Fred Balce (left) and Nikki Dionisio engage the crowd in a Model of Excellence scenario during the interactive dilemma creative during session 3 on August 17, 2013. (Photo: Kristina Roxas)
I struggle keeping my commitments and agreements. I seldom make promises and I make vows even less often. Recognising this allowed Conference’s third session and Saturday Praisefest to resound in me: even though I am not, God is a promise-keeper.
Ate Candy Subang, one of Western Canada’s full-time pastoral workers, led session three, entitled “Turning Water into Wine”. The session’s dynamism, which incorporated an interactive creative, was a welcome change of pace for the evening. More importantly, it drew me in as an active participant. Each scenario called us to obey the Lord in His vocations for us, whether in school, at home, or in service. Each scenario was a reminder that I need to trust and commit to God in all aspects of my life.
Sometimes I forget that God transforms us but I was continually reminded that He does indeed work, whether it was through Ate Candy’s testimony of missionary life, the power sharers, or simply within the Bible. Sometimes I forget about the end goal of Heaven (2 Corinthians 4:18), that God is on my side (Exodus 14:14, Deuteronomy 20:4), or that I am not needlessly tested (1 Corinthians 10:13). And when I forget these promises, I often forego obedience for my own ends and prevent my water from turning into wine.
Naturally, commitments, especially to God, are a problem for me when I’m focused on the details of the world. There are opportunities when I prevent God from working within me to transform me because, as water, I am focused on quenching the thirst of the world when, as wine, I should be proclaiming His wonders. But God works wonderfully through His instruments and Ate Candy was no exception; her reflection question was exactly what I needed to hear:
“What is the Lord calling you to surrender?”
As much as I can offer parts of myself up, God cannot transform me if He does not have the whole. He did not just turn some of the water into wine; He transformed all of it. I did not just surrender the good but also the bad in order to be fully changed in His divine alchemy.
From my surrender to Christ comes a yes. From that yes comes a commitment. From that commitment comes a promise and from that promise comes a vow.
Just as that realisation came, we were led to worship in the Praisefest by Pacific East’s Isaac Guevara. Each of us was called to make a vow to God, to write it out, and then to offer it up to Him with hands outstretched to the Cross. It was a culmination of the entire session for me to profess my intention of surrender and then worship in that posture. It was a posture of trust in God, seeking Christ, and, most importantly, love through obedience.
As I held my hands high in worship it was then that I understood how the profound transformations in our lives, through God, come about from our simplest admissions. He will transform; I need only commit.
