Bring it on...anutha one.

Are You Ready to Burn? Get on Fire for God!
By Julie Ferwerda with Becky Tirabassi



CBN.com – Want a bigger and better life than you ever dreamed? Are you ready to leave a lasting mark on the world? Becky Tirabassi, author of The Burning Heart Contract, is bringing a message to students nationwide who are ready for something BIG — something that will change their life, and could quite possibly change our country and even our world. By making a decision to sign The Burning Heart Contract (BHC), you too can begin the greatest adventure of your life—guaranteed!
What is a Burning Heart Contract?

II Chronicles 15:12 “They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their ancestors, with all their heart and soul.”
BHC is a call to passion, purity, and great purpose. It is an agreement you make with God to spend an hour a day with Him for the rest of your life.
Becky says, “A Burning Heart Contract is your response to the living, loving God and what He is asking of you. It is a marker on your spiritual journey…the moment of decision when you decided to change for good. With this contract you are saying, ‘Lord, You are worthy of my total devotion and I will live a life that honors You and displays Your faithfulness for others to see. I commit to this adventure with You for the rest of my life.’ It reflects a life that is driven, compelled, and consumed with being available and usable for God’s work.”

Ignite your passion:

“When we say, ‘Speak, Lord,’ the romance begins.” Oswald Chambers
An hour! You might be thinking. What will I do for a whole hour with God? Besides, I don’t have that kind of time!
Do you have an hour to watch television? To talk on the phone? To eat lunch with your friends? “We make time for what we want to make time for,” says Becky, who has spent at least an hour a day with God for over twenty years during the busiest season of her life. “The fact is, you will never be less busy than you are now. What will it cost you to spend one hour a day with God? Probably a little less sleep and a little less television.”


The real question is, what will it cost you not to spend an hour a day with your Creator? Based on all the evidence, I can make an educated guess. Spiritually speaking, you will live out an average life. You will likely have an unremarkable impact on the world—one that will soon be forgotten when you die. You will feel little if any purpose, passion, and adventure. There’s no way around it because that’s the way you were made. The main purpose you and I were created for is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Outside of that, there is nothing else that truly excites or satisfies us consistently without regrets.


Becky assures you that you need not wait long to see the awesome results of spending time with God. In fact, she will tell you that just one hour in the presence of the King is all it takes to get your heart on fire. “God immediately shows up. He begins to do something. You will walk around saying, ‘Oh my gosh, you won’t believe what God did...’” You will be more than ready to meet with Him again the next day…and the next…

As you watch what God does with one little hour a day, this relationship with God really becomes something that every young person wants—a romance. If you make your relationship with God your most important romance, He will fill up those holes and help you avoid mistakes like getting married for the wrong reasons. Instead, you will be intent on serving God better and glorifying Him in your relationships because He will be your first love.

Purify your life:
“God is calling for great leaders. Great leaders don’t come without great cost.” Becky Tirabassi
The greatest motivation of those with burning hearts is to glorify God and to be completely usable by Him. But for many, being usable for God feels a bit out of reach.

“I just spoke to a 30’s age group.” Becky recalls. “I heard many tearful confessions of things like, ‘I’ve wasted the last ten years with my partying and drinking and sexual immorality…I’ve been running from God…In junior high I was called into ministry and now I’m 35 and I’ve never answered the call…I’ve wasted time…I’m humiliated…Is it too late for me?’

“My response is, absolutely not! Start today. But my passion to reach younger people is because, at twenty one, I had already lost six years of purity and a life that could have been spent being educated instead of being a drunk. Thirty years olds today are despondent. And they’ve got so much baggage and garbage and missed opportunities that I’m pleading with younger people to give their whole hearts to God now and watch what He’s going to do.”

If you desire to be set apart for God, and to hear Him speak, you must begin now to live your life in purity—no matter what mistakes you’ve made in the past. God isn’t concerned about past sins you’ve confessed and turned away from. He’s concerned about your present. Are you living purely today? II Timothy 2:21 makes it clear that purity is a prerequisite for achieving God’s purpose for your life. “If you keep yourself pure, you will be a special utensil for honorable use. Your life will be clean, and you will be ready for the Master to use you for every good work.”


Fulfill your purpose:
“Changed hearts and Spirit-filled lives are the result of prayer.” Becky Tirabassi
In BHC, Becky tells about a small group of people who made the decision many years ago to spend an hour a day with God. The result?
“They were young people with big dreams and they turned out to be movers and shakers. When Bill Bright made the decision to pray one hour a day, he was not the founder of any organization; he was just a young businessman. At the turn of making that decision, he became the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. Now almost sixty years later, there are fifty million people who’ve come to Christ through that organization. It’s proof that a solid commitment to a lifestyle of pursuing God through prayer, even when you’re young and single, can turn into something beyond your imagination.”
Becky’s own life has been a testimony to BHC too. She has had God-sized opportunities to speak at large conferences all over the country, appear on national television, publish her own line of books and resources, and to speak to as many as 20,000 youth at one time. Once she even prayed for the chance to share her testimony in Cleveland, Ohio—the city where she was born. Months later she was invited to share her testimony from the stage at a Billy Graham Crusade—in Cleveland!
Through the years she has seen her father and mother become believers, and even her father-in-law made a profession of faith at the Billy Graham Crusade! The opportunities are too many to count. But dearest to her heart are the years of praying for her only son, that he would connect with God’s purposes for his life. After eight years of praying and fasting for Jake, he came home from conference at age twenty four and announced he was going to be a missionary. Today Jake is doing just that. He lives in Spain, playing soccer with prisoners and inner city kids, while sharing the gospel.


No Excuses
“The devils greatest tool is to keep the believer from praying” Andrew Murray

“Lately I’ve been sharing a funny story from the television show, The Bachelor,” Becky shares. “These girls! They fight over what they call ‘alone time’ with the Bachelor. They push each other out of the way. They’re rude to each other. They’re miffed if they don’t get alone time. And yet we say to God, ‘I really don’t have time for you today,’ or ‘This is too much time to make a commitment.’ If you really thought Jesus Christ was sitting in your kitchen every morning waiting for you, you’d get up! There wouldn’t be a discipline issue about it.”
But what about failure? Becky hears many students tell her they are afraid to fail in this very serious commitment. Her response? “Well, then you have more respect for the enemy than for God. Fear is not of the Lord.”

The best way to stick with your commitment, outlined in the BHC book, is to form a small group of people who will join together and help you in this decision. Meet every week together as a group, but also connect daily with someone from the group for the first 90 days to encourage and hold each other accountable. “It is not easy to be alone in a culture that mocks prayer and purity and purpose. So with other like-minded burning heart people, you really have your own little set of disciples who will stand together and often alone in a big crowd.”

So what about you? Want your life to really count—to be way better than average? The Burning Heart Contract is your chance to shout joyfully to God, “I will spend the rest of my life seeking You in all that I do and with everything I have. My time is Yours. My mind, body, and spirit are Yours. My dreams, hopes, past, and future are Yours. Oh God, my heart is Yours!” When you can fully say that, get ready—the great adventure has already begun!

"No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him." I Corinthians 2:9
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