayer went hand in hand. And sure enough, a year later, a conviction fell on one of my friends whose case I thought was completely hopeless. I continue to trust in the promise God gave to me through the vision and verse in the complete restoration of my friends.

As a result of this course, my relationship with God has changed. No longer do I merely believe in a God I knew about, but I have actually become a friend with the Creator of the universe. I have begun a true relationship with God. Now I embark on a journey in applying His Word and vision in my life as a form of dialogue between Him and me. I have learned about the ways of the Spirit as being spontaneous, pictorial, and peaceful. By knowing this, I was able to differentiate the different voices so as to enhance my sensitivity to His Spirit.

My prayer life had also changed as a result of this course. Before, it was a drag to make time for devotions. But after being filled with the Spirit, I suddenly had hunger to know more about God. Being usually a negative person, I used to pray with complaints and exaggeration of a problem. But the course showed me the importance of thanksgiving and praise in the midst of uncertainty. I learned to journal in this attitude, which built up my faith.

Despite being raised in a Christian context all my life, the course Communion with God showed me how much I did not know about the Christian life. God gave me two great spiritual advisors to guide my baby steps to having a relationship with Him. They helped me with journaling, seeing vision, and interpreting dreams. God also used the wilderness to draw me near Him. It was in the midst of loneliness, brokenness, and confusion, in which His faithfulness was most evident. For the cost of achieving a true communion with God, this experience was worth it.

How to Connect with CLU Students and Alumni

Koinonia Network:
The Online Home for Spirit-Filled Believers

Looking for a new way to meet your peers who are currently enrolled in CLU, or those who have taken this educational journey in the past? Now it's easier than ever! Koinonia Network is created as an alternative to MySpace and Facebook. It is for all Christians who profess to love, serve and obey Christ and hunger to walk in intimacy with the Holy Spirit.

If you have a Facebook account, you can also get involved there:

facebook.com/ChristianLeadershipUniversity
facebook.com/CommunionWithGod (the parent organization of CLU)