With skepticism on the rise, how do you meet the questioning of an unbelieving world? Theodicy, atheism, LGBT identity, evolutionism, politics, and the arts are issues becoming more and more confusing and difficult to answer. How do we meet the demands of a rapidly-changing world? Come to this presentation to learn how to become apologetically equipped for the coffee shop, the church, the classroom, and the courtroom.

ASI 2016: Called. Chosen. Committed.

<p>With skepticism on the rise, how do you meet the questioning of an unbelieving world? Theodicy, atheism, LGBT identity, evolutionism, politics, and the arts are issues becoming more and more confusing and difficult to answer. How do we meet the demands of a rapidly-changing world? Come to this presentation to learn how to become apologetically equipped for the coffee shop, the church, the classroom, and the courtroom.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Personal Evangelism

Tony Moore

How to Use Tracing the Footsteps of Jesus Evangelistically

It's something you can really invite your neighbors to and your community.

And we're gonna talk about how you can use it in a small group as well as a public meeting.

She's volunteering in our booth right now.

She lives part of the year here in Arizona and she has small groups regularly with her neighbors.

And so as a matter of fact, last night before they, no not last night, Tuesday night, before driving over here, she had a small group with 2 Roman Catholics, husband and wife, she met them walking, and they've been coming, and they do it twice a week because she's only here for a short time in Arizona, and this happens to be there in Daytona Beach, whenever I'm in Daytona Beach for conferences, I'll often go in and kind of do her class in the afternoon or evening.

Now here's something that I like to work on.

And it comes from a scholar in Jerusalem.

He said, there are 5 gospels that tell the story of Jesus.

So when you think about that, 5 gospels, so what's the fifth gospel?

Acts maybe, Revelation, Elizabeth Talbot says it's Revelation.

4 you will find in books, and 1 you will find in the land they call holy.

Understand the fifth gospel and the world of the 4 gospels will open before you.

So I love the idea that this fifth gospel is really the holy land.

It's understanding about the life of Jesus.

And it's just, there's a richness that we can use this evangelistically and share with our neighbors, our friends, and it opens up the Bible in a very special way.

Well, when I first became a Christian, as you mentioned at a Rolling Stones concert in 1972 in Charlotte, North Carolina, but that's a different story, I had 0 interest in going to the Holy Land.

As a matter of fact, I don't think there's very much holy about it, right?

It's where the story of the Bible took place.

And so, I had very little interest in going there.

And then I had a simple, I had an archaeology class from Larry Garrity.

And he had a little simple slideshow, 1 projector, and he was showing pictures from Dan to Beersheba.

I don't know, something captured my imagination about that.

Here you can kind of see a little modern map that we're working on using.

I had the privilege of going with Bill Shea.

William Shea is, great scholar of the Adventist Church.

And we went up to this place, and I'll never forget the first time going there.

This cave was the primary source of the Jordan River in ancient times.

So you can imagine the Canaanites going up there.

Alexander the Great came through, and the god changed from Baal to Pan.

And here we can see the niches in the walls.

And then Herod the Great received it as a gift from Augustus Caesar.

And his son built a temple to Caesar there, his son Philip.

Now it's fascinating that Jesus took his disciples to this high place where Baal had been worshipped, where Pan was being worshipped, and where Caesar was being worshipped, and he asked them the question, remember, Who do men say that I am?

You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

First time Jesus reveals his Messiahship to his disciples, as at this Canaanite high place where Baal had been worshipped and where Caesar and Pan was being worshipped.

I saw that and I thought, wow, of the hundreds of villages, he came here to do this.

He's saying, I'm above Baal, I'm above Pan, I'm above Caesar.

And by the way, that's the first time he accepts the worship of his disciples as Messiah.

Well, I got interested, I was in, let's see, it was 1988, probably 87.

I was going from Athens to Damascus on a solo trip.

And I came by this place, I'd never even seen a picture of this that I recall, whole side of the mountain with these calcium bicarbonate white minerals here and all these hot pools coming down and the hot water was channeled down into the valley and guess what?

It got down to the valley and it wasn't hot or cold anymore, it was what?

Alright, so there you see the whole side of the mountain and I'm walking in Laodicea and I thought, wow, there's a relationship between these stories and the physical places that we're at.

Got me so excited about the biblical world because there's something to share.

So I developed a series on archeology and we started using this.

And in those days, we were drawing about 15 people per thousand mailed.

Now, those of you who've done some outreach in your churches, you know that's about 15 times more than you get for things we do today.

Now the push was always, well, they come to hear about Egypt and they come to hear about that and not about Revelation, which is true.

So we were on a tour, I was doing a tour for pastors in Southern California, and 1 of the people on the tour was my youth pastor who was getting into video, and he said, you know Tony, you don't have to use slides.

