Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

More Media and the Brain

Scott Ritsema

Father in heaven, we just thank you so much for this day, for the privilege of being here in your presence.

And today, as Scott presents on media, we ask that you will just be with him in a powerful way.

And you will speak through him, that our ears will be opened and our hearts will be soft to be willing to follow whatever it is that you're trying to tell us.

We just thank you so much for Scott and the message that you've laid on his heart today.

So Just continue to be with us in Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you for that prayer, Gail, and thank you for having me again.

You know, there's nothing more important than the education and training of our children and our youth.

You may have heard me say this in the past but for those who haven't, I want to emphasize this again because this is really at the baseline and core of why I like to share on things that relate to families and children.

And by the way, if you came in thinking you were going to hear how to share your faith as a family, you're going to hear in these first few slides why it's important and then come back Wednesday for that session, okay, because we switched Mondays and Wednesdays.

So I was going to be on Wednesday and now I'm here on Monday and Amy will be on Wednesday instead of Monday.

I'll be on an airplane to California on Wednesday.

I want to think about the 3 most important events in the history of redemption, okay?

The 3 most important time periods or monumental experiences, the Exodus when the Jews came out of Egypt and then they were given the law on Mount Sinai and then they were taken into the Promised Land.

God's beginning his movement with his people.

Then the first coming of Christ, second most important event, definitely the second coming of Christ.

Sorry, the first coming of Christ with the cross, the resurrection, the ascension, all of it.

Then the second coming and the time we're in right now, the time of the judgment.

What do all 3 of these have in common as it relates to our children?

2 things, there was something positive and something negative.

Do you remember what child it was that saved Moses' life so that he could become the leader of God's people.

So a child played a key role in the whole Exodus narrative.

Then at the first coming of Jesus, who was it that shouted, Hosanna!

Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord when all the Pharisees were grumpy and saying tell these children to be quiet it was the children wasn't it now look at this quotation from testimonies volume 6 it says as the children sang in the temple courts Hosanna blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

So in these last days, children's voices will be raised to give the last message of warning to a perishing world." Huh, so as it just was in the past, Miriam playing an important role, the children at the temple, same thing in the last days.

The children will play a key role in presenting the final message of truth and warning and hope and salvation to the perishing world.

But there's also another quote on this, when heavenly intelligences see that men are no longer permitted to present the truth, the Spirit of God will come upon the children and they will do a work in the proclamation of the truth which the older workers cannot do because their way will be hedged up.

In the closing scenes of this earth's history, many of these children and youth will astonish people by their witness to the truth, which will be born in simplicity, yet with spirit and power.

In the near future, many children will be endued with the Spirit of God and will do a work in proclaiming the truth to the world that at that time cannot well be done by the older members of the church.

Is God going to use the children powerfully in the last days?

When laws and restrictions are placed upon adults to do the work of ministry, the children will be able to get away with it and God's going to use them powerfully just like he did in the Scandinavian Reformation with the children coming having the Spirit of God come upon them powerfully and they would speak the truths that were presently important at that time.

So If that was the case, 3 times in a row, do you think the devil is going to allow this to happen without a counter plan?

What was his edict to the children, Do you remember?

And then at the time of Herod, it was kill all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem.

And our day today, we're dealing with the same thing, an attack upon the children and upon the family.

And that's why I'm sharing about media with you today.

Because there's probably nothing more in our lives that disrupts our relationships with our family today than media, than just being glued to entertainment, being on our phones constantly.

Martin Lidstrom was the neuro-marketing expert at the company Apple.

And they did research on your brain and how it interacts with your phone, okay?

And what they found is, what happens is you have a very specific relationship with your iPhone.

What we learned from a very recent study we did was that there were actually 2 activations happening for people who are in love with their iPhones.

Because we actually realized from the study that the same area of the brain that is activated when you are in love with someone is activated when you are in love with your iPhone.

Isn't that like weird and creepy and alarming and scary at the same time and laughable?

People are in love, they love, usually you think of I love my family, I love my wife, I love my children, but now we love our phones.

Do you see how there's a competitor now intruding in on the family and our relationship with our children and with our home in our homes.

George Barna also found in his research that not only are we in love with our media but he looked at entertainment media and people are absolutely addicted to it.

He says media exposure has become America's most widespread and serious addiction.

So if we are in love with and addicted to our media, there's a pretty good chance that this is going to wreak havoc in our lives and in our families.

I mentioned that this is Satan's plot and plan to disrupt God's purpose for family and for the children.

And how about this statement from HBO CEO Richard Plepler, top, you know, media mogul elite here.

The CEO of HBO said in an interview, what we're in the business of doing is building addicts, building video addicts.

So we're trying to get people addicted to our media, is what he said.

Now we live in a time where basically parenting is being outsourced.

We no longer take ownership of our role and job and calling in our culture today.

And there's a statement that jumped off of the pages of child guidance to me as I was reading it.

And it's 1 of those slam you in the face, convict you, you know, poke you in the eye, wake up call quotes.

We need this kind of tough medicine sometimes from the Lord.

Parents give their children to Satan with their own hands like the apostate Jews making them pass through the fire to Molech.

You know, it's easy to look back on those ancient pagan religions and how horribly cruel they were.

But, you know, that was only destroying the children's bodies.

Today, we hand our children over to the mainstream media and the entertainment industry to essentially raise and train and educate our children according to worldly ways, thus sacrificing their souls to the enemy.

And that's why 2 of the seminars that I routinely do, the 1 on media, media on the brain, which you're hearing bits of today, plus some new information on that, and the DVD set called Schooled.

I mean, what do kids do during their whole childhood, typically?

After age 4 or so, they're either, today, they're either sleeping, eating, or, and some of this happens at the same time if they're eating and watching TV at the same time, so you got sleeping time, eating time, and then you got the time spent with media, and you got the time spent in a desk at a worldly public school, and that's what's training and raising the children.

He's not throwing them in the river or doing Herod's type of edict, although 20% of children never make it out of the womb.

So there is actually an attack upon the unborn, literally, physically.

But we're talking about the spiritual angle today.

Indeed, this is happening in alarming ways.

The children now are spending 53 hours of screen time per week.

We also have 5 million video gamers who are playing over 40 hours of video games per week.

19 million gamers are addicted to video gaming.

Now by the way, 83% of kids have a gaming console in their home and this is an addictive device, okay?

It's actually identified as an addiction in the psychiatry manual and so if you think about it along those lines, we would never take our kids to the casino, right?

We wouldn't expose them to pornography or cigarettes or alcohol or other addictive things, but 83% of them have the gaming console.

Teens today spend 9 hours per day on entertainment media of various kinds, from social media to video games to movies to worldly music.

Schooled: The Deliberate Agenda to Reduce Intelligence, Destroy Individuality, & Re-engineer Society

Father in Heaven, we thank you so much for camp meeting and a time to be together, to love you, to love 1 another, to come to understand your character better and your plan for us.

May we walk away from this session and especially tomorrow's follow-up to this with a renewed dedication and enthusiasm for your will, for your blueprint, for your plan for us in this area of education and understanding our children and the role that you have for our families to play in these last days.

I should mention, by the way, as a business item, the title of this session in the program is correct, but the title in the seminar schedule, it says Media School and the Attack on the Family, this session you've come to has just schooled the deliberate agenda to destroy individuality and so on and so forth.

I want to take you back to an important couple of years in Adventist history, and that is 1843 to 1844.

Now, you know, there was something else happening at this time.

In addition to the great Second Advent awakening and the time where the cleansing of the sanctuary began on October 22 of 1844, as prophesied in Daniel 8, verse 14.

So God's movement is at its climax at that point, coming up to the very last days of Earth's history.

You know what else happened at this very same time?

Horace Mann visited the nation of Prussia.

The kingdom of Prussia at the time, was developing some world famous educational methods, which later became known as Prussian education.

Horace Mann was an American living in Massachusetts.

And he said, we want to learn what they're doing so we can pattern a public school system in America after the Prussian model.

So he came back in 1844 and issued his seventh annual report to the Boston, Massachusetts School Committee.

Now the important factor here is Prussian education was a certain type of education that we're going to be looking at in a second.

You might say, well, this might sound good, you know, having an education system in America.

You have to understand the type of education that they were doing there.

Somebody in the back knows where I'm going with that.

But we'll clue the rest of you in in a moment.

So far, what we've seen is 1844 was an important year in God's movement and in the movement to bring public schooling to America Want to get share another couple of factoids before we continue with the history This man on the screen is Wilhelm Wundt Good German name from the Prussian schooling philosophy.

He's known as the prophet of modern schooling.

So this is another of a number of counterfeits that you're gonna see in 2 parallel stories going side by side.

1844, something good happening, something not so good.

The prophet of modern schooling, take a look at this, wrote 53, 000 pages over his 70-year career, approximately, from 1853 to 1920.

So we have a prophetic message with many, many pages being written.

They also have the profit of modern schooling during almost the exact same time period.

Now speaking of counterfeits, here's a third example before we really get into it.

Just as a matter of introduction, take a look at this quote and then I'll tell you who it's by.

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order.

The teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

So modern schooling, worldly schooling, public schooling said John Dewey, the most important single thinker in the formation of universal public schooling, He said, the teacher is not merely there to teach academics.

No, he is ushering in the true kingdom of God.

So in the 19th century, have you noticed we had a true movement of bringing about, ushering in the true kingdom of God, and a counterfeit taking place.

We had 1844, an important date for the Advent movement, also an important date for this counter to the Advent movement.

And then we also saw a counterfeit prophet, if you will.

I think the devil is up to something knowing that God's people are on the march.

1844 and thereafter, there is a counterfeit in our midst.

Now, of course, normally we don't think of school in these insidious, nefarious terms.

Counterfeit isn't the advent of modern education, a wonderful thing in the public school system of our time?

It has educated so many people and certainly it has done some good and most of the people involved with the system today are not a part of the deliberate agenda to reduce individuality and destroy independence and independent thinking and intelligence and to re-engineer society.

Yes, there is a plot, and you will see what that is.

But I want to say out of the gates, we're not trying to go after any human beings.

Our battle is not against flesh and blood, But our battle is against the principalities and powers of darkness.

So most parents in our land, they send their kids off on the bus at age 5.

They send them off into the hands of caregivers in the school with the best of intentions, perhaps a bit of naivety, thinking that this thing is acceptable and OK.

But this session is not meant to be an attack or a slam on any people who are a part of that system or participate in the public school system.

Nor is it even these guys on the screen you're going to hear from.

They are the founders of our system that we have.

I want them to speak for themselves so we can hear what this system of modern schooling is all about.

But the most important thing we have to realize is, as it says in messages to young people, It is the powers of darkness that strive to gain control of the human mind.

So that's the agenda we're exposing today.

It says, in mind, character, and personality, now as never before, we need to understand the true science of education.

If we fail to understand this, we shall never have a place in the kingdom of God." Now you might have come into this session wondering, I'll learn a little bit about schooling and education and this may be something of interest, but it's probably not all that important to every single person.

This is a huge life or death, salvational issue Because the way that children are raised and trained and educated, the way that their mind and character is formed, is going to determine their destiny, right?

And each 1 of us, we're undergoing an education all the time.

I want to show you a picture from 1985, Scott Ritzema, 4 years old, with a little brother there saying goodbye to my first day of school.

Now, I actually was age 3 when I first started going to school.

And when I was 3 years old, I was put in preschool and then headed off to the public school there, Brookside School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at age 4.

And interestingly, I never really took to the whole school thing.

So perhaps it's fitting that I'm doing this seminar, questioning school as we commonly know it.

Because my mom famously noted me as the third child of 4.

The first 2 were scholars of the highest order, and then the third 1 never, me, was never interested in reading or anything academic.

There's a picture when I was, I don't know, 9 or 10 or so, and she said, I'm gonna take a picture of it because it's so rare.

She quotes me there as saying, I hate reading.

Well, it's a part of my experience in my journey.

But I stopped teaching just a couple of years ago at age 33.

So basically from age 3 till age 33, I kind of lived in school.

It's just kind of where my life was, right?

9 to 3 or whatever, 8 to 3, 5 days a week, most of the year, from age 3 to age 33.

So you almost get blinders when you're that close to it.

It's like, what is this thing that I'm a part of?

The last couple of years, I've been rethinking and studying through more of that history.

But as I look back on my own experience, I figured out, this is just kind of fun, the game of school.

Because my older siblings were getting A's, and I had to keep my parents happy and to get the scholarships.

And it's about getting the grades so you can make money on that to get scholarships for college.

But I figured out you really don't have to learn in the system that I was a part of in order to achieve good grades and GPAs.

Step 1, figure out how the teacher calculates the final grade.

And work proportionately within those categories and of course do not apply effort outside of those categories.

These were my several rules, 6 rules or so for how to do school.

And if there's any kids, I'm not recommending this, okay?

This is just what I did and it and I look back and I look at kind of how silly this was figure out which tasks in the class earn points and only do those tasks which are in points no kidding right To assure full credit on assigned tasks, submit exactly what the teacher is looking for, and when in doubt, ask her.

Don't try to be creative or independent or go outside the boundaries of the assigned task.

The Family: Public Enemy #1

Let's pray shall we father in heaven we thank you so much for the gift of the family and we know that that Childhood and children and the family are under attack and as we discern the errors and deceptions that are going on may we be drawn more closely and love more fervently your picture, your blueprint that you've given to us for our families.

And as we take a look at these, as Ephesians 5 11 says to expose the fruitless works of darkness, May we have discernment given by you, not from our own insights, but from you alone we pray in Jesus name, amen.

The 3 biggest history, the 3 biggest events in the history of redemption, if you were in the session down in the commons on Monday, you've heard this, but I want to repeat it because it is fundamental, it is foundational as far as the way we understand the role of children in the family in the last days.

The 3 biggest events in the history of redemption are, you could bring up a fourth and a fifth I'm sure, but 3 of the biggest are the Exodus experience, the first coming of Christ, and the second coming.

This is the history of redemption, God bringing his people out of Egypt, giving them the law on Mount Sinai, bringing them into the promised land, the whole Exodus story.

The first coming of Christ, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension of Jesus.

Where all of our sins were paid on the cross.

Then the time we live in now, the time of the judgment which precedes the second coming of Christ.

These 3 biggest events all have something in common.

At each of these points in history, we notice that the children are playing a key role.

First of all, you have little Miriam save Moses' life so that baby Moses in that little basket boat then can grow up and become the leader of his people, chosen by God.

At the first coming of Jesus, it is the children and only the children, not the Pharisees, who are shouting the praises of Jesus in the temple when he comes in on a donkey into Jerusalem.

They're saying, Hosanna to the son of David.

Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord where the Pharisees are saying keep those kids quiet God chose the children each time.

So do you expect also in the last days for the children to play a key role?

Yeah There are quotes all over the place in Adventist home and elsewhere Saying watch for this pattern to be fulfilled in the last days, just as it was in the time of the Reformation, with the children playing a key role in going forth, endued by the Spirit of God, proclaiming His truth.

Now, if the devil knows this, of course, he's going to try to counter it, isn't he?

What happened with Pharaoh and with Herod during those first 2 events, do you remember?

The children, there was a death decree, there was an edict to destroy them.

Now today, there's an even worse tendency And that is to attack the spiritual nature of children in their minds But there's also a physical attack upon children in our day today And it's something that's not talked about quite as much because it tends to become a political football But I don't bring it up for that reason It is important for us to take a look at this.

Did you know that 1 in 5 children in America today who is conceived in the womb, in this protective environment that God has created for the nurturing of this child and its prenatal influences, 1 in 5 unborn children are aborted in our society today.

And I bring this up to show the great controversies going on in front of our very eyes, but never, never, never to lay a burden of guilt on anybody who has gone through that and has committed that sin.

Jesus Christ says he has paid every sin at the cross so don't let the devil, the accuser, come and say yeah you're rotten, you're such a horrible sinner, God can never forgive you.

Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed his blood for me.

So the topic is not just a political football or a social issue, it's a very personal issue for a lot of people.

But in the same sense, it's a big theological context issue with a great controversy going on, just as Herod did it, just as Pharaoh did it, you see the deaths of so many children today with the attack on the family beginning even prenatally.

Now the culture is tending these days to really prop this up as like something to celebrate.

There was a big controversy last year with a bunch of hidden camera videos and you might have seen this thing about these, you know, Planned Parenthood getting in trouble with, you know, bargaining for fetal tissue in exchange for donations and so on.

Well, after that, the people who were promoting the idea that abortion is an acceptable thing, they went out there with their, what they called hashtag, this is like Twitter terminology, hashtag shout your abortion.

Where they were celebrating and promoting it and saying this is such a good thing and it makes us free and it makes us have something to cheer and then I saw an unbelievable thing.

I didn't actually watch this because I don't watch television but I saw this reported on a news report and read the script from this TV show.

I don't know if you watch this I hope we don't spend a lot of our time watching worldly things or any of our time But this was right around Christmas and it actually featured in this drama this fictional presentation the the main character the woman going through a procedure of an abortion and And it wasn't to you know make people think and question it and say, you know, is this...

And the song that was playing was, of all songs, Silent Night, about the newborn baby Jesus, right?

And then the voiceover of her father appears in the background as a narration while she's having the procedure done, and he goes like this.

The family, public enemy number 1, right?

A pressure point, soft tissue, an illness, an antidote to greatness.

You think you're better off with people who rely on you, depend on you, but you're wrong because you will inevitably end up needing them, which makes you weak, pliable, family doesn't complete you, it destroys you.

Have you ever heard of worse lie than that in your entire life?

We know from the Bible, God created the family to be this magnificently important message to the onlooking universe.

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More Media and the Brain

The Family: Public Enemy #1

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Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

More Media and the Brain

1h 15m

Schooled: The Deliberate Agenda to Reduce Intelligence, Destroy Individuality, & Re-engineer Society

1h 9m

The Family: Public Enemy #1

59m

Un-doctrinated: Wordly Schooling & Media

1h 18m

Sound Doctrine