Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Staying Safe Online

Sean Parker

Staying Safe Online- Part 2

Father, we just thank you for your blessings to us and that we can spend some time together here at Camp Meeting.

Just thank you, it's such a blessing to be here.

So many good speakers, so much good material.

We just ask that you'll help us to take that to heart as we go home after the week and apply it in our lives.

And so we ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.

Like I said yesterday, you know, it's interesting.

You just, you hear these, you pick up these little snippets of things from time to time and I keep a track of them in OneNote and so I'm just sharing some of these things I've sort of tracked over the years.

So from Desire of Ages, Jesus worked to relieve every case of suffering that he saw.

He had little money to give, but he often denied himself of food in order to relieve those who appeared more needy than he.

When they, that is the people, spoke harshly, other people, spoke harshly to poor, degraded beings, Jesus sought out these very ones and spoke to them words of encouragement.

To Those who were in need, He would give a cup of cold water, and would quietly place His own meals in their hands.

As to relieve their suffering, the truths He taught were associated with His acts of mercy, and were thus riveted in the memory." I just thought that's a really profound thing.

It's hard to imagine what Jesus was like, but boy, he must have been a really kind person.

That's just a little glimpse you get of his early life when he was younger.

He was really the 1 that was looking out for people and for those that were suffering.

But the statement that really caught me in this whole thing was that he often denied himself food.

I'm thinking, man, I've never denied myself food.

In my whole life I don't think I ever said, oh man, I can't, I'll just give up my food here and give it to somebody.

There's always more food than we could possibly ever need.

I mean, there's no need to do that, it seems like.

So it's hard to understand that sometimes, but that must have been the case in those times.

And then a couple things of interest here, Some things that are interesting.

I don't know if you've ever seen this before, but the Adventist Church, I'd like to throw 1 sort of Adventist website in here.

The Adventist Church runs a website called the Adventistyearbook.org, and the yearbook is like a listing of everybody that works for the church and every possible conference, union, mission, division, who the presidents are, who the secretaries are, and all that.

Let's see if I can just go in there really quick and show you that.

Safari cannot open the page because it cannot connect to the server.

I've had a little bit of trouble this morning with the internet working and I'm just wondering if we're having that issue right now too.

No, I don't see Google's working, so I don't know, maybe I did something with my link, so let's just go into Google and we'll search for Adventist Yearbook.

We'll see if Google knows about us or not.

So you can see you've got world divisions there, you've got more information.

You can actually go back and you can see all the yearbooks that they've published over the years as well.

So there's a lot of historical information here going back many years.

Of course you can always get a copy of the yearbook if you want to purchase it.

But all the information is available for free.

Yeah, the yearbook is a pretty good-sized book.

Also on here should be, this is from the Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research.

And they have a lot of information as well.

At the top of this tab you can see we're on the yearbook tab.

There's also a directory, there's online archives, and there's statistics.

I'm just going to click over to the statistics side of this website because this is really interesting.

Here you can go and see all the world divisions there in a nice map and you can click on 1, I believe.

And now we have statistics for the North American Division, that's what I clicked on, and here you can see the name of the field, you can see the name of each field, and here's the Lake Union Conference, And we have a total of 503 churches with 86, 000 plus members.

This might be last year's numbers, I'm not sure.

I don't know how often these get updated, but anyway, if you're interested, just something of interest to look at.

So I thought you might enjoy seeing that.

The other thing, a couple other things on here that are recently interesting.

I don't know, this is sort of interesting.

It's not maybe as, it's just something I saw the other day and I'm like, that's really cool.

So I said, I got to show this to you guys.

This is, I'm just trying to show you sometimes that there's really interesting things on the internet that are worth looking at.

There's a lot of junk on the internet but then there's this good stuff, okay, that's really worth spending time on it seems like.

So This guy invented this bicycle machine that if you ride it for, I think it's a 5 minutes, it will automatically create a scarf.

So it knits a scarf while you're riding the bike.

He's got a whole machine hooked up to it.

You can see that kind of in the picture here.

So I says, well, you know people really sometimes people spend time doing interesting things, right?

You can see the scarf being made there in the machine.

And then the other thing that was interesting I was going to show you this morning is, I just saw this the other day too, this 1 struck me as sort of something that's been in the news a lot.

This is related to this problem we have at the border with children being separated from their parents.

And the problem with the news sometimes is we get sort of, we see things and it may or may not be true what we're seeing.

And I'm not saying this is or isn't, I don't know the whole story, I mean that takes some time, but this particular thing I saw a week ago or 2 weeks ago, this picture.

And I don't know if any of you saw it, but I'll show you the picture and you can see if you've seen the picture here.

I don't know if any of you saw this picture.

And it was portrayed by many big news organizations that this was what was happening at the border.

Well, it turns out that that picture was not of a boy at the border.

It was a picture of a boy at a protest of what was going on at the border.

So I'm just pointing this out to say not everything you see on the internet is true, right?

You have to really pay attention to these things and this doesn't mean that what's going on at the borders is justified or right, but I'm just saying sometimes things get sensationalized.

A lot of times things get sensationalized.

Anyway, just a couple interesting things there.

We'll go on here, there's a couple interesting things there.

Now yesterday for those that weren't here, we like I said we didn't get as far as we were thinking we would, but a couple things we did cover that I just wanted to review is a reminder to be skeptical when you're on the internet, when you're doing things, when you see things, when you get messages on your screen, be a little skeptical.

Be careful when you're clicking on links in email.

And we described some ways that you can look at the name, the web address, which is also called the URL before you go online.

And so those things, just a reminder of those things.

Staying Safe Online- Part 3

Father, we just thank you again for your blessings, for giving us another day, another day of life, another day to serve you.

And we just pray that you'll be with us, be with our plans today, and with our meeting in Jesus' name.

So here's another quick spiritual nugget that I've gleaned from Desire of Ages, as we associate together, we may be a blessing to 1 another.

If we are Christ, our sweetest thoughts will be of Him.

We shall love to talk of him as we speak to 1 another of his love.

Our hearts will be softened by divine influences.

Beholding the beauty of his character, we shall be changed into the same image from glory to glory." It's the ideal, right?

We talk of Jesus every day in our communications.

I know I fall well short of that sometimes.

Sabbath afternoon, find myself talking about technology And then I remind myself or my friends remind me, we need to talk about Jesus, right?

And he is the perfect character that we can emulate in our lives.

So just encourage you in that regard this morning.

And then just a couple things of interest.

The first 1 is really interesting in my mind.

I don't know if you've seen this or heard of this.

And this is a fairly new development, probably sort of in the last 2 to 3 years they've done this.

And what they have done is they have scanned Adventist publications, documents, all kinds of material from the Office of Historical Resources and have put it on this website available to be searched.

And so let me just do an example of what you might do here.

And then here you can search in all collections.

You can put in anything you'd like to search for.

What we find most people sort of do to start with is put in their name or 1 of their family members' name if they have had Adventists for a long time, been Adventists for a long time.

So here's my grandmother, Florence Parker.

My grandmother is the first Adventist in our family.

She became an Adventist in 1948, I think, in central Vermont.

Oh, you got a different picture than I do.

Yes, the picture changes when you go to the website, so every time you go it's a little different.

All right, so anyway, here's the search results and you can see there's a hit here in the British Advent Messenger from 1964.

However, this next 1 probably is my grandmother.

Here is the Atlantic Union Gleaner from 1952.

And it was scanned in and here's the results of that search.

And there is in fact my grandmother right here, Florence Parker, where she went to.

Let's see, members of the Morrisville, Vermont church were certified by the American Red Cross as first aid instructors.

And there's my grandmother, so she was certified.

So I know she was a member of the Morrisville, Vermont church, so I know that's her.

Is that web address with 2L, with digital?

Do they have to get Acme Dysphonia from North America or from all over the world?

You know, I think they're scanning from all over the world.

Whatever they can find that they can get access to, they are scanning.

And so in some ways, it's pretty interesting that they're able to pull that off.

And so it's not just that they scan it, but they do something called OCR to those documents.

Right under all collections, there should be a box that's got a little magnifying glass to the right.

So if you have evidence in your family, this is always interesting.

But it's also just interesting, all these documents that they've stored and scanned and put out here.

They're continuing to scan documents and make them available.

So all of our publications and papers are there.

So I looked early and I found I didn't even know.

I had put my name in here and I found that there I was, my baptismal picture was actually in the Atlantic Union Gleaner.

I never knew it was even published there back when I was baptized in 1978, 79.

