Almost half way through, and loving it even more!

Well, it's been a couple weeks since I've written, so I guess I'm a little overdue. I guess maybe a post every other week is a bit more of a realistic goal.

Things here have been great these last couple weeks. It's been awesome going back to the beginning of it all in Genesis and Exodus and seeing how God's promises continued through the generations. It's really been interesting reading about Israel growing as a nation and has made me realize how, even though we hate to admit it, we can be really similar to them. We, or at least I, always look at Israel after they come out of Egypt and always think, "How can you guys be so stupid?" when I see them grumbling and not having faith and turning away from God, but how often do we in our lives do the exact same thing? I know, they've just seen God do some amazing things and have no reason to doubt God, but when you think about it, they're a people who have been living in slavery all their life and haven't really had much to believe in about God other than some stories about their ancestors. Not to mention the Egyptian gods, who don't care about man and definitely aren't trust worthy, who have formed their mindset about what God would be like, so it's kinda understandable that they would have some trust issues with this God that has allowed them to be in slavery for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, I've grown up in a Christian family and know all about the character and nature of God and have seen Him do some awesome things in my life and in providing for me, yet I still have a hard time trusting Him sometimes about finances and about Him providing for me as I follow Him. I'm doing the exact same thing that the Israelites were doing, just in a different way and in a completely different situation. It's really interesting when you step outside the situation and really think about it.

Anyways, it's definitely been an interesting journey these last couple weeks, and I can't wait to continue it with Leviticus this week. We started it at the end of this week and are through our first few reads, and the more I read it, the more excited I get about it. I know this may sound crazy to those of you who have read it before, I mean, all it is is a bunch of laws, but it's the message behind them that's the exciting part about it. All of the laws that God gave them wasn't just so that they would live a certain way and act the way that God wanted them to do, but they were all put in place to protect the Israelites from disease, falling into the wickedness around them, to prevent any sort of idolatry or pagan worship, etc. The laws on their own can be a bit dry, but when you start to see the heart of God behind the laws, that's when it gets really exciting, and I haven't even really started digging into it and haven't had a lecture to understand the laws better yet.

I must admit that things were getting a little dry for me when we were getting close to the end of the New Testament, but since I've really gotten re-focused these last couple weeks after God smacked me around in Revelation, it's been awesome! I've definitely gotten a new found joy in doing my work, even when I stay up all night doing it (pulled an all-nighter the last 3 books.....oops), and the further we get into the Old Testament, the more excited I get. It's definitely like nothing I've experienced before when I read the bible. It's amazing how much God has shown me that when I read my bible before I never really got the point of it, but now that I'm actually understanding that it wasn't written for me but was written for people who lived thousands of years ago and am starting to look at it from their mindset, even the most dry books just come alive!! Please be praying that this continues the deeper we get into the OT.

Other than school work, things have been pretty awesome here. I just celebrated my first birthday away from Canada. It was a little strange, and to be honest, a little tough at times leading up to it cause it kinda made me suffer from a little bit of homesickness (first time yet really, so not too bad), but it was still an awesome time and I was able to skype with my family and some friends, which was definitely a blessing and helped. A really exciting thing for me is that I've found a bouldering rock climbing wall in a park in Taipei that's free to use, and pretty legit too. It's amazing. It's really helping me enjoy being in Taiwan that much more, and although my hands were like little girls so they are pretty torn up right now, it's been awesome. I'm planning on going pretty much every Sabbath, since it's only about 1hr away using the public transit, and it's a nice way to get out of Dan Shui and just spend some time in the outdoors since I'm inside basically all week, and it's rock climbing, which I missed terribly.

Anyways, it's getting late here, so I should head to bed, just wanted to send you all a quick update first. I hope you guys are all doing fantastic back home and that God is blessing you all. Please be keeping me in your prayers, it means so much to me knowing that people are praying for me back home.

God bless.


