ASI Scandinavia 2019: Follow the Lamb

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ASI Scandinavia

Family

Freja Strucksnes

Kasper Struksnes

Doing Courtship God’s Way

I think you all know that the title of the workshop is doing courtship God's way.

And my name is Kasper and this is my wife, Freya.

And we have been married for now 5 months almost.

So that's quite recent that we don't have that much experience in marriage, but we do have quite some experience in all the process leading up to marriage, and it's still quite fresh in our minds.

So that is what we will share today, all of this process that we are trying to find out if it is gospel, you should marry someone or not, and of course also in this process, then how are you to be around each other and so on.

Okay, before we dive into the subject, I would like to have a word of prayer and ask for the Lord's help.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we come to you now and ask for your blessing.

Lord, we want to follow you in every aspect of our lives and also this about marriage and courtship.

I pray, oh Lord, that you will put your word in our mouths and that you will help us now to think and that you will speak to us and guide us in this area of our lives.

Okay, so we called it doing courtship God's way.

And that is because in this topic of courtship and relationships, we want to do it according to God's way, according to His principles and with His guidance and for His glory.

And not just to do it like everyone else around us are doing, because they, as we see it in the world, it is mostly not according to the best principles.

That's why we want to see God's principles in these things.

And we will talk quite a lot about the considerations to make if you should marry someone or not.

That is because we strongly believe that the purpose and the aim of courtship should not merely be to have a nice time together and have fun, but with an aim towards marriage.

So we recognize that God, he created marriage.

We don't see in the Bible that God, he created courtship.

However, it is, there are of course certain steps towards marriage.

El Maitre writes in the Ministry of Healing that we should let every step toward marriage be characterized by modesty and simplicity and so on.

So there are certain steps toward marriage where we are getting to know the other person and so on, But we don't want to have an aimless courtship.

Probably you know the quote that success in any line demands a definite aim.

And I think it applies also to this area that it should be with an aim towards marriage.

It may not end there, but it should not be aimless.

Okay, so why do we have a workshop about this topic?

Is it not just, okay, I love you, you love me, and we'll try, and then it may work out well?

Okay, let's read this quote from Adam Sistome.

It says, if those who are contemplating marriage would not have miserable, unhappy reflections after marriage, they must make it a subject of serious, earnest reflection now.

How many of you want to have miserable, unhappy reflections after marriage?

So, according to this quote, how can we hinder that from being the reality?

We want to now make it a subject of serious and earnest reflection.

So we need to seriously think about this very thoroughly.

This step taken unwisely is 1 of the most effective means of ruining the usefulness of young men and women.

So what is it that can ruin the usefulness of young people?

It says if we take this step unwisely, then that can be the result.

It doesn't need to be like that and that we will touch on just in a minute.

But there is a danger if we do it unwisely that the result will be that our usefulness in this world can be ruined.

We are here at ASI because We want to be useful in God's work, right?

And we don't want to do anything that will conflict with that purpose.

Well, I just want, I once talked with a young man and he was very concerned if he could still be effective in the work of God and in the same time be married.

And maybe some of you have the same thoughts.

Maybe I will be distracted or maybe I will not be so focused.

But me, I and this young man, we talked about that it really depends who you marry and why you're marrying.

I don't think it's God's plan for everyone's life to be married.

I think he can call you to some kind of work for him where you would be more effective without wife or family.

So that is of course very important to be aware of and ask God if that is his plan for you.

But for many if marrying of the right motives and marrying someone that is God-fearing and has it as their life goal to work for God, marriage does not need to lessen your usefulness.

Look at this quote from me from Ellen White.

It is a quote taken from a marriage speech she had.

Marriage does not lessen the usefulness but strengthen it.

They may make that married life a ministry to win souls to Christ.

So marriage does not need to lessen your usefulness, but it can actually rather enlarge it.

And that also, and that is also when it comes to working for God.

And then she moves on in the quote and she talks about her own experience in marriage and ministry.

And I know thereof I speak, because for 36 years my husband and I were united and we went everywhere that the Lord said go.

So you can actually make your married life a ministry to win souls to Christ.

And I think there are so many ways a God-fearing couple can strengthen and help each other in the mission.

A big blessing and benefit that Casper and I have experienced, that is that you always have someone that you can pray with as you go through life.

You can remind each other of God's promises and you can encourage each other.

And we have also experienced, Casper and I, that being married opens some new possibilities in ministry that we could not do the same way when we were not married.

For instance, we have experienced that inviting people to our home or go and visit people in their homes is a very very good way to do ministry.

Because by doing that you are able to create some personal relationships with people and you can get some deeper conversations with people also from the world.

And before I was married I was not really able to do that the same way if it was someone from the other gender that was single.

So I could not really go and visit them or give them Bible studies if they were interested in that when I was alone.

But now as a married couple, Casper and I can go together and we can visit people, invite people and have Bible studies with single people with no problem.

So that is just 1 example of how marriage can open some new precious possibilities in marriage, in ministry.

Of course more could be said about the purpose of marriage, but let's go on a little bit.

So as we are thinking about this subject, there is 1 very important thing that we want to emphasize in the beginning, which is seen in this quote.

It says, A sincere Christian will not advance his plans in this direction without the knowledge that God approves his course.

He will not want to choose for himself, but will feel that God must choose for him.

We are not to please ourselves, for Christ pleased not himself.

As I was in this process of finding out if I should go into a relationship with Friar or not, and also later, I had to think about, honestly, if God would show me that this was not His plan.

Or would I be so bent on having my own will that I would not like to listen to God's guidance?

And if we cannot honestly say that we will follow whatever the Lord, however the Lord He leads, then all of the things that we're going to look at later will not really make any sense.

Because we will just try to interpret all the things according to our own will.

So that is an important point, because as it says here, we are not to please ourselves, for Christ pleased not himself.

Should we enter into marriage for selfish reasons?

Should we do anything out of selfishness?

So selfishness is the very opposite of selfless love.

And we see in the Bible where love is defined that love does not seek its own.

And we are not to please ourselves, for Christ is not himself.

Ernst Zwiker

Terri Zwiker

Conflict Management in the Family

Heavenly Father, we are privileged again to come to you and listen to what you want to tell us now.

Lord, we are in a challenging situation, everybody, in this world.

We should not be in the world, from the world.

Please help us to understand what you want to tell us today.

We have an interesting, complex topic, conflict solving, dealing with problems, with challenges.

Terry will tell our story a little so you understand where we are and where we went through and then we will see some analysis and so forth and some suggestions of solutions.

We want to say greetings from Zonmat, Switzerland.

As a family, they have a helper from mission schools, and we sometimes also help, are able to help.

And let me tell you, if you work for God in God's end time strategy, you will notice that he's behind you and he blesses you and we have a lot of miracles going on.

You would feel an hour to just tell what happens when we follow Christ's method.

So this is Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Italy and France.

And from this mountain you can see all these countries.

It's very close by And also these mountains here.

So since our subject is about conflict management, I thought it would be good, or we thought it would be good to tell you a little bit of our background and our potential for conflict.

Yeah, we teach Christian home classes in several mission schools now, and we have learned, and we have learned through teaching mostly, more and more about all the mistakes that we made in starting our relationship and in our conflict management, in our early marriage, and we're happy to share what we've learned so that others can possibly have an easier time of it.

So, from the beginning, we have had different upbringings.

I grew up in America, in California, and he grew up in Switzerland.

So we already have a huge cultural difference.

In his home, there wasn't so much conflict, or when there was conflict, it wasn't noticed as much.

I came from a divided home, although my parents stayed together.

They had a lot of differences of opinion.

My mother became a Seventh-day Adventist when I was 8 years old and my father didn't.

But he had been raised an Adventist, so he had the conscience conflict within him and he was also an alcoholic.

His parents were both Seventh-day Adventists.

His father was a real medical missionary at that time for the understanding of that time, which we didn't actually even realize until later until we got into this work.

We realized, ah, he was actually doing that too, but we didn't realize it at the time.

As far as discipline goes, or punishment, in my home there was a lot of corporal punishment.

And in his home, it was strict, but kind, conversational.

My father was very hardworking, and he worked to send us to Adventist schools.

But he wasn't home very much because he was working all the time, except when he was otherwise away.

And he had a very hardworking father and he was also, he was rude for you, but he was also not present so much in the family.

So, So that was a little bit of a common denominator.

We had a lot of things in common, but not such important things as you would think when you're thinking about what's important in a spouse.

We both like sports, so we played soccer together.

We both like music, he could play the piano, I could sing.

We played chess and, you know, card games and things like that.

He was a teacher and I was learning German, so that was a good thing.

He could teach me a lot and he taught me a lot of other things as well, not just German.

Yeah, I wrote a song about how much he taught me.

And opposites do attract because things that are very fascinating for you in your personality, You like the things that are different in someone else, and that draws you together.

And for a while, it's extremely attractive.

But things, you know, opposite, sometimes you can get on each other's nerves with being opposite too.

So in the melancholy, we kind of met each other.

And so in my culture, I grew up with the American sitcom humor.

I don't know if you know what that means, but making fun of each other is fun.

You laugh and you make a joke at somebody, you know, if they have a long nose or something.

You find a smart comment that makes everybody laugh around and you think that's funny, well the person that you're talking about, they feel it.

And that's what I had, 1 of the things I had to learn from him that that's not really a nice thing to do.

And I said, well, you know it's not really true.

There's always a part that's true, and that part hurts.

So I had to learn from coming from, because I grew up with television and and Sonny and Cher, the short guy, the tall skinny with the long nose and and they made fun of each other but they were you know a happy couple so that's what kind of I learned so then that's why they split up.

And when I was growing up, I didn't see behind the scenes.

Everybody knows now that none of the stars are happy.

An easy thing was like, I had to learn to eat with a fork and knife before I met his parents.

Yeah, because Americans eat with a fork, right?

Our language differences, but that kind of smoothed out.

Daniel Pel

Silvia Pel

Bringing Up Children in the Faith

Gracious Heavenly Father, we are so grateful to be here at ASI and here we are, the 31st of December 2019.

We've come to the very last day of this year and I can't really think of a better way to spend it than with brothers and sisters that love you, that wanna follow you, that want your word to become alive in their lives.

And Lord, here we are as young people, some here that are not yet married, others that are married, others that are newly married, or some that have children, young children or perhaps older children.

Lord, wherever we are in our journey, I pray Lord that this seminar may be both instructive, encouraging, inspirational and that it will motivate us, Lord, to do all that we can to reflect your glory and your character in this very day and age in which we live.

We know that the greatest testimony of your love and your gospel is a well-ordered family.

And so we pray, Lord, that you will help us and guide us and give us your spirit, for we ask this in your beautiful name, in the name of Jesus.

All right, so our seminar is entitled Bringing Up Children in the Faith.

We're gonna, this is a seminar that I'm presenting together with Sylvia.

Actually the bulk of time is gonna be given to her.

I'm gonna do some introduction and introduce a couple of things that we're going to talk about.

Then Sylvia is going to take it from there and then I'll wrap it up in the end and then we'll do question time together.

OK, and I want to start by talking about this principle, and that is Proactive parenting.

How many of you have heard that phrase before?

I think it makes sense when you hear the word, what I mean by that.

Proactive parenting is the idea that you are basically a step ahead of your child.

Because sometimes, I'm sure you've seen this, sometimes parents tend to be kind of a step behind their kids, and so they're always running after their kids.

