GO! Evangelism 2011

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GYC Southwest

Cycle of Evangelism

Gary Gibbs

Winsome Witnessing

What do you do when the meetings are over?

Hard Act to Follow

Adventist for such a Time as This!

Let's bow our heads for an added word of prayer.

Father in heaven, once again we just come to you in the last moments of our time together.

We want to thank you, Lord, for the time that we've spent here with you and with each other.

I want to thank you, Father, for the organizers of this conference.

They could have had a much easier life and time and more time for themselves, but they have a passion for your work, Lord.

They want to see your gospel go to the lost, and they know that happens as they train us how to share the gospel.

So thank you for them, give them strength and health and bless their efforts.

And bless each of us, Lord, who've been here.

May we take what we've learned back and use it in so many ways to advance your cause.

Lord, as we spend these last few minutes together, we especially pray that your Spirit will be present with us.

Pray, Father, that my words will not be my own, but that your Spirit will speak to us during this time.

May we see your will being fulfilled in our lives.

Title of my presentation is Adventist for Such a Time as This.

A few years ago in the country of Ecuador, Petita and Augusto, husband and wife, took their 14-year-old daughter, Andrea, out to eat at a restaurant.

They had gone out to eat many times, but this was going to be destined to be the most memorable meal they had ever shared together in their entire life.

So they walked into this restaurant and the host comes over and leads them to a table.

And as they're going to a table, their eyes looked over at a particular table.

You know how you are when you go into a restaurant and kind of look around and see who's there and that type of thing.

Well, as they're walking to their table, they look and they see this particular table with a man, a woman, you know, presumably his wife, and a child about the same age as Andrea.

And as they were walking to their table, they looked more closely at that girl that was Andrea's age, and they realized that she looked a whole lot like Andrea.

She had the same color hair, She had a similar face.

And as they got closer to her, the resemblance was absolutely shocking because in every detail, they were absolutely identical to each other.

Same hair, same facial features, same eyes, same height, absolutely identical.

Let me show you a picture that was taken later afterwards, and you can see the striking resemblance of these 2 girls.

And that is exactly what Andrea's parents, Petita and Augusto, wondered.

And so they actually stopped at this table and Andrea's father almost fainted and he looked at them and now the people sitting at the table, They're looking up at Andrea and they're looking at their daughter and they too are shocked.

And finally Augusto finds some words and he says, who is her father?

And the couple with the other girl identified themselves as her parents.

And that's when the connection actually came to light because the man said, I am her father.

And when he introduced himself, he introduced himself as Dr.

And lights went on in Augusto and Petita's head.

That was the name of the doctor that delivered Andrea.

So, what happened was Petita actually had had twins 14 years prior to this.

And Petita says she didn't know she had twins.

The doctor says Petita was a young teenage mother and when she learned she had twins she was terrified of it and she begged the doctor to take 1 of the children.

But, Petita adamantly denies that, and there is no paperwork whatsoever to confirm the doctor's story.

And so the twins were separated at birth, identical twins, and they happen in 1 in a gazillion chances to meet each other in this restaurant.

Now you, Can you imagine discovering that you have an identical twin in this fashion?

You know, if there's somebody like you walking around on this planet, that might be scary for some people to consider.

But it would be an Identity crisis of epic proportions.

Now you think about Andrea and her sister, Maralisa, what they might be thinking, who am I?

Well, I wanna suggest to you that in recent years, Seventh-day Adventists are finding themselves in a similar situation to these twins, that we are facing an identity crisis.

And it used to be that Adventists were pretty much a homogeneous group of people.

Now before you conclude that I just called Adventists a bad name or that I'm a homophobic, you know what homogeneous means, right?

And when I joined the church, they told me, they said, you know, the neat thing about the Seventh-day Adventist Church is that wherever you go in the world, people believe just like you.

Well, I've been around that world now that they've told me wherever you go in the world.

And I've discovered over the last 30 some odd years that while that may have been true at 1 time, it is not true today.

That the church not only is diverse in proper ways, in culturally appropriate ways, we look different, we eat different foods and all that, but we are also no longer homogeneous in biblical ways.

Now we're heterogeneous, we are dissimilar, we're not alike.

And so you go to some parts of the world and you find that they don't keep the Sabbath like you keep the Sabbath.

You know, you would think the Bible would simplify it, but it doesn't anymore.

They don't believe in the great controversy scenario of things like we used to.

I had 1 church leader tell me in 1 place that he didn't believe that what Ellen White outlined in the great controversy regarding last day events regarding the beast and the mark of the beast was going to be fulfilled.

He thought that was conditional prophecy that comes out of Victorian anti-Catholic era of the United States and now it's going to be some other way that it's going to be fulfilled, which in my humble opinion shows gross ignorance of how Bible prophecy goes together.

And so these dissimilar ideas and this dissimilarity, this heterogeneous-ness, unbiblical heterogeneous-ness has caused an identity crisis within the Seventh-day Adventist church.

You don't even have to have this crisis by traveling to some other country.

You can maybe visit the church across town and discover that you're just as shocked as Andrea and Marilisa were when they looked at each other and said, who am I?

You go into an Adventist church and you can say, is this Adventist?

And young people especially are facing an identity crisis.

As young people are forming their own identity and their own individual spiritual identity, and they may have been taught a certain way by their parents that this is Adventism, but then when they grow up and they go away to school and they start getting a broader view of what's happening in the world and in Adventism they wonder, did my parents tell me the truth?

I believe that what you've been doing here this weekend at the GYC Go Convention will help you identify and know what Adventists are, who they are, and what they are about.

But there are some things that we must be common on.

The foundational bedrock teachings of the scripture that make what Seventh-day Adventists, who they are, we must be alike on if we're going to be Seventh-day Adventists.

And so when you ask somebody, an Adventist, who they are, what is a Seventh-day Adventist, Adventists naturally turn to the Bible.

Because Seventh-day Adventists are a people of the Bible.

And I believe that there's 1 particular chapter of the Bible that probably better defines who Seventh-day Adventists are than probably any other chapter.

I would imagine you could pick many of them.

But this 1 specifically, in particular, I believe, defines us probably better than any other.

And that would be Revelation chapter what?

It's the passage that really identifies Seventh-day Adventists, and I want to propose to you today that it tells us 3 things about Seventh-day Adventists.

It tells us that Seventh-day Adventists are a people with a message.

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Series

Cycle of Evangelism

Adventist for such a Time as This!

Transcript

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Parent Conference

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