Prayer Requests

• That God will continue to refresh me and to be speaking to me through the Old Testament
• That God will be speaking to and empowering our staff as they teach us
• That God will be with our school leader Lachlan as he goes home to South Africa for a couple weeks
• That I will be able to connect with some of the rock climbers here and that I will be able to build relationship with them and share the gospel with them
• That God will be working through our surf ministry and that He'll be giving Chris His vision for what they are doing and how He wants them to reach the surfing community in Taiwan
• For Taiwan in general that God will be breaking down the barriers to Christianity here so that they can be freed from the bondage of their ancestor worship
• That God will be protecting our school from sickness (a lot of people still getting sick, but nobody's been to the hospital lately - Praise God)
• That God will just really be blessing our entire school and that we'd all be giving Him our 100%

Getting refreshed with a new start in the Old (Testament that is)

Hey everybody, hope you're all doing great! Things are going awesome over here. We've now finished the New Testament and have gone from the end (Revelation) all the way to the beginning of it all (Genesis). I has been an interesting week and a half since I last posted, and God has been teaching me some lessons and has refreshed me and given me a renewed zeal to study His Word through them.

Revelation was an amazing book, but was a difficult one for me. We had a lot of time to do Revelation, and because of that I did exactly what I didn't want to do, I slacked off....a lot. But God is good, and He taught me heaps through it, and was faithful to help me out of the hole I dug for myself after I repented and laid myself at His feet again. It was amazing going through Revelation and seeing it in a new light and realizing how wrong I had been in how I had looked at it before. Going through the bible this way has made me realize how silly it is to try and just take the things written in the context of our culture instead of focusing on what it meant to the original reader, and showed me that I have always done that with Revelation, which led me to not understand it at all and just get confused and avoid it. Through studying it this time I was able to see how it is basically a rallying call to the Christians  to continue to persevere through the persecution and suffering that they were experiencing (most likely under Domitian) because Jesus is victorious and we get to join in His victory (it actually says twice "Here is a call for the endurance of the saints" - 13:10; 14:12 ESV). It was an awesome experience to get a better understanding on one of the most misunderstood books of the bible, even if it wasn't the easiest book to get through.

If you've been reading my recent posts you know that I I've been thinking a lot about the future lately, and that I strongly feel like God wants to use my passions for rock climbing and the outdoors for His glory. This is amazing news and is really exciting, but it was because of this that I got myself into a hole with Revelation. I had been thinking about the future so much and starting to look at rock climbing websites and videos so much that I started to lose focus on what God was doing in my life NOW. I was starting to focus so much on the future that I wasn't giving my all to SBS and was starting to look at it as a stepping stone or something I had to get through before I could go onto bigger and better things.

Thankfully, God is faithful and last Sunday He showed me how I was doing this when I was slacking off instead of working since I had pretty much taken Saturday as my Sabbath because I had surf ministry last weekend. God really convicted me about how much I had been paying attention to rock climbing and was showing me that I was even starting to covet rock climbing and was starting to wish I was already done SBS just so I could be rock climbing. So that night I spent some time praying and humbling myself on my knees before Him and repented of how I had let rock climbing almost become an idol to me by focusing on it too much.

The next morning at base meeting one of our base staff, Martin, spoke about giving God our first fruits and giving God our current situation and being 100% where He had put us. This spoke directly to my heart and completely connected with what God had been speaking to me the night before. This really helped me realize that I had been focusing on the future so much that I was completely missing out on the present and was missing out on the amazing gift that God has given me in allowing me to do SBS and study His Word as a full time job. This definitely refocused me, and really humbled me and helped me to get back on my knees at His feet and admit that I was weak and needed His help to finish the work that I had to do.

With His help I was able to finish Revelation, even though I had to pull an all-nighter. He definitely gave me strength when I was weak and enabled me to get it done on time and still be able to do my outloud read for Genesis and study for our test on the entire New Testament the next day, which I did great on. Praise God.

Through this experience God really showed me how He is faithful to help us, even when we mess up and dig ourselves into a hole because of our own stupidity. He also showed me that I really need to stop thinking and praying about the future for now and just trust Him that He will bring it together in His timing, and to really focus on the amazing gift that He is giving me over the next 5 months in SBS.