And you're always kind of chasing your children, not only literally, you see it literally, if you go in the supermarket and there are these little kids and they want that and they want that.

So you can see it literally, but also in a figurative sense, there's this kind of always the parent is chasing the child, is trying to catch up with the child, is trying to kind of manage or try to, what am I trying to say, limit, limit the damage that can be done.

And this is a way of parenting, but there's a much, much better and, of course, a way that we find in Scripture, and that is proactive parenting.

And the whole idea is not having to chase your child, but rather to be a step ahead of your child and to guide your child, to instruct your child, to lead your child by example and to in that way teach them the principles in Scripture and to create in them a love for the gospel and for God.

And I think this is something that parents can relate to, this idea of sometimes feeling that you have to chase your child.

Oh, don't do that, don't do that, And kind of that way.

And we've had to remind ourselves, Sylvia and I, often about this principle of proactive parenting.

Not that the child is going to choose what he's going to do so that you kind of have to go after and see if you Want them to do that but rather Introduce to your child what they're going to do that day what they're going to experience create atmospheres where they will flourish you know stimulate their Their their their desires for good things.

And we'll come back to more practical levels on this, but I want to share a quote with you from a book entitled by Home...

The title of the book is Home-Built Discipline by Raymond and Dorothy Moore.

And on page 32, they write the following.

Learn to think beyond punishment and control, beyond contingency systems for behavior, and become more involved in planning constructive and preventive programs that will bring out sound behavior.

And again, this idea of punishment and control is really the opposite of proactive parenting, because then the child is just doing their thing and, and you're like kind of a step behind in your, and you, but you have to deal with what is taking place.

And so you either resort to punishment or to try to control the situation, but the child is always like that step ahead of you.

And then the next thing comes and how are you going to relate to that?

And then the next thing comes, how are you going to relate to that?

Rather than you actually being ahead of your child and creating atmospheres, environments, situations where the child will flourish and grow.

You're giving it the right amount of water, the right amount of sunlight, the right amount of the right soil, and then it will flourish, the plant will flourish.

So instead of punishment and control being a step behind, we're talking here about being involved in planning constructive and preventive programs that will bring out sound behavior.

Create that right environment for your child.

Again, we'll come with more illustrations of this a little bit further into our program, into our workshop.

I want to bring your attention to the book of Proverbs for a moment.

I don't know about you, I'm a very linear thinker, and so when I read Scripture I have a lot easier time with books that have a clear storyline.

I'm very intrigued by the stories of Scripture, I'm very intrigued by the story of redemption, the big picture of Scripture, prophecies that actually start someplace and lead somewhere.

I have personally a little bit harder time with some of the wisdom literature in Scripture, like Proverbs, because my mind is kind of like, okay, that's a good thought.

And then the next verse, oh, that's also a good thought, but where do I kind of place it in a linear storyline?

I don't know if there's anyone else that has that as well.

And so for a long time, kind of the book of Proverbs was okay, kind of like nice, you know, nice, something that you might write, you know, on a tablet or put in your bathroom or hang it up there or in your bedroom or whatever.

Nice thought, but I find it hard time to really understand this book and how it holds together.

Until quite recently, actually, because someone shared with me the idea of how Proverbs has built up.

And basically what Proverbs is, is it's 10 speeches from a father to a son, particularly the first 7 chapters.

After that, you do get these kind of loose Proverbs ideas, these wisdom sayings, but the first 7 chapters are very interesting.

They're actually 10 speeches from a father to a son.

And when that kind of clicked for me, I could kind of begin to read it in my kind of linear thinking, in the story picture.

Now, if you have your Bible, you can turn to the book of Proverbs.

I want to share something interesting with you when it comes to here.

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Series

Family

Doing Courtship God’s Way

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

Doing Courtship God’s Way

1h 6m

Conflict Management in the Family

1h 39m

Bringing Up Children in the Faith

1h 23m

Sound Doctrine