Our team journal is written for you today by our Social Media Manager, Kelly Gwin.

Why do some days seems so much worse than others? Why do we have days where we're just so full of joy, praise is in our mouths, and kindness and wisdom seems to come effortlessly in the Lord, and then the next day it seems it's taking everything in you to not scream or cry on an hourly basis. Am I the only one asking these questions? I sure hope not.

One of my focuses in studying God's Word right now is Psalm 119, and I see this consistent theme. A pure heart. The Psalms are bursting with pleas and praises concerning the heart: this deep desire to not only KNOW God's Word, but to LOVE IT in a real, deep, transformational way. As you read through chapter 119, you'll see this pattern in an especially bold and obvious way. "Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes" (v5), "my soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times (v20), and it just goes on and on. The writers are asking and pleading with the Lord to change their hearts, open their eyes, and teach them His ways, while simultaneously praising Him and expressing, with as many words as they can muster, how deeply they love His ways, His commandments, His works. They seem abnormally in love with God's law, yet seem to feel this overwhelming need of revelation.

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“Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes...my soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times.”

— Psalm 119, v5 and v20

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This is the tension we live in as Christians, and I'm convinced this tension only increases with growth. At one point I had surrendered my life to the Lord, had given my heart to Him, and saw life in His Word, yet the strength of that tension was nothing compared to what I feel now. I have a deeper and more real desire for Him to change my heart and am more aware of the fact that only He can do that, not me. My love and affection for His Word has gripped me in a way I only pleaded for before. Yet, I become more aware of my sin, grow in knowledge of my desperate need for Him, and find myself in that same position again. Crying out for help. I continue to fail, fall, and fumble. The truth still remains that our hearts are "deceitful above all things and desperately sick" (Jer. 17:9). From the garden we have believed lies and fallen prey to our own sinful hearts in spite of our love for God.

So what can we do? The answer is nothing. And praise God! He has done, is doing, and will continue to do all that is required and more for us to walk that line of tension and find the balance. All we have to do is BELIEVE that truth. It's funny how He set it up that way. We look at HIM, surrender to HIM, believe what HE has done, and HE does everything else. We give up. Stop the striving, stop the performing, and believe that He is who He says He is, and all the other things happen automatically. His commands become your attitudes. His rules become your freedom. His standards become your inspirations. The reality sets in that this is exactly where you want to be: so aware of your vileness and weakness, yet finding yourself walking that narrow path. 

So I throw my hands up. Throw them up in defeat knowing I can't do anything for myself. Throw them up in desperation as I continue to plead for change. And I throw them up in praise for the Victory that is already mine in Christ. We will keep having bad days, but oh how much more thankful we will be to know Him at the end of them. 

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Kelly is a worship leader, treasurer, and all-around multi-tasker at her church, while running a business as a fashion consultant and raising three little girls with her husband. Laughing, time with other women, and a completed to-do list are some of her favorite things outside of her passion for the work and Word of God. If you ask her when Christmas starts, she'll tell you it's before Thanksgiving. 

Our Team Journal today comes from our Tech and Design Coordinator, Mindy Braun.

“There comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where the voice inside us simply asks, Now what?” This is the same question I struggled with for a long time. And it wasn't until recently that I've felt like I understood the answer. 

For a few years now, I’ve had an itch; a yearning for something more. I felt like there had to be more to this life as Christian. I wanted to experience God in more ways, that the life of a Christian had to go beyond what I’d experienced in my own life. But I just kept telling myself to ignore it; the feeling was just the enemy telling me that my life wasn’t good enough. I told myself I was just discontent and I needed to work through it. It wasn’t until last year with IF:Dayton when I started reading the book Just Courage by Gary Haugen that I started to understand it. We read it as a book study; but instead of digging in and learning,  I treated this book like homework and skimmed it. But, God (oh, He's so good!) works even when we are skimming. There was a part within it that stuck out to me and forever changed my view on my life, on the cries of my heart and the work God has for me. 

