Today marked the end of our teaching on Grace, and the last local outreach for two weeks.

We started off again with Quiet Time, where I mostly set up for the worship time which the prayer triplet I am in lead. I controlled the song presentation software, while the two others sang, and were accompanied on the guitar by another student who graciously agreed to help out. It was quite a hard 45 minutes, for a few reasons, but the last song was upbeat, and people seemed to finally get into the swing of things. Then I shared something about what I'd been thinking this week during the lectures. We've been looking at how Jesus offers us 'quite a good deal' for us and 'quite a bad deal' for him, in that he takes our sins, pain, past, rejections, regrets and failures, and he gives us his grace, forgiveness, freedom, a new life and life in abundance. I was asking myself 'why would Jesus do that'?, and the answer I came up with was: because God is Love! He even said (in John 15:13): "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.". So I shared about that, then we went for a short break.

When we received our final talk on grace, where the question was asked by the teacher: what is the point of Grace? We looked again at the picture of grace being like a double edged sword, and saw that there is a point on the sword. The point is to live a life of grace, and to pass it on to others. We also heard some great stories illustrating the point (for example, a christian who threw a surprise birthday party for a prostitute, and the son of a business man who'd realisede obedience to God's call on his life was more important than the life he could have lead working for the business too). Also there was a memorable thought about how God looks at people as they were origionally, and separates that out from any 'sin' they may be committing, and that we should do the same.

It has been a fantastic week of teaching. Next week is looking good too: The Bible.

After lunch I read a bit more of Blue Like Jazz, the first of two books that we will have to write a report on. I am very near to the end now, and have grown to like the book a lot. It seemed quite odd to start off with, but got a lot more focused from the middle onwards.

In the evening I went out for the local outreach, the homeless project in brighton. This was a great evening where we got to meet some very intersting and caring people. One man even played his guitar for us! Next Friday, being about half way through the lecture phase of the YWAM DTS I am on, is part of a `long weekend`, so we won`t be back then, and the week after we will be coming back from the YWAM conference, so we won`t be doing the outreach then either! I am actually a bit sad about that, as I am really getting into it now.

I have had a fantastic week, I hope you have too. Please feel free to add a comment.

"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."