Last weekend 27 young adults from our church went to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend the Next conference, formerly known as New Attitude.

Because this was my fourth New Attitude or Next conference, I went to Baltimore thinking I knew exactly what to expect.  In years past, especially my first,  I remember being very emotionally moved by worship, being immersed in tremendous amounts of rich doctrine, and reflecting deeply on the whole experience with my family groups and my peers from the church.  In a way I was almost fearful that my high expectations from previous years would not be met, that somehow having already attended  this conference so many times before had made me numb to the experience and that God might not seem as big as when He’d met me there before.

During worship I was trying to reach the same level of “spiritual high” that I had felt in the past; however, I had trouble getting there, and I initially felt somewhat disappointed.  I came to discover, though, that God was deliberately keeping me in a grounded state of mind, not letting me have spiritual highs and subsequent crashes, but helping me to soberly contemplate Him in my worship.  Where years past God had used the conference to make me grow in simple appreciation and adoration for my Savior, this year was about refining my faith and showing me a bigger God.

When I first learned that the conference theme this year was Jesus Christ I was curious about how they could come up with six whole messages on Jesus.  I thought the Gospel I knew pretty much summed it up: Jesus, all God and all man, died for our sins, removing the barrier between us and God so that we could enjoy a relationship with Him.  However, I came to discover just how little I had contemplated both Jesus’ preeminence and His humanity.  Throughout the conference God revealed facets of His character through Jesus Christ that I had hardly noticed before.

God really began to wake me up to this fact when D.A. Carson spoke on Jesus’ incarnation.  Through his gentle but powerful preaching, I was convicted when he pointed out that the most heinous thing we do as humans is not in the form of rape, genocide, lying, or anything else we do against each other; the most heinous thing we do is to ignore our maker.  God does not need me; He could function just fine without me, but He holds together every piece of our world, every atom, so that I can function.  How heinous a crime I commit every moment I live without acknowledging the one who makes it possible!

I was further convicted during Kevin DeYoung’s message on the life of Christ.  He specifically read from Luke 8 verses 22 through 56, when Jesus calms the storm, heals the demon-possessed man, cures the bleeding woman, and raises Jairus’ daughter.  What I had never considered before was that in each of these miracles the disciples and other witnesses moved from one form of fear to another.  The first fear was of the earthly circumstances, and after the miracles had been performed they were in even deeper fear because of the Lord’s demonstrated power over those circumstances.  Kevin also pointed out that Jesus actually speaks very little in performing these awesome miracles; that a mere word from the Lord makes tremendous things happen!  Jesus was a man, but He was not merely a man.  He was not “Bono in a bathrobe,” as our society likes to paint him, but He was the human form of God, the one who created and sustains us, the one who even demons fear and obey!  My view of Jesus had been far too small.

The next morning in our community groups we meditated on Philippians 2, verses 3 through 11, which discusses Christ’s humility, and we were encouraged to contrast this passage with the concept of Jesus also being the fullness of God, as we had examined the day before.  What especially stood out to me were verses 6 through 9: “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”  Through the miracles we had considered the day before I saw how terrifyingly powerful Jesus is, but through this passage I was struck with the fact that despite His glory, he became even less than us.  Though He is the fullness of God and everything is at His command, He made Himself less than even the worst of sinners, and therefore was made even fuller than we can comprehend because He is both the greatest and the least.  He has experienced the best and the worst of His creation firsthand.  He has lived through and is the full glory of God, which none of us can do in, but he has also undergone the full wrath of God, which I will never have to do.  While I had ignorantly thought Jesus to be either a distant God or merely a guy, God revealed to me that He has gone through the fullest range of being possible—more than I could ever even imagine experiencing!  This brought Hebrews 4:15 to new light for me—“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

Though this year’s Next conference did not send me on the spiritual highs that I had expected, I know that this year God was working even deeper in my heart, convicting me more poignantly, and refining my view of my Savior.  As I draw nearer to Him, my view of Him can only get bigger.