Missions Conference draws people into the heart of God through the experiences of others. As we go through the first day of Missions Conference, we are all trying to find what God is doing in our hearts and how we can go out and transform the world for the kingdom of God. God has brought to Biola a speaker with a heart and a passion to go out and share the love of Jesus to others and to rightfully equip Biola students to do so.
This man is Jimmy Seibert, a man from Texas with a heart as big as his home state for going out and sharing the good news of Christ. He shared his story as a college student, when he gave God a mere three months to show that he was real and could be a real part of Seibert’s world. Seibart took some measures; he sought out the things he held most dear that would get in the way of what God was trying to do in his life. He took all the things out of his life that would get in the way of a full transformation.
Seibert literally threw chewing tobacco out the window of the car, clink clank as it hit the asphalt, as he drove full speed ahead. He realized he did not need secular music; it would only distract him further in his transformation and with his encounter with God. So threw all his cassette tapes out of the car — he could hear the sound of broken plastic shattering against the ground. The last things he threw out of his life for those three months were movies and television — things he loved, but ultimately gave up in order to get really acquainted with God.
Seibert gave part of each day to God to see that he was real; he began reading one chapter of the Gospel of Matthew a day. In a mere six days, he was transformed and wanted to live like Jesus lived. He has lived as a missionary in the jungle of New Guinea and the sun-beaten sands in Afghanistan, always confident that we have a God that has gone before us.
Our God is a God healing the past and evangelising in the present — not through us, but with us. He is the God of the future — one that has gone before us to prepare a way for us. Siebert expressed this light of truth that “God makes a way when the way we see is impossible, because nothing is impossible with God on our side.”
Jesus joins us on our journeys and comes alongside us and joins together with us as we bring others to experience him. God can make all things possible with faith. He is the God of future and will provide a way for all to go out and share what he has done to further his kingdom and bring him glory.
Siebert took extreme measures to have an encounter with God, and for God to prove himself, in a way that I hope I can learn about through this conference. God has a sovereign plan for our lives and will ultimately work everything out for our good and his glory. Romans 8:28. I think God is opening us to a life led by him, using the gifts that he has equipped us with in order to bring about his glory. He shows us how to do things in life and our fatal mistake is thinking that this whole thing is about us — when really all the things are precious gifts to us to give back to the Lord.
One thing that my heart is clinging to from the session is the phrase Seibert used when telling us a story: You can see God’s power from not only the chains of your life falling off, but that the joy of the Lord shines through once those chains have been removed. God has taken all the bad things all the things that I have deemed unworthy, and he is taking them away to show me that he can bring joy and a new life into my life that I have given to him. We do these things and put ourselves out there as Christians because we know wholeheartedly that Christ is worthy, and he gave everything for us. Through this promise of a new life found through him because of him we will never have to live life alone, and that thought in it of itself has been a comfort to me. As we want to meet God in real ways he wants even more to meet with us and be apart of all that he has intended for us.
