S2S Sisters: “Intentional Formation: Living Young Adult Years with Purpose” by Joy Weiler

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. Good afternoon, ladies. Welcome to Strength to Strength Sisters. I want to just read over the vision of Strength to Strength Sisters here, just to refresh it in our minds, and then I will be introducing the speaker to you.

The vision for Strength to Strength Sisters is to be catalysts in advancing the kingdom through biblical teaching, testimonies of faithful women, and thought-provoking discussion. So we are looking forward to a testimony today and some thought-provoking discussion. I am happy to introduce to you today Joy Weiler.

She is going to be speaking today about intentional formation, living young adult years with purpose. And I'll read over her bio here just to refresh it in our minds. For many people, the young adult years are a time of discovering who we are, what we are passionate about, and what gifts and abilities God has given us. Scripture calls youth to be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, and in purity.

These years are formational, and our choices can shape the trajectory of our lives. We will explore some ways to be intentional, to use the young adult years well to serve and grow and build Christ's kingdom. So welcome, Joy. We are so glad to have you here on this platform.

And I would like to say a prayer for you before you get started, and then I'll turn it over to you. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for being our heavenly Father. Truly, you have loved us in ways that are special and unique, teach one of us.

Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would descend on Joy today. Give her words to speak, Father. And I pray for the spirit of humility and grace and clarity to be upon her. Let us think seriously today, Lord, about the choices that we make and the way that they form us and shape the trajectory of our lives at any age we are at in our lives, Father.

Please satisfy the hunger and thirst in our souls, Lord, and I pray that our lives would be marked by righteousness. So we lift Joy up to you today, Father, and we just pray your blessing on each one of the women that are listening to this talk today, that will listen to this talk in the future. Father, may your Spirit minister to our hearts. We ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, who is so worthy. Amen.

Okay, go ahead, Joy. Thank you, Doreen. I am excited to be here. Welcome to everybody who is here, and I'm going to get started here. When I was 17, I was a newly baptized believer, and I was full of excitement, and I was passionate and adventurous, passionate about following God. I would read the Bible and pray a lot. I wasn't necessarily very scheduled or disciplined in it, but it was definitely a part of my life and something that I would go to fairly frequently, especially in difficult times. Or if I was facing a challenge, I would go back to it a lot more.

But this happened less and less as I grew older. I was working full-time as a paramedic. I was seeing a lot of really challenging things, and Scripture and prayer became less of a thing in my life. And what filled my life far more was media. I turned to media, I turned to movies, social media, etc. And the more that that became a part of my life, the less that my Scripture time and prayer time happened.

I began to feel isolated and lonely, and I wondered what had happened, what had gone wrong where the thrill and excitement for me of being a young and newly baptized believer had completely went away. I believe that my formation when I was young was weak and did not build the foundations that I needed later on.

I read this Scripture, 1 Timothy 4:12, fairly often in that time. And this Scripture, I'm going to try to read the things on my slide for those of you who are listening through the phone, but I apologize if you missed some of it. 1 Timothy 4:12 says, "Let no one despise your youth, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, and in purity."

I did not feel like I was an example to the believers in any of these things, in my word, in my conduct, in my love, my spirit, my faith, or my purity. I was lacking some of the foundations that I needed to be able to do this, to be able to be an example to the believers. I'm going to talk about some ways to build these foundations and to form yourself and to build strong habits in your younger years. But I'm going to actually first talk about these younger years. And most of my conversation is going to be directed towards the young women who are listening because that's obviously my topic.

I'm specifically thinking probably about the ages from like 14 to 23. Those were the years that I really wrestled with a lot of this stuff. And so I'm going to focus probably more on that age. But I do think that this stuff can be helpful for older or younger, and I hope we can all take a little bit away from it.

These years are years of figuring out, asking ourselves these questions: Who am I? And what is God's will for my life? What does God want me to do? What is he calling me to? They can be thrilling and exciting. They can also be really lonely years.

