At what point in our walk with God can we experience His strength? Daniel Pel shares his experiences as a missionarry in different parts of the world, recalling the times when he saw God’s strength revealed in his own personal journey. The message is basesd on 2 Corinthians 12:92 Corinthians 12:9And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

GYCE Focus 2016: Coming to Christ

<p>At what point in our walk with God can we experience His strength? Daniel Pel shares his experiences as a missionarry in different parts of the world, recalling the times when he saw God’s strength revealed in his own personal journey. The message is basesd on 2 Corinthians 12:92 Corinthians 12:9And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

GYC Europe

Daniel Pel

Have You Experienced His Strength

Father in heaven, we're so grateful for this new morning.

We're so grateful that your mercy and long-suffering and patience is new every morning.

Thank you, Lord, that we can come into your presence, that we can be gathered together in your name.

We pray that, Lord, you will bless our time together, that you will speak to us through your Holy Spirit, for this we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

This is my third devotional talk and if you have been following along with the other 2, you will know that each 1 has been phrased as a question.

We looked Friday, no, sorry, Sabbath morning, at the question, would you recognize him?

And we looked at, you know, Jesus, do we really know who he is?

Not thinking so much of the physical appearance, but his character.

And then on Sunday morning, we looked at, do you really trust his promises?

And looking at what faith really is From a biblical perspective and then this morning the question that we would like to look at is have you experienced his Strength have you experienced his strength and what I want to do this morning is a little bit different than the other mornings because I wanna share a little bit of my testimony, not all of the testimony, but just some segments of my walk with the Lord that I believe will help give us a perspective of how we can rely upon God's strength and how we can put our confidence in Him.

And really, The stories that I want to share with you this morning are really based upon a verse in the Bible that I would like to begin with.

So if you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to the book of 2 Corinthians.

2 Corinthians and chapter 12, and looking at verse 9.

2 Corinthians, chapter 12, and I'm reading from verse 9.

And if you have words of Jesus in red in your Bible, then you will see that verse 9, portion of verse 9 is actually in red, or it is in my Bible at least, and you don't find that very often outside of the actual Gospels.

But these are words by Jesus Himself spoken to Paul, the Apostle Paul.

Second Corinthians chapter 12 and verse 9, and He, capital H, said to me, this is Jesus speaking to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, For my strength is made perfect in weakness." And then the response of Paul in the second part of the verse is, therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me." This is a powerful verse because it shows us where our strength comes from, and it shows us also how we actually experience the strength of God or the strength of Christ.

We experience the strength of Christ when we come to the end of ourselves.

We experience the strength of Christ when we can no longer manage in our own strength.

It is then that we feel our dependence upon Him.

A friend of mine said once, life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

And I think that many times when we go forth in our own strength and we manage in our own strength and we strategize in our own strength and we evangelize in our own strength, that, you know, things seem to be working okay.

But in order to really experience the power of God, in order to experience a living, dynamic relationship with Christ, there will be moments, and these moments will become more and more frequent, where you will realize your own weakness.

And God in His providence allows you to go through those moments of coming to the end of yourself, of realizing that your strength is not sufficient, and then you start relying more upon Him.

And God wants us to grow in our dependence upon Him so that we come to the point where we are fully relying upon God and God alone.

This is where His strength becomes perfect.

I find it so fascinating, this verse, and this is basically the only verse I really want to talk about this morning in our time.

2 Corinthians 12, 9, I just pray that this verse will sink deep into the soil of our hearts.

My grace, God says, is sufficient for you for my strength.

In our diplomas, in our careers, in our opportunities, in our money, in our...

At first read, it seems strange that God's strength would be made perfect in our weakness.

When I became a Bible worker, I was actually studying at a Bible school in Sweden, And I had actually never heard about even the word Bible worker.

And I remember when someone told me, hey Daniel, you should become a Bible worker.

I thought, well, what does a Bible worker do, sell Bibles?

But then someone explained that no, a Bible worker is someone that, you know, travels and, or, you know, goes door to door meeting people and studying the Bible with them and then I thought when I heard that description I thought yeah I want to be a Bible worker and I had the opportunity after this year that I was studying in Sweden to travel to the United States to be involved in a Bible worker program there.

And I remember that I'd never been to the United States at this time, and I thought in my mind that the United States, you know, it's the land of the opportunities.

And I thought to myself, you know, it is difficult to do mission work in Europe, but just wait till I come to the US because there everyone will want to study the Bible with me.

It's kind of the mindset that I had, you know, the American dream.

