Narrator: Memories made, records broken, and lives changed.

The 2017 Cola Clash+ has just concluded.

Rather than presenting a canned summary of the week, however, we decided to let the CC Plus speak for itself.

As teenagers are still pouring out of the auditorium at the conclusion of the final session, join us in the lobby to experience the ambiance.

Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast.

I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m sitting here right now with Dr.

Jim in the lobby of Falls Baptist Church, and we just finished the Thee Generation Youth Summit, and boy, was it an amazing week, wasn’t it, Dr.

Jim?

Jim Van Gelderen: Amen.

It’s been wonderful.

We’ve had a high attendance.

Of course, this is our third time, and definitely had over 200 teenagers here, as well as the college students here at Baptist College of Ministry.

But it’s been wonderful to see them not only have a great time, but the responsiveness has just been outstanding.

Bobby Bosler: Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Praise the Lord.

You know, for me personally, one of the highlights for me was last night, Thursday night, just getting an opportunity to preach on hidden sin and just to see the Holy Spirit work in hearts.

I don’t know how many came back to deal with things, but we’re just hearing.

Jim Van Gelderen: We had quite a few, and there were some tears and brokenness, and there’s been tears throughout the time.

Yeah.

And many of you may know this, but we run a progression in a thing like this.

We always start with dealing with sin because you cannot get to a solution until you’re burdened about the fact that we’ve got a sin problem.

And so we were excited to see tears, brokenness.

And then as we began to unfold the fact that you can trust God, Jesus is sufficient to see kids get a hold of the fact that there is hope and there can be victory in the future.

Bobby Bosler: Yeah.

You know, obviously God did a lot of work in hearts here this week.

And we heard some testimonies of that.

And even beyond just the testimonies, there are lots of testimonies that were unspoken.

I want to say this.

If you’re listening to the podcast and God did a work in your heart, maybe you were here this week and maybe you didn’t give a testimony in the service on the final night here.

Consider going to the Your Story page.

We’ll put a link in the description.

And maybe typing out your story and just sharing that, an addendum to the testimony service.

But I know the Lord wants to use your testimony to be powerful to others.

We’ve got people milling all around here right now in the lobby.

In fact, there’s a line right now over by the shirt table.

Lots of people taking a look at those things.

We do plan in a little bit to actually offer the Thee Generation T-shirts for sale on the website.

In fact, I don’t know if, Dr.

Jim, you could say something, what you said in the service there, about the 0100 shirt.

Jim Van Gelderen: We have a couple of great shirts.

One is a gray shirt that has 0100.

It’s a conversation starter.

If you’re the kind thinking, boy, I’d love to just give the gospel, well, a shirt like that, people say, what does 0100 mean?

And, of course, you can explain that zero means I’m trusting.

I can’t do anything to get to heaven, but 100 means I’m trusting Jesus to do it all.

And, of course, you can also use that with the Christian life.

But it’s a great conversation starter.

The other one says total surrender, total dependence.

Somebody’s going to ask you, what are you surrendering to?

Who are you depending on?

Great conversation starters.

Make sure you look online. and I know those will be an encouragement to you.

And we also have polos, beautiful polos, and they have the same total surrender, total dependence on the sleeve, just outstanding.

Bobby Bosler: This is the one time we’ve offered these.

We actually have a new ladies’ style for the polo as well.

This week’s competition was pretty good too.

Jim Van Gelderen: Oh, it was great.

The four teams, if you are the kind of kid who loves competition, you really need to consider coming next year.

It was just outstanding.

If you can imagine, 200-plus teenagers, four-foot and iron big ball, four-way basketball, four-way volleyball, four-way big ball bowling, just intense.

If you’ve ever been to Special Forces or the war or Kola Clash, you just put that on steroids, and that’s what you got.

Bobby Bosler: Dr.

Jim, bowling was absolutely epic today.

Yeah, it was great.

It was amazing.

The guys were so crammed in, and those girls were amazing on the line.

I’m not so good at running the bowling.

You do the bowling all the time. but having those drones zipping around up in the sky and that ball, oh, man.

And then Mountain Dew.

Mountain Dew won that, I think.

Jim Van Gelderen: Yeah, Mountain Dew won it, but it wasn’t enough to take the lead.

But it was Coke ended up winning, for those of you Cola Clash+ veterans who were not able to come this year.

But it was a great year.

And also, Bob, we probably ought to mention that this has been one year of podcasts, correct?

Bobby Bosler: Yes, yeah.

This is actually right now episode 53.

And one of the things that I had mentioned a couple weeks ago to check out Episode 52, and I thought Episode 52 was going to fall tonight, but I miscounted, we did also want to just share with you, you may have noticed this already on the website, but our brand new resource that we unveiled at the Cola Clash+ here this week is the Battle Plan for Victory.

It’s right on the main header, on the main page, but this is the culmination, really, actually of years of things.

In fact, I wonder if you can maybe speak to that a little bit regarding the battle plan for victory, the verses sheet and so on.

Jim Van Gelderen: Well, several years ago, 20 plus years ago, we began War of Special Forces of Special Forces, which is a ministry in Christian schools.