Gary had a name for what I was feeling: divine restlessness, a holy yearning for more. “It’s the moment in which we can see all the work that God has been doing in our lives and in the life of the church is not an end in itself; rather, the work he has been doing in us is a powerful means to a grander purpose beyond ourselves. This is the supernatural moment when the rescued enter their divine destiny as rescuers.” Our rescue was never the end result; there is more to it. We are rescued and redeemed for an even bigger, better purpose.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus is constantly teaching and asking his disciples to look beyond themselves, to see the world lost and desperate for a Savior. He wants his disciples look beyond their own desires, beyond what their eyes could see and their hearts could imagine and take in the greatness of their calling. He was showing them that they were each important characters in God’s grand plan, that their true calling was far greater than they ever imagined. 

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“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

— Matthew 5:14-16

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The rescued become the rescuers. The restored become the restorers. The equipped become the equippers. We were brought out of darkness so that through Jesus, we can be the light of the world. We are the ones through whom God works out his plan to rescue the world.

This world we live in is a dark and scary place. It’s lost and hurting. God, the Creator of all things, has one plan to bring light to it through Christ. We are that plan. How amazing it is that we get to be a part of that redemption story! Through grace, we get to be a part of the story that forever changed the world. It's so much bigger than us, goes beyond what we can imagine. As small and insignificant as we may feel, He chose us to be a part of it. He chose us to keep the momentum going.

Could it be done with out us? Yep. But that's that beauty of it. He chose to bring us along for the ride to see His beautiful story play out. So are we taking him up on this offer? Are we hopping in and joining the ride? 

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Mindy Braun is an Ohio-born-and-raised, small town girl who has grown to love the city of Dayton. Her family resides in East Dayton.  While she's not being mama to her two kids, she and her husband run a photography business out of their home. Mindy has a love for deep friendships, fried chicken, sleeping in, the outdoors, serving the Church, and Oreos after bedtime.

It's our pleasure to welcome back our friend Elise Herzing to the blog this week to review 1 Peter: A Living Hope in Christ by Jen Wilkin. To see Elise's review of Kelly Minter's 1,2,3 John study, click here.

Peter wrote his first letter in a time of great turmoil for the young Christian church. Many Christians were undergoing persecution at the hands of the Roman Emperor, Nero. Peter, Jesus’ tempestuous apostle, addresses the church at large in this epistle on how Christians are to live in a place that is not our home, specifically to those undergoing suffering. He instructs Christians on how to submit to the authorities in our lives, how we are to set examples of love for one another and how our eyes must not be fixed on the temporary, but on the eternal. Jen Wilkin tackles this challenging letter by walking us through her deep-dwelling and enriching method for Bible study.

The Skinny: First things first, Jen explains how you are to use the study and why. If any of you have read her book, Women of the Word, she condenses much of that information in the introduction of this study. I would recommend that you read this intro as it is useful in your day-to-day approach! Jen breaks the study into 9 sessions. I met with my group each week to go through one session. For each week of the study, there is a corresponding video, which is optional and we chose not to utilize.

The study had a rhythm for each week with these components:

• a brief intro to the passage we would be studying
• a read through of 1 Peter in its entirety
• big picture questions and others focused in on that week’s passage
• instruction to paraphrase that portion of Scripture in your own words
• group discussion questions gleaned from that week’s study
• a space for any additional notes

What I Loved:  Jen throws us in the deep end of the 1 Peter pool, but not without the floaties of additional resources and Scripture. Don’t let that scare you, though: anyone can use this study! Jen is a big proponent of driven learning. You will get out of this study what you put in. There is no hand-holding you to the Spiritual truths; that would defy the very purpose of Jen’s method of study. She provides you with the guidance you need to find God’s truth on your own or in the group discussion. And I love that. I could use this study as what it was: A RESOURCE with Scripture being the sole focus! I must warn y’all that there is no flowery language or personal stories that somehow apply to the Scripture. It is just a book of paper with questions for you to fill with your own ink. For example, each day gives you questions based on the passage, word definitions to look up, cross-references to find, and parallels to draw. I also LOVED that Jen include the whole book of 1 Peter at the back of the book to mark up as you studied.

