ASI 2009: By Knowing Him

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ASI 2009 Youth Meetings

Jessica Frame

From Partyer to Teacher

David Asscherick

Afghanistan

Ernestine Finley

Testimony of Ernestine Finley

Christian Berdahl

Four Cs

Ron du Preez

From Mercenary to Merciful

Mark Finley

A Mighty God

I am glad to be with such a great group of young people.

And I heard you had a great day yesterday, and helping others.

I also was very glad that you sang that song, what, never part again.

Because as I tell my story, I'm gonna share with you how that when I went to the Portland church, every Sabbath that was the song that they sang and that stuck in my mind.

This morning I've been asked to share my own life experience and how God has led me in my life and led us in our ministry.

So I'm gonna try to take you through several years here in just about an hour this morning.

But the reason that I wanna share also this experience with you is because I have no question in my mind that God took a little girl from Maine and led my life completely.

And if he can lead my life, I know he's leading your life.

And we just have to be sensitive to his spirit.

And so I wanna share with you a few pictures this morning too, so, Imeon, do we have that up there?

And so if we can put that on, I have a few pictures along the way that I'm going to share with you and let you think about how God is leading your life and how that many times you say, I wonder if God is really leading me.

All of these things that are so important.

And so 1 day I was in the car with Imeon and his family and he asked me to share my experience and after that he said, you've got to come and share that with the young people.

I think that they'll be inspired to see how God has led you.

So I want to first start by saying throughout history, God has led his people.

If you look at scripture, God has led his people.

If you look at Moses, why, who would even think that there was something great for Moses to do in his life?

I mean, he was to be put to death as a child, as a baby, and here he is in a basket behind the bulrushes and in the river, and you wonder, how is he going to lead anybody in his life, let alone have his own life spared.

And yet God allowed Moses to lead the children of Israel.

Daniel was 17 years old and He's taken captive and he leaves his country, he leaves his friends, he leaves his family.

And he goes into Babylon and yet a whole nation is changed because of Daniel.

They think he, his father loves him and does more for him than them, and they're jealous and they're angry, they're upset, so they really wanna kill him, but they don't want his blood on their hands, so they decide they'll put him in the pit.

But we see Joseph going from the pit to the prison to the palace, And he leads again a whole nation and he spares his own people from dying.

In fact, in Genesis chapter 50 verse 19, when the brothers finally were bowing down to him and said, behold, we are your servants, Joseph said to them, don't be afraid, for I am in the place of God.

They were afraid of Joseph then, but he said, don't be afraid for I'm in the place of God.

But as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.

So he said, you meant it for evil, but God led my life and meant it for good.

And look, he spared my father, he spared my people from death, from famine because of where he placed me.

I want to take you back to a cold winter day in December and a little girl is born in Portland, Maine.

This girl only has a single parent, no father, just a mother.

If you think sometimes it's difficult in your life, Try being raised by a single mother and very little money in a poor family and yet at 6 months old I left Portland, Maine and went on to a little town way up in northern Maine in Millinocket and lived in this house.

Now my mother is in a relationship with who would in the future become my stepfather.

But as a young girl, I saw that God had a plan for my life and I had that spiritual longing, but I didn't know how that was going to be fulfilled in my life.

You see, There were really 3 of us, my mother, my sister, myself.

I did not grow up, of course, as a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, and really not even in a Christian home.

Oh, occasionally, we would dress up at Easter and put on the very best dress that we had and go to the Congregational Church to, or the United Baptist Church that we had in the town, but maybe just once or twice a year, never really had any religious background, but occasionally went to that church, but there was conflict in the home.

And so we would be thrust from our home and told that we needed to go to our grandparents' home.

Now my grandparents lived way out in the country in this old house that my grandfather and his father was actually born in, 66 acres out on the farm out in Morro, Maine, about 3 hours from where I lived, and we would go down to that house, but it was different there.

You see, my stepfather didn't like us, didn't want us around, so he would give us a little bit of change and say go to the movies on Saturday, but then when I would go to my grandfather's house, he would, on Friday, have all the house prepared.

On Friday night, my grandmother and grandfather would gather around the piano and sing songs just like what you sang here today.

And then on Saturday morning, they would get up and go to church.

For you see, someone knocked on their door and they had become Seventh-day Adventists.

But not early enough, possibly, in their life, so that the rest of us benefited from that.

But they now became Seventh-day Adventists.

And they saw these 2 little girls with a single mother and now a stepfather being involved, and not a good situation, and so we would go down and just enjoy being with them, But it was different.

But soon we would have to go back because it would be time for school to start and we would go back.

Sometimes even in the school year, we would have to go and live with our grandparents because things would be kind of rough at home.

And so we were in and out of several schools, and that sometimes can be very difficult on a young person as well.

But God, again, was leading because I had grandparents who were praying for these 2 little girls.

But it became so bad that 1 night in the middle of the night, I'm praying, and Lord, I don't even really know who God is, but Lord, just lead my life.

And then 1 day, as I'm back in my home in Millinocket, a knock came on the door, and it happened to be a call porter.

And the call porter wanted to sell books and Bibles and all of that, And at the end of his sales pitch, he said, oh, we're also offering a free Bible course.

And I said to my mother, I wanna take that Bible course.

I was 9 years old and I said I want to take that Bible course and I started with the Voice of Prophecy junior lessons at 9 years old taking this very course.

I didn't want to come from what I was seeing in my home.

I'm indebted today to the voice of prophecy for what they did in my life because you see I kept taking these lessons.

I learned where did Satan come from anyway?

I started learning things about healthful living and that pork wasn't the best for me, that my body was the temple of the Holy Spirit.

And I started telling my mother, I don't want to eat pork anymore.

Then I started learning about the Bible Sabbath.

And I thought, I want to keep the Bible Sabbath.

At first, my mother was very much for this.

In fact, I started telling her about all these things and She started taking some lessons and we started doing some things in our home, just trying to even keep the Sabbath.

Series

ASI 2009 Youth Meetings

Testimony of Ernestine Finley

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

General Sessions

Interview with the Wilsons

48m

Why Protestantism Matters

1h 5m

GYC 2013 Plenary Sessions

Sabbath School Church Leaders Panel

1h

Flight of The Youth

55m

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Composite Christian: Character Development

05-God vs. Satan: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

1h

Total Member Involvement

2. Ask the President! (Q & A with Elder Ted Wilson)

1h

Own It

Own It- Part 6

55m

Revelation Today Crusade

2. The End Of the World: Near or Just Fear?

54m

To Know and Be Known

God Still Speaks

58m

Plenary Sessions

War!

54m

Faith of our Fathers

Things Old and New

41m

Adventist Education: Respectable and Conventional

58m

Sound Doctrine