Because of all of this, I've decided that I'm not going to pray about the future until the end of this term, and am going to try not to even think about it until then. That will still give me enough time to figure out if I'm going to do Titus Project (http://www.ywamtaiwan.org/us/training/titus.html) after SBS before the deadline to apply, and will help me to stay focused on what I'm here to do. I've also realized that I need to not allow rock climbing to distract me from the work that I'm doing, so I'm going to limit myself to not looking at any rock climbing websites or videos or anything except on my Sabbath. I know that this may sound kinda silly to some people, but God has really reminded me through this how easily I can get consumed by my passions and how I tend to have a hard time waiting to get the things that I want. These are things that I have always struggled with and that I need to continue to give to God and to look to Him for strength in.

Through all of this I have really been refreshed and have gotten excited again about studying the bible, especially with us starting the Old Testament. I can't wait to see how everything connects to the New Testament, and I'm already starting to see how God had a plan from the very beginning to redeem us and that the bible is just one big love story between God and the people who didn't deserve and often didn't even appreciate the love that He gave them. It has also just been an awesome change to get into some stories and narrative since the New Testament started to get a little repetitive by the end of it since as you study it more closely you can see how it is basically just telling us about God's love and about how we need to show that love by putting others first over and over again. It has been an amazing gift so far being able to understand the bible so much better, and I'm so excited to see what else God has for me through the rest of my time here.

As I mentioned earlier, I am now doing surf ministry with a couple guys from our base that head up Christian Surfers Taiwan. I go for 6 hours every other week, and last week was my first week. Unfortunately there was basically no surf, but we had an amazing time hanging out with some Taiwanese people and I was able to meet a couple really awesome Taiwanese and spent the day just hanging out with them and showing the love of Jesus to the people we came across at the beach and the surf shop. I'm really excited to be a part of this ministry and to learn more from Chris and Zack about how they use their passion for surfing to spread the gospel, since this is something that God has put on my heart to do with rock climbing. It's also just an amazing atmosphere to meet some Taiwanese people that may not have ever heard the gospel or even met any Christians before, and show them God's love through friendship and fellowship. Chris has made some amazing relationships with the surfers here over the last few years, and I'm blessed and excited to be a part of it.

This week we're studying Genesis all week. We started it on Wednesday, and have had 1 lecture so far and still have 3 more to go. This is a really big book and is done a little differently than we did the New Testament, so please be praying that God will help me to get through it and will help me adjust to the new style of charting and the new style of writing too.

I hope you are all having a great summer back home, and thanks so much for spending the time to read my blog. It really means a lot to me. I love you and miss you all.

God bless,

Matt

Prayer Requests:

• That God will help me to stay focused on what He has for me now and that He will be speaking to me through my studies
• That I won't get overwhelmed by the size of the books in the OT, especially since we go through them really quickly
• That I will adjust well to the change from the NT to the OT
• That I will make good connections with people and will show God's love to the people I meet in surf ministry and throughout my time in Taiwan
• That I will continue to focus on God and to be willing to learn everything that He wants to teach me through this time
• For my Grandpa who just had open heart surgery that he will have a quick and full recovery (and thanks that he was able to get in so quickly)
• That God will comfort me when I'm missing home or feeling lonely
• That God will be empowering and leading our staff as they help us through SBS and teach the different books (for the schedule of what books were studying, see my last post)

A little overdue for an update

Well I just realized that it's been almost 2 weeks since I last wrote an update, so I figured I should probably let you guys know how things are going.

The last couple weeks have been pretty good, but really busy as well (of course). The rest of the break was a great time, and God really reenergized me and really spoke to me and showed me how He has been speaking to me and continued to motivate me to spend more time with Him in prayer. After the break we started up hitting the ground running with the gospel of John, which was difficult because we only had 1 week to do it, and unlike most books where we work on the Saturday to get started on the book, we didn't start any of the work until Monday morning, which made me feel like I was behind from the beginning. I also had some struggles with getting my mind back in to charting mode after the break and had some kinda unproductive days, which led to me getting really behind and having to have a HUGELY productive day from Friday to Saturday. This was a little draining and killed me a little, but in the end, I think it was a bit of a blessing because it showed me how I can pound out a ton of charts in a day, which has given me confidence for the Old Testament. This is really good because I was a little worried and intimidated about the Old Testament because how big the books are and because of how quickly we move through books (I'll post our schedule at the end of my post, it's INSANE, but it's gonna be AWESOME!!!).