Now in those days we had 800 slides on Egypt, okay, And I thought it was a pretty good program.

You know, we had a lot of Egyptian people that would come and they'd be proud.

And I thought, that's why you're the youth pastor and I'm the senior pastor, because you're very naive.

We came back and he made a 2 minute demo with Indiana Jones music in the background and planes and maps and boom, I was teaching in Tarsus.

Well, that's the way the footsteps of Paul developed.

And just a little, this is our little crew, Simon Leversage and Pecos and Danny Chan, who's the senior pastor at Eagle Rock today.

Simon's a senior pastor at The Place and Thousand Oaks, and a young Tony.

And we woke up here in Osos, and you might notice that that's a Norwalk production when you see it on 3ABN or Hope Channel.

It's because it was filmed in the bathroom of the Norwalk church when I was a senior pastor.

So anyway, just a little bit of how this developed.

Well, after doing that, I began to have a desire to do something on the life of Jesus, something that would be more in depth on the life of Jesus.

As a matter of fact, this movie star, Mel Gibson, was just coming out about that time with the passion of the Christ.

And I thought, could we do something that would be historically accurate, archaeologically accurate, and scripturally accurate that would touch people's hearts?

We have 4 volumes and the first volume is the early years in ministry of Jesus in Galilee, teachings and controversies, and in Jerusalem and beyond.

And so when we look at this, these are actually the study guides that go with it.

You can see there's 7 episodes in volume 1.

Same thing for volume 2, volume 3, volume 4.

So again, the whole purpose is, just imagine it right now with your neighbors, okay?

As you're sharing it with your neighbors, they get plugged in to the stories that happen.

Nelson Ernst

How to Distribute 1,000,000 Tracts in 7 Days

Father in heaven, thank you so much that we can come together on this beautiful day in Arizona we pray Lord that you'd send your spirit to be here and Lord that as a ripple effect of our time together this morning that Thousands of people tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people would hear about the 3 Angels' messages through small literature.

Lord, we pray for those who are here, those who are coming.

We pray for those who will hear this presentation later through audio verse, Lord, that you would speak to them and that your work might be uplifted.

And we ask for these things in your son's name.

Well, glad that you all were able to make it today.

I don't know if you're staying in the local hotel here, but we are at a Airbnb house that we rented that's about 3 miles away.

And the rain was so heavy this morning that we had to drive slow on some of the streets so that the tires wouldn't kick the water up into our engine and we'd have problems.

I was hoping that we'd make it here this morning.

But you all probably just walked over from the hotel, right?

So, well my name's Nelson, for those of you who haven't looked at the seminar presenter.

And I work for the Pacific Union as a director of a ministry called GLOW.

And I'm assuming that most of you who are here have already passed out some kind of literature before, perhaps GLOW tracks, and maybe some of you here have heard about the mission trips that we've been doing recently with GLOW.

And that's what I'm going to spend the majority of our time talking about this morning is some of the awesome stories that have come out of the mission trips that we've been doing and also how we all can get involved in not just doing joining the mission trips but also putting together mission trips to because it's it's a relatively easy thing to do so but to start with I wanted to show you something This is a picture of the World Church's map, you could say, and how they divide up the World Church into the 13 divisions.

And you can see the different colors there.

And even on the bottom, it breaks down the names of the different divisions so just a quick update on some progress glow is a is a program that's that started literally in a renovated garage in 2007 and God has just been pushing and pushing and pushing it forward and opening up doors.

And we're just trying to keep pace with what God's doing.

And now now we're to the point where we're going in and the various divisions of the world church are interested in starting the program.

So we've been flying to a lot of the different divisions and talking with the administration, including my brother here, Vincent Sameh, coming from the West African division, all the way, 2 days flight to get here.

And We've been enjoying working with them.

And the divisions are signing contracts to work using GlowTracks and we're also working with the General Conference on doing an initiative that hopefully will be kicking off in 2017 to encourage the World Church to distribute 1000000000 tracks.

So that's something to pray for because a billion is a big number.

But really if you think about it number-wise, it's actually quite easy.

If only half of the church membership passes out just 1 packet of glow, we almost have a billion tracks just with that.

And so, you know, the hard thing is just going to be spreading the message and talking to people about it and getting people into it.

And we're also going to be developing an app to go along with it, so when you pass out the tracks, you can report your numbers, and you can see a global tally of all the people across the globe who are passing out literature and it's just something we're really excited about and you guys can just keep an eye out for that.

I also want to just point your direction over here to my friend Camille Metz.

If you folks here have any questions in regards to international work with GLOW, maybe you want some tracks in different languages, maybe you're traveling to a different country and you need some tracks in a different language, Camille Metz is the man to talk to.

He is our international coordinator for glow and he's based out of the office over there in Lansing, Michigan and We're just excited to have him working with us.

He's going to take off in a few minutes here he has to head back, but He's been doing a powerful work, and God's been using him so Just keeping on going here.

We're working with the various divisions and I want to tell you before I move on from this picture.

I want to tell you 1 story about how God is working with these divisions.

Okay, so recently the Inter-American Division, which is Mexico down to just above Brazil, that orange section on the map.

We were invited to go and present GLOW for 2 hours at their personal ministries advisory meetings just a couple months ago.

And so you had the personal ministries directors for all the unions there.

And after we got done giving our presentation and I'm happy that we had 2 hours because it had to be translated into Spanish so we needed all the time we could get after we were done with our presentation they were very excited about getting their church members involved in passing out literature but God wasn't satisfied I suppose so after the presentation was done I was sitting in the back of this meeting room and I get a call on my cell phone from a person that it doesn't tell who it is, it's just a number.

And I'm telling you, I never answer those phone calls.

If I don't know who it is, I just let them leave a message.

But for some reason, my finger moved over and I pressed the answer button.

And this man is talking to me on the phone and he says, yes, I received some of your literature, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he keeps on going and all of a sudden it dawns on me that something, some fluke happened in the routing system for our glow tracks.

And this is an actual non-Adventist who got 1 of our glow tracks, and he's calling my cell phone number, and he's telling me what happened.

And we have a 1-800 number for the North American Division tracks, where people punch in the state that they are from when they get a tract, when they call in for Bible studies, they punch in the state, and then it routes them to the appropriate conference office to help them with Bible studies.

Well, for some reason there was a fluke and this guy's calling me and you know the last time I answered 1 of those calls was when we first started this program like years ago and I'm thinking man I don't know how to do this, you know.

So anyway, I just listened to what he says and come to find out this man, he told me the 3 tracks that he received, he told me in the titles, he had just ordered a garage door opener from Amazon.

And when the package came through Amazon, he opened up the package, and there were these 3 glow tracks.

Somebody had stuck them into an Amazon package when they shipped out their garage door opener.

Either that or the Amazon delivery guy or whatever you know UPS stuck in there who knows the point is he wasn't upset about it all he was actually calling because he really liked it and this was a man who is a he was a chaplain of in an evangelical church and he oversees a group of men that he studies with and he was calling in to order 12 Bible studies, separate Bible studies so that he could begin giving Bible studies to these men with that free offer that we have on the back of the tracks and so you know I was blown away with this and I I was like yeah sure we can help you with that and and then I even told him I said you know what this is actually not supposed to come to me I didn't tell him that I was a director of the program or anything but I said you know this is my cell phone and and this is funny that this happened right now and anyway, we kind of laughed about it and then we prayed together and he signed up for 12 Bible studies and as soon as I was off of that call, you know what I did?

I went right back into that meeting room where all the Inter-American Division Personal Ministries Directors were and I was able to share with them a fresh testimony right out of the oven.

And I'm telling you, it just brought up the interest level that much more.

So that's just 1 example of what God is doing you know in these various divisions is very obvious that he wants his people to get into the habit of putting literature in their pockets and carry it with them wherever they go people in all these different divisions can get involved in something this simple.

So, I want to share with you a few quotes, okay?

These are some of my favorites from Ellen White on this topic.

This is 1 where she says, Let every Seventh-day Adventist ask himself, What can I do to proclaim the Third Angel's message?

It is to be proclaimed to every nation, kindred, tongue and people.

She answers by saying, the distribution of our literature is 1 means by which the message is to be proclaimed.

Going on, she says, let every believer scatter broadcast tracts and leaflets and books containing the message for this time.

None can estimate the influence that even a torn page containing the truths of the third angel's message may have upon the heart of some seeker after truth.

Sometimes you see a tract on the ground and you think, oh, what a waste.

We actually have people calling in on a regular basis who receive literature that they find on the ground and they read it.

We had 2 stories that are similar to this that illustrate this quote.

She says that we can't estimate the influence of even a torn page of our literature.

We haven't had people calling in because they've gotten torn tracks and they've read it.

But we've had 2 stories come to us where the tracks have been on the ground or outside somewhere, and the rain has come, and they've gotten wet.

And the people have walked by, they've picked it up, and the only thing that they were able to discern on the tract was the contact information on the back.

And they called the phone number on the back to us in California, and they signed up for Bible studies.

We had 1 that was placed by an Adventist on a drinking fountain, I think in Walmart.

I mean, you know, you'd think that's a good place to put it, but the problem is is that we don't have waterproof tracks.

So some water from the drinking fountain got on that track, it soaked it, it was very hard to understand, but another person came by, they picked it up, and they called the contact information on the back and sign up for Bible studies anyway that ended up turning into a Bible study where 1 of our Bible workers was was interjected or inserted into a Bible study that was already happening with a group of evangelicals and they were able to help me that study with our Bible study information because they found a tract on a drinking fountain that was messed up from water by the way.

This reminds me we are in the process now of developing a waterproof glow tracks.

I'm not joking We're working with Pacific Press right now to develop waterproof glow tracks.

When I first called Pacific Press and I said, hey, this is what we want to do, they were like, they took it back to their department that deals with those kind of things in the department says, they don't even make paper like that.

Because somebody just came into the office and they showed me a waterproof Bible.

And so they did some more research and lo and behold, of course, they do have such kind of paper.

And just hopefully a couple weeks here, they're gonna be giving us a sample of a glow track that should be waterproof and if it if it turns out just right we're gonna make those available for sale think of the possibilities.

Now you can pass a glow tracks to those people you know when you go through the automatic car wash you know and your cars wet and they're there scrubbing your drying you off at the end roll down your window you can give a glow track no problem next time you're snorkeling or surfering over in the Bahamas or Hawaii you can stick glow tracks in your little you know if your swimsuit has a pocket right I hope we'd be wearing a swimsuit that's really modest and has pockets all over and then you can give a goal tracks there or even more applicable.

Many people live in places where it snows a lot right.

Well we tell people that you need to put glow tracks on car doors when you go into the stores.

Well, the problem is if there's snow all over that car and then the snow melts a little bit, you're going to mess up your track.

Get some glow tracks that are waterproof.

Man, I'm totally going off on a tangent here.

But I'm waiting for the day when I'm going to hear a story from somebody who passed out a glow tract while they were snorkeling or while they were scuba diving.

In fact, I actually will be even better is when somebody calls in for Bible studies because they said I was I was scuba diving.

And I came around the corner of this coral reef and this other snorkeler scuba diver came up and gave me something.

Heidi Carpenter

Duane McKey

Ted N.C. Wilson

Total Member Involvement

Anil Kanda

Apologetics In the Marketplace

Father in heaven, thank you again for this special time.

Thank you Lord for the Holy Sabbath that's almost here.

We pray and ask that you would lead our hearts and minds to Jesus and God that you would equip us to be better communicators, better witnesses, better ministers for you.

It's kind of a funny story that Ravi Zacharias told.

Anybody ever heard of Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

And he said as they went camping, In the middle of the night, Sherlock Holmes nudged Dr.

Watson, looking up at the sky, said, astronomically, I can see that there are millions of stars and millions of galaxies.

Theologically, I can see that God has created the universe.

Then he said, meteorologically, I can see it's going to be a great day tomorrow.

Orologically, he said, I can see it's a quarter past 1 AM.

Finally, Sherlock Holmes hits him and he says, Watson, you fool, someone stole the tent.

The reason I say this is because oftentimes when you go to a apologetic seminar or you go to a seminar that's talking about defending your faith or how to communicate your faith.

Oftentimes it can be in very complex language.

And then the difficulty is to try to translate that language or that information in a way that's understandable to common people.

Well, I hope this seminar is going to be something that can be understood and through the Spirit of God it will be.

However, I do have to warn you about 2 things.

We will be covering some topics and you may think to yourself, man, we're not spending enough time on that topic.

Look, I want to be able to get you out of this place feeling like you have gained some knowledge, some tools that are useful.

However, I also speak at a very fast pace.

And so If it's too fast for you, you can listen to the audio recording later on and you can slow it down to the speed you want.

In fact, 1 day I actually put a pedometer on myself.

I actually clocked half a mile 1 day when I was preaching.

Well, get into this topic, Apologetics for a New Generation.

1 day I was reading an article written by Greta Christensen.

She is somebody that does not like Christianity, does not like religion.

She was challenged by somebody who commented on her post, and they said these words, What in the world would convince you to become a believer in God, a believer in religion?

Could you list off that would ultimately convince you there is a God?

And so she wrote her next article on this.

It says these words, okay let me turn this thing on, okay very good.

Unlikely developments that could convince this atheist to believe in God.

Number 1, accurate prophecies in sacred texts.

She said, what would possibly convince me is that if you can find accurate, bona fide prophecy in sacred texts.

And then notice what she says right here.

In other words, the scriptures or the religious texts are in harmony with the data that is found.

Number 3, the once successful religion, and this is interesting, do you know how she defines the once successful religion?

When the inheritance are not only happy, get this, but healthy.

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Series

Personal Evangelism

Apologetics In the Marketplace

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

How to Use Tracing the Footsteps of Jesus Evangelistically

1h 1m

How to Distribute 1,000,000 Tracts in 7 Days

1h 14m

Total Member Involvement

1h 22m

Apologetics In the Marketplace

1h 25m

Sound Doctrine