And when kids got right, we realized they need the Word of God.

So there was several different stages of development.

And finally, we just copied these things.

They didn’t look great at all, but it was great material, just didn’t look good.

And we decided, you know, we need to put this on really good copy and put some other things on there.

And then Evangelist Bosler here took each category and explains the verses, reads them, explains them.

So not only do you have the verses there on your verses sheet, you can go online and listen to them explained.

And so it’s just greatly expanded, and I know it’ll be a help.

Bobby Bosler: You know, recording those expanded verses was such an incredible exercise for me.

You know, I’ve worked with this verses sheet for quite a while, I think about 10 years myself now, since I traveled with Dr.

Jim in 2005.

It’s a little trivia for you.

But I actually having to process through and talk through every single category page has a five to 10 minute talk where I’m just talking about the verses, explaining them, applying them, kind of just giving you my heart.

That way it’s more than just seeing a couple verses.

You’re hearing somebody talk about it.

Some of the words sometimes you’re like, oh, what does that mean?

Well, this is just desire to maybe even put it even more on the bottom shelf.

And also, most of the categories, many of the categories have a featured resource.

Let’s say you’re struggling with bitterness.

And there were a number that were struggling with bitterness here this week.

We heard some testimonies about that.

God gave a victory.

But, you know, it’s helpful to read the verses, but it’s also helpful to hear a classic treatment in sermon on the topic of bitterness.

And we have a featured resource on that page and on many of our other pages that’s a featured resource.

It’s a sermon on that topic.

So you can hear a preacher just take some time, explain it, work it through.

And also underneath of that, we also have just additional resources that you can continue to explore, whether it be a sermon, a podcast, or an article, or something like that.

And we’ve just had somebody sit down here, and I think you want to share testimony, don’t you, a little bit of what God has done.

Remind me, this is…

Jim Van Gelderen: Silas, I believe, right?

Bobby Bosler: Luke.

They look alike.

Luke, Bilbrick, Silas, Bilbrick.

Yeah, so I wonder if you could just maybe just share.

Luke, tell us what God did for you this week.

Yes.

Participant: Yeah, so before this week we had a conference at our church, and God just really dealt with some things in my life, and I was holding them back from my parents and just didn’t want to tell them.

It was all pride.

And just this week I knew God was going to speak to my heart, and I just had the mindset that I was just going to get through it.

I can make some decisions between me and God, but I really didn’t want to talk to anybody about it because it was all pride, and I just was scared of what people would think of me or what people might think and what my parents would be ashamed of me.

But Dr.

Jim spoke today about the fear of men, and also Gabe Reisinger gave his testimony on how he did similar when he went to a youth conference that he just tried to get through that week, and he knew when he got through that week that he would be all set and he’d just go back to his normal life, and that’s very similar to how I felt.

And God just broke me today that it was all pride the reason I was holding it back and that it was the fear of men and that the only way you can have true victory is to just trust on the Lord, to not care what anybody else thinks, but to just step out in faith and believe that he will give you the victory through that.

And today I got clean with mom and dad and just unloaded everything, the sin I’d been hiding for the past year and a half or so, and just unloaded it all.

Jim Van Gelderen: You sensed a relief in your own heart, Luke?

Participant: Yes, it was great.

I never really had peace about doing my devotions and things like that because I knew there was things between me and my parents. but just a great sense of peace God’s giving me today.

Jim Van Gelderen: Well, the Bible says if you confess and forsake, you’ll have mercy, and so if you cover your sin, you won’t prosper.

So your testimony is an illustration of that, and I guarantee you somebody listening to the podcast needed to hear that, Luke.

So thank you for your candor and for testifying of God’s work in your heart.

God bless you.

Bobby Bosler: Amen.

Praise the Lord.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That’s just one testimony from this week, and there are many others that the Lord did a work in their heart like that.

And, you know, if you’re listening right now and God is dealing with you, in fact, if you’re wondering what he’s talking about, hopefully in the next couple days we’ll have the sermons up from this week.

So maybe if you weren’t able to come, you’d like to just kind of work through the progression as we laid it out.

We’ll try to have them in order by when they were preached.

But you can kind of come along the ride of what God did in hearts here this week.

Jim Van Gelderen: Amen.

I encourage you to listen to the preaching and get in order would be good. there is a progression there and a lot of things were said i thought would be very helpful and uh you know young people we are excited we believe god is doing something yes that across the world he is raising up a generation who are totally surrendered to god’s will and dependent on his grace to do it so uh the encouragement this week is there are many young people that um got on board with that vision and i know you’re listening because you have that heart and we just want to encourage you.

I had a wonderful week.

And you know, I want to pray about coming next year, every year.

It’ll be another special year, I’m sure.

But you can go online there on thegeneration.org and it’ll be up, I’m sure, a little while, the new dates.

Bobby Bosler: Amen.

Praise the Lord.

Well, thank you for joining us here.

A little noisy in the background, but we just wanted you to know that we’re right here in the lobby after the 2017 Coley Clash Youth Summit.

Thank you so much for listening today.

God bless you.