A big thing that I wrestled with a lot during these years was, what was God calling me to? What did he want me to do? Was I going to get married? Was I going to move to another country somewhere? Would I always live in the community I was in now? Those were big questions for me. They were big questions about who I am, what I should do, and how I should live.

We can almost become paralyzed in these years because of this. There's so many vast opportunities that are open to us, and we can see all the needs of the world in the palm of our hands. Our cell phones, in a click, can tell you the huge needs that are all over the world today. And those things can feel heavy and feel like, what are we supposed to do? And how do we even begin to pursue any one of them, let alone the vast numbers of them that there are?

The language of calling is often used here. And I mentioned it earlier, and we often ask this question: Is God calling me to this or to that? Or I'm praying that God would call me to do this thing.

Or I never felt like God called me to serve. These are like the language that can often be used as we try to figure out what we should do. What is God calling us to? And we can just get hung up on that.

I'll be honest with you, I highly, highly dislike how we generally use this idea of calling. Sisters, if you have decided to follow Christ, you have already been called. I will repeat that again. If you have decided to follow Christ, you have already been called. God's will for your life has been clearly laid out. This might be a new thought, a new idea to you. I know it was to me when I first heard it, but I read a lot more about it and sought to understand it more. And I have found it to be incredibly helpful and freeing for me in my life. And I wish I had known more about it when I was young.

I'm going to go to Scripture and show you a little bit of what I mean. So this idea of calling or what is God's will for me? So the word, the will of God, the word will is the word Thelema in Greek. And it's the word that's used in the Lord's Prayer by kingdom come, by will be done. It's also used several other places.

In Mark 3:35, it says, "For whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother." So Jesus is telling us that we should do the will of God. But what is the will of God? The other places in Scripture it talks about the will of God is, "In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you," which is 1 Thessalonians 5:18. 1 Peter 2:13 says, "Therefore submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme or to governors as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.

For this is the will of God that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men, as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God." 1 Peter 2:13. 1 Thessalonians 4:3 says, "For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality."

And then this last verse does not necessarily say the will of God, but I think it speaks to what God is asking of us. And it's from Micah 6:8, and it says, "He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God," which is again Micah 6:8.

When we ask, what does God want? What is his will for me? In Micah, he's saying, "The Lord is requiring that you do justly, you love mercy, and you walk humbly with your God." I am not aware of anywhere else in Scripture where it talks about the will of God in regards to something that we should be doing. We don't see anywhere in any language in Scripture about trying to figure out God's will. We're not instructed to pray that God would show us his exact will for us as an individual.

We're not told to wait to do anything until God speaks to us. Instead, this is what God tells us. This is what he says. "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." This is John 14:15. Instead of trying to figure out what the will of God is, I think we should look at what God has already said. And he's saying, "If you love me, you're going to keep my commandments." So I'm coming back to this again. If you have decided to follow God, if you are choosing to serve him, you have already been called. Let's look at some of these commandments. There is a lot. I'm going to just jump through them fairly quickly.

I don't expect you to be turning to any of these verses because there's many of them. I have them on my screen, and I also try to read the references for those of you who are listening. But the commands that Jesus gives after or during this time that he's with his disciples and the people when he's here on earth, during this time when he said, "If you love me, keep my commandments," these are some of the commands that he gives to us. In Matthew 4:17, he says, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matthew 4:19, he says, "Follow me." Matthew 5:24, he says, "Be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift."

Matthew 5:42, he says, "Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away." In Matthew 5:44, he says, "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you," and so on.

Matthew 6:33, he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." Matthew 7:1, "Judge not that you be not judged." Matthew 9:37 to 38, "Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." Matthew 11:28, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden." Matthew 22:21, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, to God the things that are God's." Matthew 22:37, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart." Matthew 22:38, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Matthew 26:41, "Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation." Matthew 28:19 to 20, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all the things that I've commanded you." Mark 16:15, "And he said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel.'" John 13:34, "A new commandment I give you that you love one another." And John 15:12, "This is my commandment that you love one another." And John 15:17, "These things I command you that you love one another."

