Christians on Campus Fall 2011 College Conference (Part 4)

The next message after the early rising session was entitled, Daniel and His Three Companions - God's move through Young People. Christians on Campus arranged this message to be "by-the-students-and-for-the-students" format. 

Daniel and his three friends

So we were given materials to be read together in small groups. The entire message was divided into sections. Each small group would focus on a particular section for the first thirty minutes or so. The group came together to fellowship based on that reading. Then the next event was to gather the small groups and present what we had learned from the section we read to this bigger group of audience. So when all the groups presented their sections, the audience ended up with an entire message, spoken by multiple people from the small groups.

Continuing on with the message itself, I was blown away by the reading material that we got. It opens with a section, God calling young people to turn the age.

"The young people need to realize that this is their golden time to be used by the Lord. The Lord needs you as a channel through which He can carry out His move. The way for you to grasp this opportunity is to go to the Lord to open and empty yourself. You need to give yourself to Him and allow Him to take you, to possess you. Never have something within your being set, settled, or occupied. Keep yourself empty, open, fresh, new, living, and young with the Lord. Then the Lord will be able to go on through you in a marvelous way. We all need to consecrate ourselves once again to the Lord for His eternal purpose."

  

The next section is the characteristics of the men who turn the age. The first being separation from an age that follows Satan. The ones who turn the age (from the age of grace to the age of the kingdom) must be those who consecrate themselves voluntarily to God, against the tide of this age. 

The second characteristic is, being joined to God's desire through His Word. Daniel did not read God's Word for knowledge but he read to receive and keep God's commandments. He accepted God's desire revealed in His word and applied them to himself. His action in rejecting the choice food from the king was due to his reading and joining himself to the Pentateuch, the five books that Moses had written. To Daniel, the Scripture was not separate from his person. 

Many of us, Christians, read the Bible daily. Yet the Bible remains the Bible, and we are still who we are. We read but we don't quite live by God's Word, let alone join ourselves to His Word. In my case, often I just have no strength to fulfill the requirements in the Word. So this was my question during my time in the small group, reading this section with my companions. How can we join ourselves to God's desire through His Word?