And so I had the opportunity and I traveled to America and it didn't take very long until I realized that, yeah, this was not as easy as I thought it would be.

And I realized that many people, they already had a religion and they had their ideas about scripture and who am I, you know, to come on their door and why would they study the Bible with me?

And so there was a lot of rejection and those of you that have been door knocking, you know what this is like.

And I had this day where, you know, basically just rejection after rejection and I felt that things were not going very well, and I wondered if this had even a purpose, what I was doing.

And I came to a home in the end of the day, and I knocked on the door, and the woman that I met there said, well, no, I'm not interested in studying the Bible.

And so as I'm turning around and about to leave, someone else comes behind her and says, yes, but I am interested in studying the Bible.

And so I thought to myself, yes, 1 of my first Bible studies.

But she told me, she said, you know, but I'm not living here.

I'm only on a day pass, I'm visiting a friend, and so I'm staying somewhere else.

And she gave me an address, and we made an appointment to meet so a few days later I'm driving to this destination and I have this address And as I'm getting closer and closer, I'm realizing that this is a little bit of an awkward address.

It wasn't really a residential area at all.

And I'm getting closer and closer, and I realize that this is not a house that I'm driving to.

And so I arrived there, and I thought, OK, so she's staying here.

So I went in and I spoke with the administration there, someone working in the administration.

And they led me into a little room and they just said, okay, wait here, we'll go and get her.

And so they went and they got her and they brought her into this little room and here we are sitting and now we're gonna have the first Bible study.

Now before I go any further into this experience, I need to tell you something.

I was very young at this time, I was 21, I'm 35 now.

This was my first real, 1 of my first Bible studies that I was gonna give, and I had anticipated this very much.

And so I was going over the notes of the things that I had learned in the Bible school about how to give Bible studies.

And we would learn, you know, the importance of getting to know the person before you actually go into the Bible study.

And so, you know, we would ask the teacher, like, how does this work?

And he would say, you know, 10 minutes, ask a couple of questions about themselves, tell a little bit about yourself, pray, and then go into the Bible study.

And we would also learn in the Bible school that a good topic to begin with would be Daniel chapter 2 because it talks about the, you know, the trustworthiness of God's Word, the prophecy that we're familiar with, the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, remember?

The different kingdoms, and so I had been preparing this Bible study.

I'd been preparing very, very well because I didn't want to use too much of my notes and so I'm thinking like about all these kingdoms and I'm actually memorizing all the kingdoms, I'm memorizing all the time periods so I knew Babylon, 605 to 539, Medo-Persia 539, and I knew all the dates, I knew all the kingdoms, and I thought, I'm ready for this Bible study.

And even as I was driving to the place, I remember just going over the dates and the events that I was going to share with her, this knowledge that I was going to share with her.

I was also going over for myself, okay, I need to get to know her, 10 minutes, and then go into the Bible study.

And so I have all this list in my mind and all this expectation in my mind of how exactly this Bible study is going to be.

And so there I am, I arrive, I'm now waiting in this little room, she walks in, she sits down and I ask the question, tell me a little bit about yourself." Right?

She started telling about herself, but the things that she began telling me, I had totally not expected.

You know how you sometimes ask someone, how are you doing?

And you just hope that they'll say, I'm fine, so you can walk on.

And so she starts telling me about her background.

She starts telling me about how she grew up in a very, very difficult home.

She starts telling me about how she actually left that home because it was an abusive home, but how that she was searching for love, for acceptance, and she actually found herself in a gang, and she thought that that would be her belonging.

Well, she got, you know, into drugs, she got into the wrong kind of lifestyle, as you can imagine, and just tragedy upon tragedy started unfolding in her life.

Eventually, she thought she found the right person, but this man also started abusing her.

She had a daughter, but then her daughter left her, and she was just so desperate, so disappointed about life that she started cutting herself, and she started attempting suicide, and that's how she ended up in this mental rehab center.

Tears are running down her face, 10 minutes are way gone by this time, and I'm thinking to myself, what am I going to do next?

This is something I have not prepared for.

And something in my mind told me that I don't know if it fits right now to tell her that Babylon existed between 605 and 539.

And so something in me was going like my whole Bible study has just collapsed because this is what I've prepared, This is what I've come here for.

These are the dates that I have in my mind.

I don't know how to deal with this situation.

Here I am, a young man, 21 years old, hardly any experience in Bible work, and she's just unfolded her life before me, and I'm supposed to give some meaningful answer.

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Have You Experienced His Strength

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