by Dawn Hwang
The 2016 Lighthouse Bible Church’s Singles Retreat was … crazy. It was busy, hectic, and tiring. My voice was gone by the first night, which I didn’t get back until the following Thursday, and I felt so physically pushed and exhausted. But at the same time, it was also incredibly fun, encouraging, and humbling. If you were to ask me would I go to retreat again, I would not hesitate to jump up and down and ecstatically scream “Yes!”
This year Pastor Kurt Gebhards, visiting us all the way from Chicago, spoke on the topic of the Lord’s prayer under the theme “The Disciple’s Prayer.” He broke down Matthew 6:9-13 verse by verse and delivered four messages titled (1) Communion with the Father, (2) Commission with the Father, (3) Provision of the Father, and (4) Protection of the Father.
We are disciples of Christ and as a disciple, prayer is an intrinsic part of our lives. The disciple’s prayer, the Lord’s prayer is so familiar to us that we often tend to skip over the beauty and glory of it. Pastor Kurt focused on the implications of the Lord’s prayer and the importance of it for us as disciples.
The first session was on Communion with the Father (Matthew 6:9). During this session, Pastor Kurt challenged us on how we view and value our time in the word. We throw out the terms “quiet times,” “devos”, “devotions” and “DTs” left and right, but what is at the heart of these words? Communion. He explained the importance of relishing our time with the Father and the detrimental repercussions of not doing so, likening it to cutting off our own limbs when we relinquish this time. God has done all that He could to procure our communion with Him and we just want to microwave it instead of slow cooking our time with Him.
The second session seamlessly continued from the first session with the topic, Commission with the Father (Matthew 6:10). Jesus gives us the consequences of communion. When we are able to slow cook our communion with the Father, we find our identity and with any identity comes an activity. Our identity is grounded in Christ and this should and will lead to activity. When Jesus was here on Earth, He took care of everything and He was the Light. But now that He’s in heaven, we are the light of the world. He uses us to do His mission and what an honor that is! Communion and commission work together beautifully and we have to ask ourselves, what are our current commitments to the Great Commission?
The third session was on the Provision of the Father (Matthew 6:11). For someone living in the 1st century, this part of the prayer could have applied quite literally but how does this apply to us, 21st century Americans? The fundamental message that Jesus is telling us to ask for God to provide for us. We all know that our God is a good God and He is a gloriously good provider, but do we really understand and view Him in this way? Pastor Kurt’s challenge allowed us to reflect on whether or not we could genuinely trust that even through all that we’ve gone through, we’re going through, and will go through that God is good.
Pastor Kurt concluded the series of messages with the Protection of the Father (Matthew 6:12-13). We are called to live a perfect life and Jesus is the standard, but we fail thousands of times a day. Every single sin is a debt and when we sin against God, we take something away from Him. Our debt is massive but hallelujah! It is forgiven. The answer to all of these prayers is God, Himself. It’s not about what can God do for me, but that God Himself is what we need. In order to understand the protection of the Father, it’s exceedingly important that we understand justification.
It doesn’t end there! Not only were the sessions awesome, but everything in between was also really great. This year, I had the opportunity to serve as a team captain (woot woot Team Baseball!) and I learned so much through this experience. When I first got my list of teammates, I was somewhat overwhelmed with not personally knowing a good portion of my team as we had Lighthouse Bible Church San Jose and Orange County joining us for retreat. But God is gracious and He showed me so much love through all the people around. It was great getting know to people from the various Lighthouse churches and fellowship was so sweet. The feeling of being overwhelmed quickly dissipated and throughout the retreat, my love for everyone, not just those from San Diego, grew. It was encouraging to see people mingling, learning from each other, being vulnerable with each other, and challenging each other. We were able to witness people who didn’t know anything about each other form a relationship on the sole foundation of Christ.
This retreat was such a good reminder of God’s goodness and as I mentioned earlier, if I could attend retreat again, I would jump at the opportunity.