My heart for you as young women is that when you are trying to figure out what God wants from you, what his calling is, and what you're asked to do, that you stop trying to figure out exactly what it is that God is telling you and focus on what God has already called you to. If you've decided to follow Christ, you've been called, and your calling is outlined in Scripture. This is just the commands of Jesus. And then there's so many more that were given by the apostles and by the rest of the New Testament.

When this is your focus, when your focus is on the commands of Christ and following Christ, then when opportunities arise to serve or to do this or that, you can ask, "Does this align with what I have already been called to?" So practically, what does this actually look like?

Again, I apologize for those of you who are calling in because this is on my screen, but I'm going to try to explain it. It's a Venn diagram with three circles overlapping at one spot. Somebody explained this to me one time when I was trying to, when I was literally agonizing over a decision I had to make. And it has stuck with me ever since and has continued to be really helpful for me. The first circle is outlined as interest or is labeled interest.

These can be your passions, things that you get really excited about, something that you stop thinking about or talking about. Maybe it's something that frequently comes to mind as you're praying or that you feel a heavy burden for. So that's the first circle. The second circle is your gifts or your skills. These are things that you're really good at. They often intersect with your interests, but not necessarily. And you can start asking yourself, "What are the things that I'm really good at? What things do I know that I do well with? What things have people pointed out to me that I have a gift in?" If you're not sure that these are great ideas, just sit down with somebody who knows you well, maybe a family member or a parent, and ask them to help you think through what are some of the gifts that God is giving you, some of the ways that you are really good at serving in these, in whatever it is.

The third then is need. And this is the one where I would say there's probably vast amounts of things that can go in this circle. And this is why we have the interest and the gifts to try to narrow that down. Once you know your interests, once you know your gifts, you can start looking at the needs and how you can use something you're interested in and your gifts to meet a need. And this is a way that you can use the calling that you've been given to serve the people around you. So some examples that I can give you of this are in my own life where I've used this.

Oh, not too long ago, or a little while, but I forget when it was exactly. I got an email from the Shenandoah Christian Music Camp. It's a music camp that I had went to one year, and I really enjoyed it. It's a week-long singing thing. And they were looking to fill a position at the camp and were wondering if I would be interested.

It's a need. There is a clear need there. I have some interest in it, but it's not too much of an interest of mine. It's not a burden on my heart to have people singing more and to be able to minister in song and etc.

And I do enjoy singing. For a gift, it's something I enjoy, but I would not say it's something I'm necessarily really talented in. And so it actually was really easy for me to delete the email and move on. I didn't even give it a second thought until actually I was coming up with this talk and I remembered it. It was not a question. That was not the place where I was going to go because it did not fit these three things for me at all. Another example could be for us women, not necessarily for just women. Sewing is a good example. I know how to sew. I have the ability to sew. I can sew about whatever I would need to.

Is there a need for this? There are probably many ways that you can serve people with your skills in sewing. You can sew clothes for your neighbors, your friends, etc. There's ways that you can use a gift of sewing. But I have no interest in sewing. I do not enjoy it. It's not something I like spending my time with. And it's very easy for me to not really think about spending the rest of my life sewing.

An example where I have used this, and that has fit really well in my life particularly, is in the medical field. So I have for a long time been highly interested in the medical field and burdened for people who have low access or no access to medicine. It hurts my heart to hear about children and people dying of something so simple that could have easily been solved and easily taken care of had they only had the most basic of medical care.

It is something that I have developed a gift and ability, and I have sought training in it, and I have sought to understand how I can use this, and I have built into my life ways to grow in the medical field. I also have a gift of compassion for people who are hurting and who nobody else is taking care of. That is a deep gift that I have. And there is a vast need in this field. There is so much need around our world for people in the medical field to serve. So that is something that I have actually shaped my life towards. It's something I know of interest, I know of a gift, and I know there's need.

And I've shaped my life in that trajectory. I did not hear a word from God telling me, "You should get involved in the medical field." I did not hear a word from God telling me, "You must become a doctor." I did not see writing on the wall or anything very specific at all. I simply know that as I serve in medicine, I can obey the commands God has already given me in Scripture. I can care for the poor in need. I can spread the gospel. I can serve and give and all these different things that God has already given in Scripture. And I can use my gifts and abilities to do that. So that's kind of an example of how you can use this.

There's a book I'm going to talk about later that this book came, two books here came out of. He says in there that when we're thinking about calling as a singular event, it weighs it down with tremendous anxiety. We're just waiting for this calling from God, and we get just paralyzed as we try to figure out what that one thing is that God wants us. Rather, he suggests that we see it as like a lifelong thing that God keeps shaping in us as we go.

Additionally, he says that while people can and do hear God in the place of prayer, what they hear is rarely as specific as they imagined it would be. God, in most cases, does not speak fully and loudly to us. He does not write on the wall. In general, it's guiding and leading through Scripture and through people around us and through the church.

And again, in line with what he has already given us in Scripture.

Why I don't like the language of calling is that I've heard it used as an excuse to not do anything. These are some of the ways that I've heard people talk about calling. I didn't feel like God was calling me to serve in that position. I didn't feel like God was calling me to give money to this thing. I didn't feel like God was calling me to move to this place or etc.

And oftentimes, I feel like it's used as an excuse to do what we want to do. God didn't write this thing on the wall. He didn't speak in an audible voice. So I'm going to go on serving myself as I please. And I say this carefully and not judgmentally because I know I've been here, but I feel like I have also heard it a lot around evangelism and sharing the gospel. I didn't feel God calling me to share the gospel with this person or to build the church or to, yeah, spread the gospel in some manner. And so I'm just going to continue living my life, and I'm going to continue living my comfortable life where I please and doing what I please until I hear God call me to that.

And I have a big problem with that because I say it again that you've already been given this calling. It's in Scripture to care for the poor in need, to spread the gospel, to baptize, to preach, to share, to build the church, and to not amass wealth and to not live in comfort and to not just have a comfortable, easy life. It's all over Scripture. So coming more back maybe specifically to young women, I pray and hope that you can do something with these years instead of just being paralyzed. But roll yourself into something that you're really passionate about. I especially think about young women, especially thinking about young women. I am really sad when I see them turning down opportunities or not using gifts that they've been given as they wait to get married.

I have no problem with people getting married at all. I think it's a beautiful thing. And if this opportunity comes into your life and it's something that you want and it's a godly man, that aligns to Scripture. It aligns with the calling God has already given. You can get married and follow the calling God has on your life already. But I beg you to not waste your life in the meantime. 1 Corinthians 7:34 says, "The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord that she may be holy both in body and in spirit." That word holy means set apart or to be used for another purpose. As an unmarried woman, you can use your life to serve the church, to administer to people, to evangelize.

There's so many things because your job as an unmarried woman is to care for the things of the Lord. And when you're married, you care for the things of the world. It specifically says that in that passage. We live in a culture that is bent towards marriage. And it can be hard to not live with that being the focus of your life and that being the thing that's always on your mind. But I hope and pray that you can use your unmarried years to serve and to use the gifts that God has given you and to not just wait for something to happen.

This quote by Frederick Prucker is one that I really love. He says, "The place God calls you to is a place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." And it kind of captures the previous thing that I was saying of looking at where the gifts and the burden that you have meets some needs of the world and to do them and to use them.

When you're wrestling with what you should do when an opportunity arises, here's what I do. I first go to Scripture and I look at what God has already told me and look at what I, as someone who follows Christ, has already been told, has already been given.

Then I ask if it's a way that I can obey the commands that he's given me. Is it a way that I can live out the Scriptures that he has already given? And I evaluate if it's something I have interest in and the ability to do, and then I choose.

