MTYC 2012

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Montana Youth Conference

MTYC 2012 Question and Answer

Father in heaven, thank you for this time you've given us to be together and to fellowship and interact and encourage each other.

I pray that you will be with our hearts now and help us to be receptive to what you want us to learn.

And please be with our speakers and give them your Holy Spirit as they answer questions that have been written in.

Thank you for your love, in Jesus' name, amen.

So for those of you that were not here earlier, I'm Christina Wright, and I work with the Montana Youth Conference.

And I'd like to start out by just going down the line here and having our speakers introduce themselves.

And if you wanna tell a little short sentence about yourself, that's fine as well.

I'm from Edgewood, New Mexico, and I left my beautiful wife of 16 years behind with my 2 boys, Tyler and Micah, who are 14 and 12.

My name's Joseph Olstad, I'm a member here at Eureka.

I live in Whitefish and I have my wife and children with me, Toby, Teva, Aaliyah, and Tirza.

And I'll be your speaker for this afternoon, too.

My name is Michelle Boothby, and my family is down in Condon.

Actually, they're in the Bob Marshall Wilderness right now.

My dad is like an outfitter, takes people into the Bob and stuff.

And I went to a Bible college, and I just love the Lord, and any time I get a chance to share, it's really fun to do so.

My name is Benjamin Waymire and I live in Custer, Montana.

Just keep busy working every day and love the Lord and privileged to be here to share with you today.

All right, so to start out our questions, I have a question here that someone wrote in and I think it'll be a good kind of 1 just to get started and get our minds on the track of where we want to go here.

The question is this, what is the best environment to hear God's voice?

And by the way, these are live questions.

The speakers have not reviewed these, so their answers are just what God brings to their mind first off.

They have not gone over these and come up with a bunch of answers pre-programmed.

What is the best environment to hear God's voice?

I'm just going to put a comment there that you've got to be in an environment where you can actually hear something.

So a noisy environment is obviously not going to be a good place.

Well I think it's important to define environment.

That can mean our external environment, and that should be, if you really wanna hear the voice of God, a nice quiet place.

In the clamor of the world, it's difficult to hear the voice of God.

However, how about our internal environment?

The best place to hear God is to be an emptied environment, without preconceived ideas or notions, but listening to the still small voice and allowing Him to prick in our conscience the things he wants to teach us.

And so it's not only external, it's internal as well.

I like what Christian said, when I think of an internal environment, I think of having a teachable spirit.

So I've heard God's voice listening to other people, driving in the car.

Montana is a great place to hear God's voice.

So I think the internal is really the key, and then God will speak to you every way he possibly can.

Something I would suggest is, even if you're in the middle of a city, I've had sometimes where I'm not living in Montana, you just find a place where there's actually a tree and like a foot of grass or something, And you can just pray to the Lord and be like, I see there's a bird.

Just kneel down, even if there's people around you and they're watching.

You're trying to be where you can hear the Lord, stepping out of your normal environment.

You'll be more apt to hear the Lord when you make an effort to do so.

So in whatever way you can, go someplace where the Lord knows that you are in earnest to hear him.

He'll find some way of revealing himself to you.

And really the best way to hear God's voice is through the Bible.

So go in a closet if you need to, someplace where you're alone with him and you put your plugs in.

And just say Lord reveal something to me through your through your word and he absolutely will answer that prayer.

All right our next question kind of relates just to what we were saying about having a prayer life.

And this 1, this question says, for someone who is feeling empty in their prayer life, i.e.

Hasn't been faithful in praying and might not be sure the best way to start again, what would you give them as tips to become filled and faithful again?

So they've had a good experience but they've kind of fallen back, what advice would you give them?

Can I just share the prayer we prayed this morning?

I think if people would pray to the Lord, just pray a prayer to him from the Bible.

Sometimes if we just pray scripture, it can really encourage us.

Open your Bible and say, Lord, read some of the Psalms and say, I want to pray like this.

That might be some steps of getting prayer re-established in your life.

And I encourage you to just go through there.

And every time it says we or our, put your own name or put I.

For instance, it says, for this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant me according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in my heart by faith, that I, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that I might be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that I ask or think according to the power that worketh in me, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end.

You'll learn how to pray as you look through scripture and God will fill you.

I think sometimes when we talk about Christian devotional exercises, we talk about Bible study and prayer And that's fine, but I think it's put kind of an artificial boundary between the 2.

And 1 of the ways that I like to pray is actually while I'm studying, instead of compartmentalizing them into 2 separate areas.

So this may be a little bit new, but to actually be reading the Bible and praying while you're reading, almost having a one-on-one conversation so that when the Bible's closed, you've actually done both.

Not that you're trying to get out of 1 or the other, but you've actually accomplished and had a meaningful time with the Lord through the Bible and praying simultaneously.

If I'm correct, the question was how do we start?

There was something, a key component in there.

For someone who is feeling empty in their prayer life, i.e.

Hasn't been faithful in praying, and might not be sure the best way to start again, What would you give them as tips to become filled and faithful again?

And of course we know the key to having a connection with the Lord is to actually connect with the Lord.

And the way we do that is through His Word, this is Him talking to us, or His still small voice talking to us, and through us talking to Him.

And so in any healthy relationship there has to be two-way communication.

And so it's not enough just to do all the listening, reading the Word of God, which is important, but it's also we need to do some of the talking.

And we can talk to Jesus like we talk to a friend.

Open our hearts and really just pour out what's going on.

Imagine, I imagine Jesus sitting there with me, just as real and true as this brother is, and I'll just have a conversation with my Lord.

If I think of Him in the most holy place and God sitting on a throne, and it seems unapproachable.

But I also envision myself many times taking a walk with the Lord along a river, and we're arm in arm, and Every time I think of that image, my heart just melts.

And so, for each 1 of us to just start that prayer life, if your prayer life is waning, something's eclipsed your view of God.

And when your prayer life starts to be, you know, people say it doesn't seem like my prayers go beyond the ceiling.

Well, the reality is they don't have to go beyond the ceiling because if you ask for Jesus to be with you, He's right here.

So you don't have to, your prayers don't have to have the supernatural power if you will to go through the ceiling and through the atmosphere and all the way out through the stars to finally reach God's throne.

MTYC 2012 Question and Answer

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