My friend and colleague Ann Beyerlein, who directed the Compelling conference, sent me this report this morning!
"What do these stones mean?" After God heaped up the water of the Jordan and brought Israel across on dry ground, he asked Joshua to pick up 12 stones from the river bed to make into a monument in the promised land. Then the water went back to flowing in its usual way. The stones were to serve as a reminder of the miracle God did so that "all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God." Joshua 4 We looked at this text yesterday at our Compelling conference.
Today is a sweet day of remembering the things that God did this last weekend. Thank you for praying. All of our conferences are special in their own way but we entered this one with a sense of anticipation, and today I'm seeing the realization of a number of goals we have been working toward with this conference and with our ministry in Michigan for the last four or five years.
God protected our students and conference in many ways and we had a lot of prayer before and during this conference. Our main speaker connected well with our students. We had an offering for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students that was well over $6,000. We had a couple of hiccups but in general the large numbers weren't a problem. Our break out tracks seemed to run smoothly with students commenting on how much they had learned from the book of Philippians, about Jesus, about sharing their faith, about intercession, etc. The highlight for us was to seeing about 40 students go forward on Saturday night either making a first time or recommitment to follow Jesus. Many of these students were freshmen who have been in our Bible discussions this fall and who we will be able to follow up. God answered our prayers for 10 students to move from darkness to light as they came into the Kingdom.
- Please join us in thanking God and remembering what he did before and during this weekend.
- All our students made some kind of application at the end of this weekend. Please pray for these tender commitments to begin following Jesus, to begin having a quiet time, to share their faith, to enter into a lifestyle of more purity, etc. Ask God to protect them from the evil one so that they "might always fear the Lord their God."
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