I deeply believe that God cares a lot more about whether I am sincerely seeking to follow the commands he's given than he does about what that exactly looks like. My hope and prayer is that this gives you some sense of direction as you wade through these years of figuring out who you are, what your interests are, what you should do, how you want to shape your life. It can be a really hard, challenging place, and I hope that this can maybe in some way give a little bit of clarity.

I'm going to go back now to what I mentioned at the beginning about ways to form yourself and shape yourself as a young person and some things that you should be focusing on as a young adult, especially in three areas: learning, serving, and building. I'm going to go into each one of these a little bit. First of all, learn. We look at Jesus, of course, who is our example. And in Luke 2:42, it says that Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men.

If Jesus needed this time to increase in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men, you do as well. I do as well. We need our young years to grow in wisdom, to grow in favor with God, and to grow in favor with man. I'm sure you've heard this many times, but your brain does not finish developing until you're age 25. Though as a young person, I thought I knew everything. I thought I had it all together. I look back now and I'm so really the person that I was.

We need to give our hearts and our minds and our judgment time to grow in wisdom as we also grow physically and build lasting relationships. So first of all, in this time of learning, you need to choose your teachers.

The first and foremost teacher that you should choose in this time is Christ. To learn from Jesus is our key to build healthy identity formation. It's the key to healthy identity formation, to experiential learning, to testing our boundaries and our false assertions. And it's our key to revolting against the broken systems we've inherited. Jesus is our perfect teacher.

The general call in this time for you is to learn. The specific call is to learn from Jesus. Luke 6:40 says that everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. And if your number one teacher is Jesus, I hope that as you become more and more trained, you will look more and more like Jesus.

As you are using Christ as your teacher and as you are getting into Scripture, you also through this time will begin to understand sin. You'll begin to understand the effects that sin has on your life and the grip that it can have and how challenging it is. You are awakening to a lot of things in your life throughout these years, and one of them is sin and the sin that is within you and all around you.

I know a verse that came to me often when I was young and that I thought of often was Romans 7:18. And still today, actually, but especially then, Romans 7:18 says, "For the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice." And that feels like it fits so strongly. The life as a young adult trying to wrestle with sin and not wanting to practice sin and the stuff that I didn't want to do, I found that I was practicing it, and it's hard and challenging. But this is something that you are learning to understand, and through Scripture, hopefully, you can begin to develop ways to combat the sin and to push back against it and learn ways to grow against the sin.

This is also a time to discover your gifts. This is a time to discover who you are, to push into all the different opportunities that are available to you as you discover more and more of who you are. In our early career development, we are most profoundly developed by being asked to do things that we really don't know how to do and possibly don't want to do.

You will grow the most, and you will learn the most as you challenge yourself when doing things that you have not done before and that you might not be good at and that you might not love, but that you do anyway because this is the time to grow your abilities and to grow your gifts. We should want to do as many different kinds of tasks as possible. We should hope that people ask us to do things that are challenging and hard because this is your time to learn. This is your time to figure out what you're good at and what you're not. This is your time to figure out the things that you love and the things that you don't.

It can be, you can think of it as a bit of a treasure hunt, and the results of this are going to be very important later in your life as you go forward. So during these years, you should be trying to do and try as many different things as you can.

The second point I have is serve. And again, we look to Christ, for example, in this. "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bond servant and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross." Philippians 2:5-9. If Christ Jesus, our perfect example, took and made himself of no reputation, became a bond servant, was humbled and obedient, how much more do we need to do this?

And this is so necessary before you are able to go on to maybe work in a leadership position or maybe work in something that is much more in the spotlight. You need to first learn, like Christ, you must first learn to have no reputation, be a bond servant, be humble and obedient.

When I was a 17-year-old, I took an EMT class, and it was an opportunity to do something stretching and different and challenging. And I volunteered many hours and poured myself into the service. And it was so abundantly fruitful for me later on as I learned to serve, I learned to give, I learned to pour myself into serving other people. It was very stretching, but very enjoyable. I still have some close friends from my time there, and I still have many lessons that I learned through that time of volunteering and serving. I also was involved in a local teen girls' ministry, and it shaped me in powerful ways that I did not realize at the time, but looking back now, I can see.

It opened my eyes to the brokenness of our world. It opened my eyes to the pain of broken families. It developed in me a compassion for hurting young people. All things that would have never happened had I not chosen to volunteer and to give of my time.

Between Paul's conversion and his ordination into missionary service, there's a large period of time that we don't know anything about. Perhaps we all need a time of being unremarkable before we're ready to do something of remark in this next group. But we need that chance to do something where we are not in the spotlight, where we are just serving in the background. This quote here, I think, highlights this. This perhaps is the most important aspect of our developmental journey: to serve for a while in relative obscurity. This time of serving will shape us and will form us into the people that we need to be.

Additionally, this is a time to build character. And another author said that a true character can only be forged in the fires of servanthood, and true servanthood is impossible without love. This is the time to build character, to shape the person that you are. And probably the best way to do this is through serving, through giving of yourself.

Finally, we must learn to follow before we can finally and fully lead. To mature, to become a leader, you must go through servanthood first. You must be shaped by servanthood. You must be shaped by giving of yourself and serving the people around you. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in the context of the church later on, but I want to just touch on this, on what Scripture says about it. 1 Peter 4:10 says, "As each one has received a gift, minister to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God."

Galatians 5:13 says, "For you, brethren, have been called to liberty. Only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another." The first portion of Romans 12 talks all about how to serve the body and how to give of yourself.

This is the time that you have for forming character and shaping your character. Some of these quotes come from the Sixties of calling. This quote by David Brooks, I think, is powerful for you to think about. "Good character is a byproduct of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or a cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily act of serving you.

The emphasis on self, of individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization is a catastrophe." Again, that's by David Brooks. In these young years, you need to focus on learning to serve and to submit. And as you do this, you will learn patience as well, which is something you should be developing in these years.

Your focus should be to serve the team. You will learn invaluable lessons of character, which can't come without some submission. Our willingness to do anything in this time results in just this flurry of skill acquisition, which is going to be unmatched in any other time of your lives. This time of pushing into hard things and seeking what you can do and how to do it will shape you in powerful ways.

The third thing that we should focus on is building. And this comes, this idea or my points from this come from 2 Timothy 1:7, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." And I believe the ways that you can build power and love and a sound mind are through these things.

If a tree has a certain bend when it's young, it's probably going to keep that bend when it's older. You have the chance right now to shape the trajectory of your life, to shape your future. And I don't want to put too much pressure on this because God's grace is sufficient and He can shape even the most bend of trees. But the foundations that you build now and the formation that you take on now will serve you so well in the future if you lean into them and build them. The first and probably most important, I think, is spiritual disciplines.

So Scripture is the first one I have here. And this bounces a little bit off of what I spoke earlier about God's call in that to understand God's call, you have to understand Scripture. You have to read Scripture. You must get into it. And the more that you read Scripture, the more that you incorporate that into your life, the clearer God's call on you will become.

What God wants of you is that you're reading His word and understanding His word, as we talked about kind of before. John 8:32 says, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." You cannot be set free unless you know the truth. And you need the word to know the truth. And so you should be writing it on your heart and incorporating it into your days. Psalms 1:2 also says, "His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law He meditates day and night."

Scripture should be your delight. Scripture should be what you love, what you love to go to. And it can be hard to develop that. It can be hard to get to that place. To be very honest, it took a long time until Scripture was my delight. But part of that, part of making it that was that Scripture was something I got into every day eventually. And Scripture was something I was memorizing, and I was praying over, and I was praying for love for the word. And through those things, it eventually became something that I loved. But it took time and work, and it was not immediate.

The second discipline I'll talk about is memorization. This is another way to develop your love of Scripture. It's to have it on your mind and have it on your heart. Psalms 1:19-11 says, "Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you." Memorization, the key to it, I would say, is accountability. And I'm going to talk about accountability a little later on, but you're going to probably need somebody around you to hold you accountable if you want to really memorize intently. My roommate and I have a challenge going right now where we both picked a passage that we liked and set up a schedule for memorizing. And as we met mile markers or as we met these different goals that we had, we do a little celebration where we get something fun to eat and do something fun for the evening.

