6.1.08 I Graduated!!!

Today is June 1^st.  I’m supposed to start today delivering you to my Word for the Day, but the course of today has been a bit different from most Sundays.  Today, I graduated from my first year at Bible college – Barclay Ministries’ Supernatural Ministries Training Institute (SMTI).  It’s been an awesome and transforming 9 months.  A special honor for me, was that I was selected as one of the 2 students to deliver a short speech at our commencement ceremony on what SMTI has done for us.  So instead of trying to come up with a new blog topic and Word for the Day, I thought I’d just share what the Holy Spirit put in my heart for my local body of Christ, with the body of Christ all over.  Here goes…

 

I’m Tami Nutall, and I’m a first year SMTI graduate.  This moment has been, for me, in the making for the last 3 years.  It was about 3 years ago, one of our previous SMTI graduates was preparing to enter into her first year at SMTI, and I so clearly remember her asking me if I wanted to enroll too.  I said “no way, not me, but I’ll happily pray for you as you do”.  I was happy just coming to church for those 1.5 hours every two weeks or months or so.  I think God was standing there smirking at me, saying “That’s what you think”.   So I continued on over the next 2 years, living my life the way that I wanted to and trying to make my heart’s “little” desires come true – with “little” success.  But I always felt God pulling me closer and closer to Him – it’s amazing how we feel that when nothing in our life is working the way we think it should.  So last year, I started to yield a bit, and I started coming to church every Sunday and as I did and as I began to get closer to God, His word really started to be fulfilled in my life. 

 

Everything God does always begins with the word, but sometimes we don’t get a revelation of what that word is until way after God has started something.  And for me that word was Psalm 37:4 “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart”. For so long, I thought that meant whatever I wanted, God would give it to me because He loves me – never mind the first part about delighting in Him.  But around week 28 of SMTI, it became clear to me that that wasn’t all at what that scripture meant.  I got a ‘revelation’ – a light bulb – that scripture means exactly what it says in the exact order that it says it.  And I began to have flashbacks.  Looking back over the last (now) 365 days of my life, it started with the Sunday morning service the day of the 2007 SMTI graduation. It was just a small desire to come and support the 2007 graduating class.  Then it was a small desire to really have what they had.   I know me, and I know those 2 desires didn’t just come from me.  Then exactly 60 days later, God did something even greater.  He sent me to SMTI.  Didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go, just sent me.  Thank God I obeyed.  Because as I pressed into SMTI every Saturday morning at 9am for 31 weeks, I know undoubtedly that God did what He said He would do in that scripture.  He really did give me a new set of desires – which were soooo different from my previous set of desires.  Those little desires snowballed into a big desire to be here in fellowship and in Word with this company of believers every time Pastor requests, and a big desire to help build up my local church – not just fill a seat, and also a big desire to invest my time with my daughter above spending all my time at work.  Most importantly it gave me a big desire to have an eternal relationship with Christ.  It also sharpened my spiritual ear to hear the heart of my Pastor and to hear God through him, and it gave me a heavenly love and respect for both of them.  The lessons were great and on point each week in my life.  But the one thing that has really transformed in my heart, is my huge desire to follow after the things of God and His will and call on my life versus my own.  And you know what, it was like a big shift change beginning January 2008.  The more I sought God, the more peace, and joy, and even business sought me.  Now I might have gotten to this point eventually without SMTI, but it could very well have taken another 30-something years, and I and my family, and the Kingdom of God just don’t have that time to waste anymore.

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So, to answer my question from yesterday,

 

“What do I want to be today???”

 

Simply…