Encounter Youth

This summer we are having our amazing seniors share their testimonies of growing in their faith and how knowing Jesus has changed their life. This week Luke Slabach and Evan Hastings share about overcoming difficulties and loving Jesus even in when you are constantly in the pressure that can come with a Christian environment.

This week our very beloved Grace Kreider shared a message for youth group!

In this message Jake talks about one of our most complicated emotions - anger. Anger is a natural thing to feel but it can often make us want to hurt others. Jake talks about how anger works, and about the nature of God's love and anger. God does feel anger, but his hearts desire is always to show mercy and forgiveness, and that is what he wants us to show as well. Then he finishes with some tips about how to show mercy instead of acting out of anger.

This week Jake talks about the Gospel - the good news of Jesus. He talks about how God's love doesn't just overlook sin - the sickness of selfishness and pain that every person has. God loves us so much that He deals with sin by giving us a new heart and paying for our guilt. Jesus says that receiving this new life in Him is like being born all over again.

Tonight, Jake wraps up the dating series by talking about how set boundaries with the person you are dating, and how to make sure you keep them. He also talks about the myth of "the one" and "love at first sight" and how to find the person you want to marry.

There's so much temptation in our world use the online world to gratify ourselves. From Snapchat to Tik Tok, to Instagram, to messaging, to pornography. This week Jake shares about how purity is about more than just what you do with your body, its also about what you allow into your heart through what you look at. We talk about how to check your heart in everything you do when you are online.

This week Jake shares about how to set good boundaries in dating relationships and how to walk in purity. There is a SHALLOW END in a relationship where things are just cute, and there is a DEEP END, where you start to know deep things about each other emotionally and physically. God tells us to learn how to guard our hearts, and control our bodies, and he tells us these things for a reason, because intimacy outside of commitment sets us up to get hurt.

This is the message from the Carry the Love gathering at Encounter Youth where Zack talked about "Jerome," the crippled man who's friends wouldn't allow to stay far from Jesus. His friends didn't just send their thoughts and prayers to Jerome when Jesus was there. They took action. They let their faith show in the love they had for their friend. Zack challenges us to do the same, to declare war on inaction in our lives.

This week Jake talks about how to be someone's dream girl/guy. There is a huge difference between what the world says is attractive and what God says is attractive. The world looks on the outside, but God says that true attractiveness and beauty is on the inside, in someone's heart. Confidence, Character, Joy, and Love. These are all things that make you super attractive, and they are all fruits of the Holy Spirit in your life! Check out the PDF of the slides on our Encounter Church PA app!

We kick off our dating series this week with Jake sharing on how we were all created to be loved, and that is what drives our desire to date someone. Jake also talks about intimacy, about giving yourself to someone else and how painful it can be if they leave. God's solution to this is called covenant, a commitment to each other for life in marriage. If you are wondering whether you are ready to start dating, the real question is, are you ready for covenant?

David Stoltzfus stirs us up to hunger and thirst for more of God. We want to be a Joshua generation who remains in God's presence no matter what, and refuses to be distracted by lesser things that the world offers us.

This week, for the first message of the year, Jake talks about how the most important thing you can do in 2020 is know God more. There are so many other things we set as our goals each year, but God is desiring and longing for us to make loving him and knowing him in the secret place our focus this year.

This week Jake talks about how the true meaning of Christmas is not just what happened in the Christmas story, its about the fact that God fulfilled his promise to bring light and hope to a dark world. In that little baby was the fulfillment of a promise from the very beginning of creation that God would make right what humanity had destroyed.

This week, Jake talks about when the lows sometimes come right after the highs. How do we respond when we pray for a miracle and it seems like God is silent? Where is God in the midst of our pain, and how does he feel when we experience loss? Jake dives into John 11 where Jesus weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus as we search for answers this week in response to a loss in our local community.

This week Jake shares about what Jesus did when He died on the cross. He died so that the record of debt that you owed to God for your sin could be paid, that the death sentence over your life could be canceled, and you could be called innocent when you stand before God one day. Now, we can stand before a Holy God with confidence that he sees as clean, innocent, beloved, and accepted. That is the good news of the cross!

This week we begin a new series going back to the basics of what we believe, the Gospel, the good news about Jesus. Jake talks about the problem Jesus came to answer, the fact that we are sinners who deserve God's wrath. God is the creator and the judge of this world, and every person will give an account for the things they have done in their life. The good news is God is a merciful judge, and he sent his Son to take away our guilt and bring us back into relationship with a loving God.

This week we talk about what it looks like to live a life that is surrendered to God based on Romans 12:1-3. It means refusing to be conformed to the pressures people put on you and allowing yourself to be transformed by God's Word and His Spirit.

This was a special week of completely surrendering our lives to God again. Sometimes God is trying to move in our lives, but we won't allow Him to change us because we afraid to trust him. God doesn't do things half-way, and he calls us to make Him the only one on the throne of our hearts. Revival starts when we let go of all of our other loves and make the choice to lay down our lives for Jesus.

This week Jake talks about the power of Declaring the Truth over yourself. Sometimes our self-talk can be really negative, and we don't even realize that we are speaking insecurities and lies over ourselves. But, when we begin to declare the Truth over ourselves, our faith is activated, our thinking shifts, and things change in the spiritual atmosphere.

This week, Jake talks about how every person who has the Spirit of God inside of them has the power to be a world changer in their friend group, their school, and their family. We can't change the world by ourselves. We need help from Jesus, the greatest world changer who ever lived.