In The Beginning

Reflections from CAMPUS Winter Retreat 2015:
-Ideal: the satisfaction of a person's perception of what is perfect.
-God has an ideal in every situation.  How do we get back to God's ideal?
-God's ideal way of thinking is not seeing boy/girl, tall/short, black/white, mom/dad, it's seeing saved and lost.
-Our way of thinking was changed by sin and can only return to the ideal by faith in God and the renewing of our mind (Rom 12:2)
-My knowledge of God determines how I react, relate, and experience God.
-God's commands are clear because the consequences are too grave for Him to be unclear.
-His liberties far out way His restrictions (Gen 2:16-17) He even tells us the results of breaking the rules and the blessings of obeying.
-We do not need to live in fear that we are breaking a rule we do not know. It is God's ideal that we not live in fear.
-The biggest fear is the fear of failure. What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? Eph 3:20 "Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us"
-Rom 4:16-21 Faith does not consider human weakness, circumstances, or past experiences, it considers what God said he would do.
-We fall when we mistakenly believe that God can't or won't help us in all circumstances.
-Faith is the power to go through a challenge and trial, not what is used to make the trial go away.
-Reality is not what we see, it's what God says
-Something only reproduces what that something is. I was created in the image of God. That means I have an infinite path of development and there is nothing I cannot learn to do.
-During creation, God did not do what He could do, He did what He planned to do. God knows that changing us to His ideal over night would be hard on us. This is why our development takes time. But He promises to complete what He has started (Phil 1:6)
-1 John3:2 "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him." God sees in me what I don't see in myself, that is why He asks me to do things I might not think myself capable of doing.
-Peter was a fisherman and did not expect to me a preacher for the Lord. What is God's ideal for my life?