1. Maintain external compliance with the no dating policy, but think continually about interns of the opposite sex, and talk about the opposite sex with your roommates all the time.
2. Think that curfew is for little kids. Stay up till 10 am every morning.
3. Assume that fasting is impossible. Never even try it.
4. Spend all your time studying the end-times figuring out how to win arguments.
5. Never try fellowshipping with the Holy Spirit.
6. Every time you hear a sermon on bridling your tongue, guarding your thought life, or managing your time and money, assume that it doesn't apply to you.
7. Assume that everybody is faking their prayer language, and never study what the Bible says about tongues or ask for prayer to receive the gift of tongues.
8. Never ask Stuart a question for fear of looking dumb.
9. Never pray on the mic.
10. (for musicians and singers) Don't audition for a worship team and then complain all the time about how monotonous the worship is at IHOP.
11. Leave your schedule open so you don't feel restricted when you don't have to be in the prayer room.
12. Don't take any FSM classes; sleep in every day instead.
13. Ignore the policy about video games and movies. Fill all your free time with electronic entertainment.
14. Insist on having to figure out for yourself the allegorical meanings of everything in the Song of Solomon, and never buy a book or a commentary about it.
15. Watch the clock every night in the prayer room and think about how you can't wait to get out of there.
16. Treat the whole six hours in the prayer room as study hall every night. Read lots of books but don't bother trying to intercede.
17. Complain about how narrow IHOP-KC's prayer mandates are (for Israel, Kansas City, the black community, etc.), and never ask the leadership or God to help your understand them.
18. Make fun of your core leader behind his or her back and assume that there's nothing you can learn from them.
19. Gossip about your roommates.
20. Make sure everybody thinks you're cool (or smart or spiritual or radical... or whatever).
21. Treat service assignments (cleaning, CEC, inner city, etc.) as a tedious chore beneath your dignity.
22. Assume that you are now part of the spiritual elite. Write condescending emails and newsletters to people in your home church.
23. Never use the Apostolic prayers (Ephesians 1:17-19, Ephesians 3:16-19, etc.). Always pray in your own words instead of trying to understand the prayers in the Bible.
24. Come up with theological reasons why God doesn't answer your prayers. Refuse to consider the possibility that you might be "asking amiss" (James 4:3).
25. Assume that God is not doing anything unless there are signs and wonders. Never pray for wisdom and revelation to understand the Bible.
26. Never pray for your home church, unsaved friends, or people you actually know at home.

As I've been typing this up, it struck me that I know people who have done most of these (and I've done several myself), but in the end, the internship still wasn't a waste. They showed up as one person, and they left as someone completely different.

It's not that IHOP or Fire in the Night is such a cool thing; it's the Lord. If you take a bunch of 18-30 year olds and require them to read the Bible and talk to God for 6 hours a day for 3 months - in the middle of the night, so they have nowhere else to be - even if they do it kicking and screaming, the Holy Spirit will still change their hearts!

First, a quote by Stephen Charnock, from The Existence and Attributes of God:

God is his own eternity. He is not eternal by grant, and the disposal of any other, but by nature and essence. The eternity of God is nothing else but the duration of God; and the duration of God is nothing else but his existence enduring. If eternity were anything distinct from God, and not of the essence of God, then there would be something which was not God, necessary to perfect God. As immortality is the great perfection of a rational creature, so eternity is the choice perfection of God…

In Isaiah 57:15, it says that God "inhabits eternity". In other words, eternity is not merely time extended out forever, but eternity is actually outside of time.* But as Charnock correctly observes, eternity cannot be "the 'time' where God dwells" or else it would be something greater than God. God is His own eternity. And therefore, God dwells in God.

What else dwells in God? Well, for one thing, time. Here's how Stuart expressed it in his class notes:

Eternity is the realm in which God dwells. There is no time in the realm of eternity because time is subject to measurement. There is no past, present, or future in eternity. The very name of God is I AM. Time dwells in God.

Follow that through to its logical conclusion. If time itself exists in God, then what else exists in God? Everything.

As I realized that, verses that I read dozens of times and even prayed a few times came back to me one after another, all with one little two-letter word in big bold letters: "IN"

Acts 17:28
^28 for in Him we live and move and have our being...

Colossians 1:17
^17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

John 5:26

^26 For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself,

Let that sink in for a moment. All of creation exists inside of God. Not in some mystical, spiritual sense. Literally. Physically - as much as it makes sense to talk about the Infinite God having a physical existence. A literal translation of the Greek for Colossians 1:17b would read, "the all in Him has stood together." In other words, the universe was "put together" within God (actually, within Jesus!).

Now, keeping this in mind, let your thoughts go back to the world as you have known it. You know all those people who don't like God? Who don't want Him to be in charge of their lives? How about the devil - the greatest creature the God made who is now in open rebellion against God? Every creature that rebels against its Creator is fighting against its own existence. Satan is inside of God, rebelling against the very One who continually upholds his existence.

And yet, God will not ultimately grant the request of suicidal, self-destructive creatures. Granting a terrifying dignity of choice to His creatures, He has decreed that every angel and every human being is going to exist forever - either in the eternal joy of fellowship with their Creator, or in the eternal torment of His wrath. It's up to you which one will be your destiny. In the words of the Apostle Paul:

...we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God! (2 Corinthians 5:20)

* The idea that the Creator is outside of time matches with the predictions of General Relativity. Einstein predicted the beginning of the universe in a Big Bang, before which not only space, but also time itself could not have existed.