And that keeps it exciting and keeps us doing it. And it's a way that we've built it into our lives and is probably the best thing that has worked for me yet since I've started trying to memorize more.

The third is prayer. This does not need to be disconnected from your memorization or reading Scripture. It's a really good idea, I think, to read through the Scriptures and pray over them that you have for the day. It can be really good to pray through the Scriptures you're trying to memorize. It helps it get on your mind and heart more. But you need to commune with God. There's many books and things that you can read about prayer, but most importantly is just doing it, coming to prayer, coming to God every day and praying. It can definitely be a battle. Your enemy would really like if you didn't pray, honestly. And so it will be hard and it will be a battle.

And I'm not going to go into it too much. If at some later point you would like to hear more about this or how I develop some of these disciplines, I'd love to talk about it. But specifically for prayer, some things that have helped me are having a praying first thing in the morning helps me a lot. Later on in the day, I find that my mind is a lot more distracted and it's a lot harder for me to make it happen. But if I do it first thing, it usually helps a lot. Praying about praying. That's kind of funny, but often when I'm just really not feeling like praying and not feeling like going to prayer, if I just pray that God would give me a desire for prayer right in that moment, oftentimes my heart does change towards it.

Another thing that's helped me a lot is actually setting a timer. And I started with a small amount of time. I believe I started with five-minute timers, and it has just increased from there. And I still use it actually to this day because when I set a timer, I know that that time block is for prayer and that I can't do anything else. And so if I can't do anything else anyway, then I might as well just pray. And it kind of helps me get kickstarted into it. And very often I pray long past the time that my timer has went, but it just helps me get started. And often that's the most of the challenges is just getting started.

Another thing I do is keep a pen and paper close by, and I jot down the things that come to mind that I need to take care of that day. So often I'm in prayer and then I think about this email that I need to send and, oh, I need to make sure I don't forget that. And then I need to keep remembering it. So I'm praying and then, oh wait, I need to remember that email. And I found that it actually is a lot more helpful for me if I write it down quickly and just jot it, stop praying, jot it down about the email, and then I can forget about it because I know that it's there.

And that often helps me a lot to get those things off my mind that I need to do later on. The other thing that somebody recently told me and that has been really helpful for me is to pray about the things that actually come to my mind. So if there's a situation or a thing on my mind that I'm praying and I keep finding my focus keeps getting pulled to this thing, to actually stop and pray about that thing because maybe it is the spirit of God laying it on my heart. And often when I pray over it, it kind of clears out of my mind and I can let it go. The last one I'll mention is praying on my knees.

That has actually helped tremendously as well. It didn't help me to not fall asleep. It's actually kneeling on the floor in prayer keeps me more alert and more focused on what I'm doing. Those are some suggestions for prayer. Finally, evangelism. I'll touch on here. Evangelism, I will admit, is hard as a young person because you are only figuring out who God is. You are figuring out for yourself what you believe about God. And it can feel really hard to try to explain that to somebody else.

I suggest though that it is something that you should start building in any way. You should start practicing. You can do it together with somebody else that often feels a lot less scary. Or you can seek out the people who are doing it well, who you see doing evangelism, ask if you can join them and just act as an intern basically with them to learn how they're evangelizing and how they're reaching out to people. The biggest thing I say is to just be faithful in it. So decide that you're going to do it every week or every other week and show up. Find somebody, seek out a person who you know is seeking or wants to do Bible studies, and to just show up and allow God to do the rest.

You can't change hearts, you can't change minds, but you can be present and there and allow God to work through you.

Secondly, I think you should be building the church in this time. The Scripture from Acts 22:46 to 47 is powerful. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.

You can search somewhere in Scripture for someone who is commended for or encouraged to not be a part of the believers, and you won't find it. That is not a thing. You need the church. You need to be a part of the church.