We just finished 1 John on Tuesday morning and since 2 and 3 John are both so small we did something a little different for them and rather than charting the books we had to prepare a small 20 minute sermon from a passage in one of the books. It was a lot of fun and was a great change from charting. We were able to choose a hypothetical audience and had to write a sermon to meet a need that they would have. For my sermon I decided to speak from 3 John vs5-8, chose my audience to be DTS students, and spoke on the subject of supporting missionaries and asking for support. This is obviously something that is close to my heart since I've been praying about support, which made it pretty easy to speak for 20 minutes about it. I basically gave the biblical basis of supporting missionaries, then spoke about being obedient and diligent in raising support and finished it off with a bit of application, like writing a letter to share with people what God is calling you to do and asking them to partner with you in it. It was a fun experience and I was able to get some good pointers and constructive criticism out of it. It really showed me how much I want to spend some time staffing some DTSs and discipling younger people in living their lives for God, even if I wasn't actually speaking to an actual DTS.

We're now just starting on Revelation, which is going to be a huge and heavy book, but I'm pretty excited for it. I've just read it the first time through today and am about to do my colour code and read it again and I'm already realizing that I have no idea what it all means, but am super excited to dig into this and try to get a better understanding of the revelation that John had. So please be praying that God will speak to me through this book and will give me a revelation (haha) of what it all means and what it means to me in my life.

Other than that, there's nothing too exciting going on, which is probably a good thing since it means things are getting better. My Grandpa just had open heart surgery yesterday, so please be praying for him for a quick recovery. The surgery was a complete success with no complications, so hopefully that stays the same with the recovery process and he's able to get around better after he recovers. Also, we had 3 people leave SBS at the end of the break, my buddy Breno that I mentioned last post, and a couple named Calvin and Camille, who were also good friends. They've all gone over to the Kona YWAM base, so please be praying for them that their transition will go smoothly and that God will be using them mightily there. This has also been difficult for our staff because it's always difficult to have students leave the school, so please be praying for them as well that God will be affirming them and that He will be speaking to them and filling them so that they can pour into us, especially in this difficult term that we have ahead of us.

Finally, I also want to mention that my friends Jari and Tanya Koivu who work with YWAM Alternatives Network in Toronto are preparing for a Supernatural Ministry DTS, which starts in September, so please be praying for them that God will be sending them the staff and students that they need and that God will bless the school and will use the school to touch many lives. If you want any more information or if you or someone you know may be interested in the school, either as staff or students because I know they have room for both, check out their website at http://www.ywamalt.net/dts/dts-overview.

I hope you are all doing great. I love and miss you all. Also, I don't think I've mentioned this before, but it looks like I'll be home at least for a few weeks, or maybe even longer, at Christmas, so hopefully I can connect with some of you then. Thank you so much for reading my blog, your prayers mean so much to me, and if you ever have any questions or just want to say hello, feel free to email me at stelps1@gmail.com. It may take me a little while to get back to you, but it's always great to hear from people back home and I definitely will get back to you.

God bless

Prayer Requests

• That my Grandpa will recover well from his heart surgery
• That Breno, Calvin and Camille will have a smooth transition to the Kona base
• That God will continue to speak to me through my work and will continue to change me into the man that He created me to be
• For Jari and Tanya and the school that they are preparing for
• That God will continue to send people to support me (and praise Him for sending some support since my last post!!!!)
• For our staff that God will continue to bless them and fill them up and equip them to be a blessing to us
• That God will help all of us to be able to understand Revelation and that God will be speaking to us through it

Schedule

Here's the schedule for the second quarter, in case you're interested. It would definitely be appreciated if you could all be praying for us as we finish the different books and for the speakers that will be teaching them to us.

• July 7-13 - Revelation
• July 15-23 - Genesis
• July 23-29 - Exodus
• July 29-Aug 4 - Leviticus
• Aug 4-9 - Numbers
• Aug 9-16 - Deuteronomy
• Aug 16-20 - Joshua
• Aug 20-25 - Judges
• Aug 25-27 - Ruth
• Aug 27-Sept 5 - 1&2 Samuel
• Sept 5-12 - 1&2 Kings
• Sept 12-16 - 1&2 Chronicles
• Sept 19-23 - BREAK!!!!!!!!!