Right, I don't know how they deal with that.

There was a young man that I grew up with, Gunther Hammerach.

I search up and I want to find where his address is, and try to get in contact with him.

I don't know what, you know, they may have information, they may not.

Helmut, that was a brother of my father-in-law.

So you could click on that document and look at the actual document.

No, you're not necessarily going to find somebody's address, because all this is is a scanned copy of published documents.

So if I was in the Adventist Review or my name was in the...

Staying Safe Online- Part 4

So Father, we're just thankful that we can be here together at Camp Meeting.

And it's just nice to wake up in the morning here and just have that beautiful, cool weather and sunshine.

We're just thankful for that this morning.

We're thankful that you're always with us.

And we just pray for your spirit, pray for your guidance in all that we do and say.

And so we ask these things in Jesus' name.

So here's another quick little spiritual nugget from Desire of Ages.

In infinite wisdom, God chose the foundation stone and laid it Himself.

The entire world may lay upon it their burdens and griefs." Did you get that?

With perfect safety, they may build upon it.

Those who trust in Him, He never disappoints.

He has endured the pressure of Adam's guilt and the guilt of his posterity and has come off more than conqueror of the powers of evil.

He has borne the burdens cast upon him by every repenting sinner.

In Christ, the guilty heart has found relief.

All who make him their dependents rest in perfect security." I was thinking that's kind of appropriate for a security seminar.

All who make Him their dependents rest in perfect security.

I wish I could say to you today there was something that you could rest on in technology that would give you perfect security.

Such a thing in this world, unfortunately, does not exist.

And we say that at the Union office all the time.

We do everything we can do security-wise, and then we rest in Jesus and in His protection, knowing that He will take care of what He needs to take care of.

Because what we're doing, especially in the church, and if you're working with a church or in your school, even in your home, it's all part of God's work, and it's His stuff.

We do what we can do and you take care of the rest.

All right, a couple things of interest to look at this morning.

Does anyone here use the EG White Estate app on your mobile device?

I Just want to go in there if you haven't used it.

It is available for free on any of the major mobile devices.

And I think the new 1 is called EGW Writings 2 with the number 2 on the end.

This is a very good app in the sense that if you want to read her writings or you want to research, you can get free access.

All the writings that she ever wrote are in this app.

I think it has pretty much everything in it.

Yes, and some other founders of our church.

I mean, It's pretty much a great resource.

The only dilemma I have with it is it takes a long time to look in the top left.

The only dilemma is when you want them all, it takes a long time.

I just download the ones that I'm interested in or that I'm going to read.

And so that's what I was going to show you this morning really quickly.

First of all, I want to back here because I want to remember what I did here.

I couldn't remember what page that was I quoted from.

So I'm going to show you just a quick couple things because it's not the focus of what we're doing today, but just so you can get a taste.

If you are in a meeting and you're listening to a message and the preacher says, go to a quoting here today from Desire of Ages, page 598.

There's a little magnifying glass here in the top right corner.

You can click that and then it says, search.

You can put in here, DA for Desire of Ages.

You have to get those acronyms down, 598.

You can put the shortcut or the abbreviation for that specific book, a space and the page number, and hit your search option, and if everything works right, it will take you right to that page.

I don't know if you can see that from where you are, but it took me right to the top of page 598.

And you can see the quote I had this morning is right here.

In infinite wisdom, God chose the foundation stone.

It's a really sort of neat little feature.

And I'm going to tell you, you know, most of the time of course people are pretty good at getting the right references and quotes.

But I have found on occasion somebody made a quote That wasn't exactly what was in her writings, or it wasn't there at all.

We found 1 1 time that, in fact, the union office was getting ready to send out a communication with a quote from Ellen White.

And someone came to me and said, can you help us verify this quote from Ellen White?

We want to make sure we have the right reference.

In fact, that quote wasn't even an Ellen White quote, turns out.

Staying Safe Online- Part 5

Father, we just thank you so much that you are good to us and that you are a loving God and you care deeply for each 1 of us.

And we just pray that we'll sense that appreciation in our life today.

We pray for peace over the coming Sabbath.

We pray that you'll lead and guide us every day closer to you, that we might be more and more like Jesus.

So as I do every morning, this is our fifth time.

This is a little, another little spiritual nugget I've gleaned and stored away.

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