First studying week in DTS

Soo…WHAT does it mean being a long distance from home, further for some than others, spending time with new people, to be challenged in faith in a DISCIPELSHIP TRAINING SCHOOL?

If you want to know…COME do one! This blog will be a great tool to let you know how DTS for us is like! So far, it has been a really good and already challenging week for us. Beside a really good Finnish diet, sauna and snowboarding for the first time we also spent time with Kimmo Sarajarvi, who is the teacher of the first week!

This weeks teaching is about God’s character and identity in Christ. His nature. His personality and functions. How does God function? We’ve learned He’s a friend, a father, a counselor, the Prince of Peace and lot’s more. In the end it blows my mind and end up with a bigger picture of God than before. And how about identity? What forms it? Culture, family, friends, what we think God thinks about us, or what other people think. Well what God really thinks about us is always POSITIVE. He’s proud of us! We’re His creation! And we’re double His! Made by Him and bought by Him.

Spending time with God every morning is a challenge but really interesting cause it can provide for the necessary fuel to go through life. Like Jesus says. I LIVE not of bread alone, but by every word of the Father! In my time with God today I read Luke chapter 24. Awesome piece of work there! The 2 guys going to Emmaus don’t get it. Jesus is dead, he was supposed to save Israel and now a couple of women claim they’ve seen Him alive?

As they walk Jesus walks besides them and starts explaining everything about Him. They don’t recognize Him. When they arrive at Emmaus they invite Him for dinner. He brakes the bread and asks a blessing from the Father, and than He is revealed before their very eyes and they see it’s Him!

I hope this DTS will be a little bit like that for us. To feel like we’re walking next to Jesus. Him explaining again to us the things that He really important in His eyes. Until we see Him again. With an unclouded mind. Ready to return back to Jerusalem and to tell from what we’ve heard, seen and learned.

-Bendert