Spiritually Revived Thru Mission
By Esther Kim
I was one of the young people that went on the recent GYC mission trip to Iceland, and my spiritual life has completely turned around.
For a long time, I had been praying for spiritual revival because I had forgotten how to love God. I forgot about the first love experience I had four years ago when I was converted. During this trip, God answered my prayers for a revival experience. Never before have I felt so close to God. I could feel God walking with me to every house I visited. There were times when I forgot about Him and relied on myself but I could tell something was missing.
Countless times, things happened that seemed purely coincidental but they were miracles performed by God. For example, I visited two churches while distributing GLOW tracts in a neighborhood. Both times something tugged on my heart to visit these churches at a specific time (which meant skipping a few houses and going straight to the church). Typically these churches are locked or empty ,but on those two occasions, I ran into someone rushing out of the church. They took a bunch of GLOW tracts, on each topic I had, to place at the churches for the local members.
One time on our way home after a day of prayer and distributing GLOW tracts, I felt impressed to place the pamphlets at a bus stop before we made our way to our pickup vehicle. Doing this meant that I would delay the whole team from their warm dinner and rest, but I was urged by God to do so anyway. While putting up a packet of GLOW tracts on the wall of the bus stop, a young man stopped by and asked what I was doing. After a short, friendly conversation I handed him some GLOW tracts and he suddenly shouted, “Is this about Jesus? Wow! That’s crazy!” He explained that his new boss would not stop talking about Jesus and he was wondering what that was all about! “God must be trying to tell me something,” he said while taking all the different GLOW tracts. After that, we prayed together.
There were many other instances where I saw God leading. For example, God inexplicably stopped someone’s bike from working so I could talk with him. Another time, I met a Christian lady who thanked us for doing this.
With my modern Laodicean mindset, I never expected to see miracles or experience divine appointments, but God proved me wrong. This trip has taught me so many things, from how prayers should never cease, to how God is still very real and mighty.
To be honest, in the beginning I thought the trip was disorganized because we were not given details of what would be expected. Instead the focus was on prayer and how we would allow God to arrange the agenda. I was proven wrong, for God had an amazingly organized plan. And that’s how He works, when we surrender everything – I mean really everything – to God, amazing things happen.
Esther Kim is a senior student at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, studying Psychology. She spent her early childhood in South Korea and has lived in Singapore and the USA. She is excited to see where God will take her next.
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World Church Prayer Requests
From Gavin Anthony, President of the Iceland Conference of SDA
October 27 – November 3, 2019
• PRAYER REQUEST: Please pray that God will be honored through the refocusing of our church school in Iceland, and that the school will become known as a place of quality education.
• PRAYER REQUEST: Please pray for God to grow an audience for our newly established Hope Channel Iceland.
• PRAYER REQUEST: Pray that God would show us how to impact secular society in Iceland, and that the Holy Spirit would open hearts.
• PRAYER REQUEST: Pray that we become a people of prayer, and that prayer and dependence upon God would be characteristic of our local church as well as Conference leadership.
• PRAYER REQUEST: Please pray for our members to personally experience Jesus every day.