What I Didn't Love: Since our group didn’t use the video sessions, there were a couple of instances when the questions correlating to the video felt incomplete. Additionally, my note-loving heart and hand missed the more spacious areas to answer the questions, especially when it came to sections where we wrote down definitions and related verses. Also, throughout the course of the study Jen would have us highlight words in 1 Peter in different colors and then go through and record how many times those specific words occurred. This may be more impactful for a visual learner, but for me it became more of a busy-work exercise. Finally, You will get out of this study what you put in. You’ll notice that I included this as one of the things that I loved about this study, which I do! But it also was a struggle for me to be self-disciplined enough to put in the daily work I needed to richly dwell in this book. The weeks where I put in the time to learn were much more impactful to me than the weeks where I hastily scribbled out answers the night before our group meeting. It was a challenge. It wasn’t always fun. I didn’t always love it. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

My Profound Truth: Y’all. There are so many profound truths in 1 Peter that it was hard for me to pick one. All of them link together with Peter’s themes of living as exiles with the hope of eternity. 1 Peter 2:21-25 sums up the purpose of the book by discussing how we are called to submit to others, even if suffering is involved. Why? Christ submitted and suffered for us so that we may receive our eternal inheritance: salvation! This inheritance makes any temporary suffering we face bearable because we ourselves are not temporary. Our bodies may be earthly, but our souls are eternal. We have better things to look forward to. When we keep in mind that this earthly life is just a shadow, we are free to live as God intended: without fear, giving all praise and glory to Him, filled with love for one another. But part of that life of freedom means becoming examples of the one who submitted himself to the will of God and died for us all. If Jesus is called to submit, suffer, and die, then so are we. It’s a hard truth, but a chain-breaking one. What do we have to be afraid of? Our inheritance is set! Our salvation is secure! Nothing on this earth can touch the promise that God has given us. That is good news!  We can rejoice in the midst of suffering because we are being made more like Christ! Amen, amen, amen!

If you want to feel the chains of fear break off and learn what living as a Christ-follower and an exile looks like, I highly recommend this study. It will push you to seek out truth. The good news is you don’t have to study alone. Find a group of women, hold each other accountable and have grace with each other. God desires us to seek him out, and if that is your desire then this is a study for you.

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Elise wants to live in a world where you can eat as much pizza as you want without concerns about your waistline. When she's not guzzling tea, you can find her reveling in God's nature or watching exorbitant amounts of Gilmore Girls. One of her favorite Scriptures is Ephesians 5:8-10: "For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord." Explore her other favorite Scriptures and get to know her on Instagram at @eliseherzing.

We are excited to introduce DWITW's newest team member, Kaitlyn Carl. She will be serving as our DWITW Treasurer. Get to know all about this sister below!

Kaitlyn is a wife of 5 ½ years and a mama to two precious little girls. She is a University of Michigan grad (GO BLUE), but she has come to love Dayton as her home. She wears many hats at her church, the most common being that of worship leader. She is also a group leader with Bible Study Fellowship.   

Kaitlyn loves to see God work in big ways when people walk in faith with Him. She is passionate about sharing life with others. What does this look like in Kaitlyn's world? She loves spending time with people, getting to know them on a deep, personal level, or as Kaitlyn likes to say, "just being real." Some of Kaitlyn's greatest joys in life include brunch/lunch/coffee/play dates, over-sized sweatshirts, coloring books, and having to double recipes because her table is so packed with people that she had to put the leaf in! She would love to have you over for dinner!

Favorite Scripture: Luke 22:31-32, John 17, II Corinthians 4:16-18

To learn more about our other team members, visit our 'Who We Are' page.

