Encounter Youth

This week Jake shares about making the church and our youth group a place where everyone is welcome and everyone can belong. He shares about how guys and girls both struggle with being selfish and excluding others through gossip, competition, and excluding people, and how Jesus was the exact opposite. Jesus was always welcoming the people that no one else would welcome.

Check out this great message from Sarah Stoltzfus where she shares her journey of learning to fully understand the Gospel. She shares about different times in her life where God took her into a deeper understanding of the Gospel, and shares some powerful and helpful insights on what Jesus' death and resurrection really means for us.

This message by Bradley from YWAM Lancaster has some fire and passion on it! God is doing something in the youth of our region and he has so much available to us. Sometimes we just go for the little crumbs of what God has for us when we leave Jesus on the fringes of our lives. But when we fully surrender to Jesus we receive the whole loaf of what He has for us! Catch a little bonus testimony from Kephas Beal at the end!

This week Jake shares a sobering message about returning to our first love again. About how intensely Jesus desires us and wants us to desire Him back. he's not looking for us to live the Christian life just out of duty. He's looking for people who are in love with Him, and we talk about what brings us back to that place is remembering and experiencing how deep God's love for us really is.

This is the first message from National Day of Prayer 2022 where Jake shared about how God is looking for partners to stand in the gap for Gen Z. He shares about how Gen Z is like the Rich Young Ruler, and their biggest struggle is surrendering everything to God. Then he shares about how God has moved in the past to bring generations back to him through the power of the Spirit.

This is a recording of the powerful prayer time that we had where students declared LIFE over Gen Z and prayed for revival in their generation during National Day of Prayer 2022. If you need your heart for intercession stirred up, listen to this!

This is the second message delivered at National Day of Prayer 2022 where Joel Bomberger, our guest speaker, delivered a powerful message full of stories about revival in Lancaster and ending with a call to surrender everything to Jesus and be filled with His Holy Spirit.

Many of you know him as Mr. Brown, but this week, Todd Brown shares on our identity as chosen and adopted sons and daughters of God. He shares out of his own experience of adopting and the power of the moment when we stop pretending and truly identify as sons and daughters of God.

This week Jake shares out of Revelation 3 where Jesus tells us that he never wants our passion for him to be lukewarm, just ok, satisfied with how things are. This can be a really dangerous place to be where we don't actually want any more of Jesus! Just going to church doesn't make you a believer in Jesus any more than going to a firehall makes you a firefighter.

This week Jake talks about the power of hope, how hope is like light in the dark times of life. How when you loose hope for your future or your self you often give up and give in to evil. But Jesus gives us hope through His resurrection and His promises to us that He has a good plan for our lives and a bright future in this life and after He returns to make the whole world right again.

This week Jake shares about our new series on identity and who God says we are in His Word. This Wednesday we go after anxiety, believing that when we believe the truth that God is our Father and he cares for the little details of our lives, we are set free from worry, fear, and an orphan heart. At the end, we take some time to soak in some verses that speak to us about God's care for us.

This week Jake talked about Homosexuality, one of the most intense subjects being talked about in our culture right now. We talk about the tough questions: Are people born Gay? Do people choose to be gay? And Jake talks about how these aren't necessarily the right questions to be asking. We talk about how everyone has been de-formed and corrupted in their sexual desires (gay and straight alike) and how we are all called to walk in sexual abstinence in different ways to fulfill God's plan for sexuality in marriage. We close by talking about what the Bible actually says about homosexuality. Don't miss this one!

This week Jake dives into the different instructions the Bible gives to men and women on how to live their lives and what their roles are in the family and in the church. We read some of these Scriptures, then we dive into Proverbs 31 (the awesome wife passage) and Job 29 (Job when he used to be an awesome man passage). Jake shares on how both of these passages share the same qualities men and women should have, but just in different ways.

This week Jake talks about how modesty (in what you wear) and purity (in what you do) isn't just about rules and shame. Its about knowing what you are worth! its about knowing that you are treasure, and you won't give yourself away cheaply. We also talk about how guys and girls can be immodest and lead people on in different ways, and how God's desire is for us to live for him rather than living to satisfy our own desires.

This is one of the best weeks of our dating series! Where we talk about why boundaries are so important in a dating relationship! And not just physical boundaries either. Even if you've heard this message before, you should check this one out, since we talk about everything from why keeping our desires in check, not getting too intimate, and even boundaries about sexual intimacy at the end (Parental advisory for that part).

Its time for our dating series again! This week Jake shares dating advice on why you should take dating seriously and on who you should be looking for (and who you should be looking to be) in a person to date! Are they showing red flags?? Or are they showing that they are someone worth pursuing?

This week we talk about a controversial topic in American culture today, the fact that there are only two genders. Jake talks about how our culture encourages people to look to their own hearts to tell them who they are, but that the Bible tells us that our hearts are wicked and deceive us about who we should be and what we should do all the time. Then he talks about some facts to help us understand why gender is not a spectrum, but there are two human genders of male and female. Finally we talk about how we can love people who are struggling with gender issues.

This week Jake talks about God made our bodies with value and with purpose. And part of that purpose is our gender, the fact that God made humans both male and female as part of his plan for them to become one with each other in relationship through the covenant of marriage. And marriage is the foundation of God's idea of family.

This week David Stoltzfus tells the story of how relationship with God was broken through humanity's sin, but also about how God made a way through Jesus for us to have relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. At the end we practice spending time with Holy Spirit and practicing relationship with God.

This week Jake talks about how true freedom in God only truly comes when you fully surrender your life to Him. the Bible says friendship with the world is enmity with God, but Jesus calls us to love God with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength.