Heavenly Father, your character is unchanging. When we consider you today, we can say, “You are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, one who relents from sending disaster.” Thank you for lavishing your forgiveness on us through Christ. Please help all who come to our campus Easter event to be struck by this wonderful truth of the gospel, and turn to you in faith and repentance.
Amen
Hi all, if you’ve managed to open this up before 5:00pm today (Wednesday) and prayed that for us, I just want to say thank you so much. We’ve been looking forward to holding this special event here on the campus in Cairns this week. We keep crying out to our great God to save though his word, by his Spirit. If you’re less obsessive about opening your emails, maybe you could echo this prayer instead…
Heavenly Father, please keep working in the students in Cairns to be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy especially as they follow up conversations with new students and continue to invite people to consider who Jesus is. Please keep delivering students from the domain of darkness and transferring them to the kingdom of your beloved son.
Amen
It’s has been really encouraging to see a good handful of our students standing under our Christian Students flag and handing our hot-cross buns, inviting all who pass by to our Easter talk. We’re hoping that some of the people we’ve invited will come along and hear the gospel tonight. But even if not, our students have had an opportunity to be seen as someone who wants people to hear about Jesus, and we pray that that will result in the fruit of gospel boldness and courage, and future conversations and invitations.
Early encouragement.
For these first few weeks we have been running off the encouragement that we find in Philippians. Paul’s conviction of the importance of the gospel has struck us and has been helping our students to consider the immeasurable worth of knowing Christ and to be willing to suffer for his sake. We’ve also been spurred along by our Kick-off camp (you can thank God for it here if you like 🙂. It was so good to have 6 of our students from Cairns come down and join in with the Townsville students. This is the most we’ve ever had come along to any kind of camp. I’m really excited to see this because the more students who get a glimpse of the wider fellowship of Christian students, the better. It gives our students a chance to see that we’re not just a group of friends that hang out, but a team who wants to see Jesus proclaimed on campus.
A few new things have started up recently. Some of our students have spontaneously started meeting together to read the Bible in 2s and 3s. I can’t help thanking God for that so much! I’ve also been encouraging the students to make their lunch times = prayer times. I’ve been inviting students to join me as I do this, and it has been encouraging to see people start to take me up on that. I would love to see this snowball into a culture of prayerfulness in our group. Today I has a rather unsavoury character join me for a while… 😬. They breed these guys big up here!!
Most of our students are away over public holidays and the week following, so I’m also planning to take some leave and have a brief break before launching into the last half of semester. A dear friend has shouted the kids (and us) to the “Bluey” concert happening in Cairns tomorrow – probably the best surprise the kids have ever had … sshhh no leaks please :).
Looking forward to continuing to partner with you all as we ask God to keep working to build his kingdom here in Cairns.