This world is a dark place, sisters, BUT we have the light! Jesus called himself the light of the world (John 8:12). We have Him, and we have His Word. If you pay attention to it, you can share that light in whatever dark places you find yourself.

The ladies on the DWITW leadership team are intentionally seeking that light in their daily lives through His Word. We are real women finding ourselves in dark places, needing that light everywhere we go. We started this thing because we needed encouragement from each other to keep seeking that light from God’s Word. All that we do in this ministry keeps us accountable to do the very thing we are about: cracking open God’s Word, every day.

We would like to continue to share that light with you through our 2017 Team Journal Series here on the blog. Every Friday, a DWITW team member will share specific ways that God is teaching her through His Word. Enjoy our first Friday journal from Jillian, our Blog and Podcast Coordinator.

“And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention to as a lamp shining in a dark place.”

— 2 Peter 1:19 ESV

Are false prophets and teachers something we have to worry about? I’ve been studying 2 Peter lately, and chapter two is all about them. It was tempting for me to skim through this passage and move on, because I honestly didn’t think it was relevant to me. When I think of false prophets or teachers, I picture showy televangelists with greased-up hair and prosperity gospel pastors standing at the pulpits of mega-churches. But by God’s grace, these people don’t really have much sway in my current life.  I’ve been wisely directed to press the “mute button” on those voices in my life. However, I got the feeling from the language of Scripture that I am actually surrounded by them. Jesus calls them “ravenous wolves” in Matthew 7. Peter uses similar wording here, calling them “insatiable for sin, enticing unsteady souls.” This is no joke. Anybody else feeling a little freaked out? Maybe this does apply to me after all…

After reading 2 Peter 2, I realized the false teachings in my life are sneakier, quieter; striking in moments when my soul is unsteady. I have a suspicion that they come in the form of voices I listen to for advice or splashed on the social media accounts I follow, telling me what my life should look like. They come in the times and places my heart is insecure, when I’m looking for answers or reassurance that I’m heading in the right direction.

So I asked the Holy Spirit some scary questions: “Where are the false teachings in my life? How can I tell someone is a false prophet or teacher in my life today?”

When I cross referenced this chapter, I found two helpful passages: Deuteronomy 13:2-3 and Matthew 7:15-20.

Deuteronomy 13:2-3 says, speaking of false prophets, “And the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whatever you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

In Matthew 7, Jesus says we can tell if a teacher is false or not by the person’s fruit. A false teacher or prophet is like a diseased tree that cannot bear good fruit. In Galatians 5, the Word describes the fruit of the Spirit to be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. As my pastor likes to pray, “God let us produce the fruit of changed and transformed lives.”

From these passages, I learned that we can tell someone is a true teacher or prophet if a) they are directing us to love God and only God with everything in us and b) if they are producing good fruit.

Immediately, upon reading those passages, I realized I had SEVERAL voices in my life that I needed to turn DOWN the volume for in my heart. So today, I’m asking God to turn UP the volume to the voices that come from men and women who love the Lord with everything in them, are deeply rooted in God’s Word, and are bearing the good fruit of changed and transformed lives.

My deepest hope for the DWITW blog and podcast is that we can provide some of those voices for you, dear sister. But above all, I hope our ministry directs you to the ultimate TRUE and REAL and PERFECT teacher and prophet, Jesus Christ. When your heart is unsteady or insecure, cling to His Word. Let the loudest voice with access to your heart be the voice of God himself, the lamp shining in a dark place.

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Jillian Vincent is DWITW's Blog and Podcast Coordinator. She has been a lover of Jesus for over twenty years. She's a wife, mother of two and a Dayton enthusiast. Jillian currently is a stay-at-home mama and spends nap times writing and discipling other women. She would (almost) die for an avocado, a cup of coffee made by her husband, a novel that makes her cry, and a bouquet of sunflowers.  Her favorite verse is Zephaniah 3:17: "The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing."