Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Emmanuel Training Sessions

Mark Howard

1. Orientation

A couple of different things here I want to bring to your attention.

We have, you might notice, we have no lighting in here.

This is 1 of the exciting things about camp meeting.

There are always certain things that make camp meeting camp meeting.

There are certain glitches that we work through, through the week, they'll be taken care of.

If we don't have a good sized thunderstorm this year, it's not camp meeting.

I'm really pleased with the weather this morning.

But if you don't have a sweltering day like yesterday, it's not camp meeting.

So these are all little things that make camp meeting fun and so what we have is we have the video lighting here this morning because they're going to be videoing but we're hoping by tomorrow that these lights will be working in this room and but we'll see Now this is the Emanuel Institute camp meeting session.

So if you had thought you were in the gardening class, you're in the wrong room.

If you thought you were in the Emanuel Institute class and you're in the right place.

We've not done this at camp meeting before.

Our conference secretary, Elder Jim Mitchiff, suggested that we do this at camp meeting.

And I asked him if he would come and, as we start out this morning, just share a little bit of why he felt that burden and kind of kick us off this morning.

So Elder Mitchell, I'm glad you can be here.

He has a billion responsibilities, but he's taking the time to be here this morning, and I appreciate that.

I'm looking out at a group of people that I'm just really excited to see.

You know, Michigan Conference has a lot of, there's a lot of things, moving parts for Michigan.

Our heart and soul is to finish the work, isn't that right?

And 1 of the things that we are big into is evangelism, but what we realized is that evangelism, it does work when you just advertise and people come, that does work a little.

But that's not the way we really, I think the Lord has a better plan for it.

I think if all of us were giving Bible studies and we were really moving out, we would bring our interest and I think this work would be finished in a good way.

Can you imagine what it would be like if every church had, every member was given a Bible study in every church?

Can you imagine how quickly we would turn this world upside down?

It was the idea was to equip Michigan members for Bible study.

Arise, the Lord called someplace else and raised up Emanuel.

And we were just so delighted with Emmanuel.

And 1 morning, well, we had been talking about how we could have more sessions for Emmanuel, where we could get more people to be able to be trained through Emmanuel so that they could be equipped for Bible, to give Bible studies.

We had a several month program and then we reduced that down to a 10-day program and then we started thinking about how we could take that to the churches.

And 1 morning I was praying about it, and there was just a burden on my heart as I was thinking about Emmanuel.

And so as I was praying about it and thinking, the Lord impressed me that, you know, there are people who come to camp meetings and they make every effort to be at camp meetings and sometimes that's the only opportunity they have throughout the year to be anywhere outside of at work.

And so the thought came, well, why don't you have a special session at camp meeting?

And so I thought about it, continued to pray about it a little bit more, and then I came over and talked with Mark about it.

I said, Mark, how would you feel about that?

And he had other responsibilities at the time.

I mean, he lives and breathes this kind of stuff.

So I'm talking to the choir when I'm talking to him.

And the more we talked the more excited I got.

And so we formed a team around him and we pulled him out of the other responsibilities and put him into this responsibility.

And then we set a limit on how many could be there because we wanted to have this a quality program.

Where not that it wouldn't be quality, but if you have a large group of people, it's hard to get personal contact with them.

And so he set the number at what he would like to do and then he said well where would we meet at?

And so we talked a little bit about this.

This was even before the camp meeting project.

And we talked about this room, we came down and looked at it, and this room it was functional before but it just needed to be spruced up a little bit and so in the course of time, as you can see, we have new windows on this side and maybe you don't know that, but if you look at the windows on the other part of this building, you'll realize how nice these windows are.

And then we put new ceiling in and then we put new lights in.

Of course, the lights are not hooked up right now.

But we've had a lot of people busy doing other things.

And these were supposed to be hooked up on Friday, but something happened and it won't get done until today.

But by God's grace, they'll be done tomorrow.

So for you, But we're excited that you are here.

And I want to just say, this training that God is giving you this week, first of all, let me say this, you're not here by accident.

God has placed it on your heart to be here for a reason.

And it isn't just to feel good, or it isn't just to know a little bit more yourself.

God has a plan in your life, and he has someone in mind for you to touch.

I'm talking about that personal touch of bringing them to Christ.

And so as you sit through these sessions, understand that you're being equipped for service and God has that service in mind for you.

If you feel a little bit intimidated, don't worry about it.

He said he's intimidated and he told me privately that it's All he can do to step in front of people and he pleads with the Lord to give him something to be able to share.

And that boldness is gonna grow because as the love of Christ comes in your heart, you can't stop yourself.

And so God is going to bless you in a powerful way throughout this week as you're being equipped.

Learn everything you can, But as you're here, put it in your mind.

This is not something you're going to put on the shelf.

This is something you're going to put into action.

And so you want to make sure you do that.

I do want to ask a special blessing on you.

Father in heaven, you brought each 1 here.

I don't know, there's 36 that are signed up.

I pray, Father, that you would just stir their hearts.

You would open up their minds so that they would understand what you're presenting here.

You would equip them, and then, Lord, you would just fill their hearts with love and compassion and a desire to see people come to you, that when they go home, they can't help themselves.

2. Introduction

Now a couple things I want you to know we're gonna have a word of prayer here each time we come back together we're gonna pray because I know for 1 I need the Lord's guidance.

You're not here to hear me or any man or woman at camp meeting you're here to hear the Lord And he's here with us.

In fact, we're told in these convocations, I don't know if you've read this, in the writings of Ellen White and Testimonies to Men, no, I may have the book wrong, but she says it's in the convocations of the church when we are gathered together, especially for the purpose of saving souls, but when we gather together, those are the appointed places where God pours his spirit out.

And so, yeah, anytime the church comes together to gather, man, I don't wanna miss it.

Because the spirit might be poured out there, right?

So I'm glad you guys are here at camp meeting.

The training manual, there is a, we'll be referring to things in the training manual off and on, but we're not obviously reading through it.

There's some great resources in here on different aspects of soul winning.

I want to talk to you a little bit in this class period about discipleship and the Great Commission.

And so before we get started, I'd like to pray and invite you to bow your heads with me if you would, please.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this beautiful day you've given us here at Michigan Camp Meeting.

Father, we thank you for the presence of your Holy Spirit.

We've been blessed already by the messages and different ministries that have ministered here.

And Lord, now I pray that the Spirit of truth would guide us into truth, not just an intellectual truth, Father, but a transforming truth that would help us to be the disciples you've called us to be.

Give us ears to hear and hearts to respond, for we ask it in Jesus' name.

Okay, now I'm going to go over a little bit of the idea of discipleship and the Great Commission, and then my brother Jim's gonna talk about why we don't see the level of discipleship that you will expect to be seeing after we cover what discipleship is.

So first thing I want to touch on though is evangelism.

We're Emanuel Institute of Evangelism and a lot of times, in fact most of the time when I've talked to Seventh-day Adventists about evangelism, We understand evangelism a certain way.

I've had people tell me a lot of times, oh hey pastor, we're doing evangelism in my church right now.

Now part of me wants to say praise the Lord, but you know what they're telling me, and maybe you've done this yourself, what do you think they're telling me that they're doing?

Okay, an evangelism series is only part of evangelism.

And it actually is a very small part, it's an important part, but it's a small part of evangelism.

The word evangelism means basically to share the good news.

And anything and everything that would be sharing the good news is evangelism.

Evangelism is carrying out the great commission of Jesus, which we're going to look at in the scripture in just a moment.

When we're talking about evangelism, so the first section is called 7 Reasons for Evangelism, and even in the introduction I share that evangelism is about sharing the good news.

Now you know the word gospel means good news, right?

Why would you call anything, what's, what is a key, probably the primary characteristic about news?

It's not a, God didn't make a mistake when he called, you know, we read the word gospel, but it's the good news.

When you are excited about something, you share it.

I don't care how scared you get about it.

Your excitement generally overrules your fear.

Look, I've never in all my time in ministry, I've never had to give a seminar.

Pastor Howard's gonna have a seminar on how to share with your friends how your football team is so much better than theirs.

I'm a real Lions fan, but my friend's a Steelers fan, and I don't want to upset him by telling him that my team is so much better than his team.

Oh, my team just trounced your team in the last game, or whatever it is.

When you're excited about something, It could be, this is really kind of a chauvinistic thing that I do, and I apologize, I don't know how else to do it, but I've never met a man excited about a shoe sale.

Well, that's not, I take that back, my younger brother would be excited about a shoe sale.

But I'll usually do the guys with the football, Maybe the girls are big on football, but the ladies, boy, you get a sale.

It's not like, you know, pastor, I've got some friends that I wanna tell them about this great sale going on, but what if I say it wrong?

I've never had to give a seminar on that.

When you're excited about something, you just tell people about it.

And 1 of the most interesting things, I touch on this in the introduction on the 7 reasons for evangelism, is the story of a man named Joe Cross, a fat, sick, and nearly dead guy.

OK, well, for those who don't, this guy, Joe Cross, was an Australian, is an Australian businessman, who, when he reached 40 years old, well, in high school, he was active.

Became a successful businessman, but that meant a lot of board meetings, sitting in the boardroom, sitting in the office, putting on weight.

By the time he hit 40 years old, he had developed a skin condition he'd been to a lot of doctors about and Nobody could fix it.

He was on all kinds of medications to take care of that, plus his hypertension and everything else.

All these bottles, pills, medications for his rashes that he never could get rid of.

And so he began to process, and he did this in a documentary.

You can see the documentary is called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead.

But this is where he felt, Wow, 40 years old, I'm in this terrible shape, worst shape I've been in my life, I'm miserable.

He got the idea, you know, when I was a kid, I remember getting in, having an accident, fall off my bike, skin my knee, and I'd wanna do something with it, and mom would say, leave it alone, it'll heal if you just let it, you know, let your, you know, take care of yourself and let your body heal, it'll heal itself.

And he said, I wonder if that'd work with all my other problems, if I take better care of my body.

So he worked with his doctor and decided to go on a juice fast.

Okay, this isn't apple juice and grape juice and all sugary juices.

This is the good green stuff and beet juice and anybody ever do juice in here?

Anyway, Has any, yeah, he goes on this juice fast for 60 days, which is, you wouldn't want to do something like that without a doctor's supervision, whatever.

Michigan Conference, don't get in trouble.

Pastor Howard said we ought to go on a 60 day juice fast.

Anyway, but what he did is he just juiced every meal for this period of time, and then he called it a reboot.

For him, and it does, if you've ever done something like that, my wife and I did like a seven-day juice fast.

Okay, you don't add anything, it's just the juice, there's no seasoning, there's no salt, there's no...

Jim Howard

3. Introduction & Overview

I've got 50, what do we have to, what time's lunch, 1.15?

Okay, I'm going to be incredibly concise here, incredibly concise.

So, and this morning is sort of a little bit philosophical if you will, inspirational, wanting to give you a broad bird's-eye-view picture as well as kind of give you some compelling reasons why personal work and personal soul winning is so needed in the church.

So I'm going to kind of continue that vein a little bit but talk about about a few other specific areas of it And then we'll get a little bit more into some of the methodology and that sort of thing as we continue in your schedule.

But before we start this last session for the morning, let's have a word of prayer together.

Father in Heaven, thank you so much for the opportunity and privilege we have to spend time just considering the work that you have called us to.

We want to be genuine disciples and that means we want to be like you.

We want to be soul winners through and through in our heart of hearts.

And Father, we know that if the calling that we have is to make disciples, then that means that we not only need to win others, but we need to win them to that same soul winning work.

So please help us, Lord, to understand this cycle that we are involved in and help us to do our part.

Speak to us through your Spirit now we ask in Jesus' name.

Alright, see that part that Mark told me I was going to have time to do where I asked what church you're all from?

So if we could just instead of going around and finding out what church you're from, if on the count of 3 you would all just tell me what church you are from?

Let's take your Bibles and turn to Acts 8.

There's perhaps going to be some things that I share with you that you have heard before, or maybe you've even heard me say it before.

That's ok, because I'm going to talk really fast and it'll be over before you know it.

So, Acts 8, beginning in verse 1, this is right after Acts 7 in which Stephen, that first Christian martyr, was stoned, and there was someone standing by who was consenting to his death.

And Saul, we learn later in Acts chapter 9, in his conversion story, we learn that he was kicking against the goads.

Which tells me that the Spirit of God was working on the apostle and he was resisting the Spirit of God.

And 1 of the key places where he was resisting the Spirit of God was in this story in Acts 7 where Stephen is stoned and he looks up and sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God and he says, Lord, charge not their sin against them.

And Paul, soon to be Paul, is looking at this and he's supposed to be the 1 who's consenting to this awful person being put to death, and he's seeing this Spirit of Christ and the glory of God emanating from Stephen, and he is convicted in his heart.

And as a result of the conviction, conviction results in different things.

Sometimes conviction will lead someone to fall on their knees and to pour out their heart and to surrender their life, but sometimes conviction leads someone to try to bury that conviction by getting even more wicked in what they're doing, and the apostle, soon-to-be apostle, did that very thing.

Saul decided to amp up the persecution that was going on.

And so that's what happens in Acts 8, right after the stoning of Stephen, you have beginning of verse 1 of Acts 8, Saul consenting to his death, and then it says, at that time a great persecution arose against the church which was at Jerusalem and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except who?

Who was scattered throughout Judea and Samaria?

So you have the leaders, the pastors in Jerusalem, and the church members scattered throughout Judea and Samaria, right?

Now, in verse 4 it says, Therefore those who were scattered...

The church members went everywhere doing what?

Now, presumably, the apostles were also preaching the Word, but they were in Jerusalem, and so this isn't talking about them.

This is talking about the lay people going everywhere preaching the Word.

Go to Acts 11.19 and you'll see the same group spoken of.

Acts 11.19 says, Now those who were scattered over the persecution that arose over Stephen, who's that?

Those who were scattered over the persecution, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch preaching the word to no 1 but the Jews only.

Look at verse 21, and the hand of the Lord is with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.

It's for this reason, as Mark brought up, that the end of verse 26 says the disciples were first called Christians and Antioch.

So Antioch, which turned out to be the home base for Paul and Barnabas and their missionary endeavors where they spent much time, this home base was developed through the preaching of lay people.

And Paul and Barnabas just came later and were like, oh wow, this is really of God.

And they helped put a little bit of structure to it.

But the bottom line is it was this incredible movement of lay people that developed this church in Antioch and by which, quite frankly, the work spread as fast and as quickly as it did.

We always like to look at it and say the Apostle Paul did it all.

The Apostle Paul knew how to mentor people who went and did the same thing.

And what you see right here is that the work of the early church, the model of church that you see in the early church, was 1 in which the laity were preaching the word.

Then, as churches were established in Antioch by lay people and in other places, then they appointed elders to oversee.

Now, let me help you understand what that's saying.

Elders you could consider part of the church structure, okay?

Or was it the work of the lay people driving the need for structure?

So what can happen if we're not careful is that we can look at the church and its structure and think that it is the actual working body of the church, and then the actual laity spreading the truth that you see in the early church model can disappear and it can create very big problems.

Let me take you to something in your manual here.

And I don't know exactly what page it's on, but I'm going to find it, and then I'll tell you where it is.

Hey, Mark, is this the, what am I trying to say?

It says chapter 10 on the top of the page.

Do you want to come here and show me if this is, if we're looking?

OK, and then once you get to chapter 10, which is, then you go to page 11.

Kameron DeVasher