WYC 2010:  In His Image

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GYC West

Lifestyle of the Last Generation

Nicole Parker

But We’re Just Friends

How many of you have been enjoying WIC so far?

Father in Heaven, we're just so grateful that You have blessed us so much.

I know You have a plan for each of our lives, and I pray that You will empty me of self and fill me with Your Spirit, that I may be able to share something that will be a blessing to each person's heart here and that each person may be changed into your image more by the message that I share today.

My seminar is titled, but we're just friends.

Because this is 1 of the most common things that I hear as a person who spends a lot of time with young people.

My husband works at Southern, and I'm staying at home as a stay-at-home mom with 3 little kids.

But we have a lot of students that come funneling through our house.

And just kind of, I hear so many complicated situations that start out with, well, we're just friends, but.

So I decided a long time ago, this was a topic that I really thought needed to be addressed more.

And I actually am working on writing a book on this.

So whenever I have spare time between raising 3 little kids, 1 of these days you may be able to read this if you can't hear it.

Now what I want to share with you today comes from my heart and from my own experience because I had the same situation that many other people that I know had in growing up trying to follow God.

You know, I always heard you got to save yourself from the right 1, right?

And When I was younger, like up until I was about 16, I really thought that that was kind of a, you know, as long as you don't have sex, it's okay, right?

So I would play with all these guys, flirt around a lot.

But of course, I was going to save myself for the right 1 physically.

But emotionally I wasn't saving myself for anybody.

I was giving myself to anybody who seemed like they would be interested in me.

I remember going out walking with 1 of my friends.

We would go over and visit the academy campus nearby and go on man hunts.

Just walk around and try to find somebody to flirt with.

And then go away giggling, oh you were so cute.

It's insane the things that 14 year old girls do.

And then when I gave my life to Christ when I was 16, I decided, all right, now I'm going to do it right.

I'm going to give every area of my life to God, and that includes dating.

I dated several non-adventist guys and had some really messed up relationships.

And I didn't date again until I was out of college.

And that was a great decision, 1 of the best decisions I ever made.

It really helped me to be able to mature and to work through some of the things that I needed to work through before I started dating anybody.

And that decision also probably saved me from a lot of very bad situations.

Because even when I was 16, I remember just a few months before I really made that commitment to follow Christ, I was studying to be a lifeguard.

And my lifeguarding teacher sat down with me 1 day and she said, Nicole, if you keep acting the way that you're acting with guys, you're not going to be a virgin much longer.

And physically, I dressed in the kind of clothes that I thought would get attention.

It wasn't that I was trying to get guys to want to have sex with me.

But when you have a nice body and you dress in things that show it off, then everybody pays more attention to you.

And guys want to put their arm around you.

And I liked how I felt when I put on something that made my body look what I thought looked good.

So I wore those tight things, those short things, those things that didn't have any sleeves.

And I thought, wow, you know, this is the life.

But my lifeguarding teacher saw where it was going, even when I didn't.

And I'm so grateful that she had the courage to sit down and talk with a girl who wasn't really very spiritually minded in some ways, because she saw I had potential and that I did want to follow God and I needed somebody to warn me.

So she did help me to know what I was doing was desperately wrong.

And I came out of that conversation horrified and confused.

When I gave my life to Christ, I was attending Ouachita Hills Academy, which is a wonderful school.

And at Ouachita Hills, we weren't allowed to date.

And I found that really great because the other guys, when a guy would walk with me or sit next to me in class regularly, I didn't have to start worrying, oh, no, he's got a crush on me.

But it also meant that I became good friends with guys, not worrying about whether or not we were going to be interested in each other.

That can be a good thing and a bad thing because I thought, you know, we're just friends, right?

You want to stay just friends with everyone, right?

When you're out there in the world, you date around, you have a wild time, you decide what your boundaries are physically and then you go that far whenever you feel like it.

But as Christians we say, wait, we're supposed to save ourselves for marriage.

And that means physically and of course emotionally too.

We realize that as we mature spiritually.

We realize it's not okay to just throw yourself at everybody emotionally.

So you're supposed to stay just friends with people until you find somebody you think might be the right 1, right?

But practically, that often means that we're still confused.

What does it really mean to be just friends?

The Bible talks all the time about staying pure.

But it doesn't talk about what's the boundary.

How can a guy and a girl be friends and be just friends and stay pure?

We live in a culture where Movies tell you that you've got to have these intense emotional friendships.

And everything has to be intense and emotional.

And in an hour and a half, you go through all the emotions that somebody is supposed to go through in like 10 years, in this movie.

And wow, the hills and the valleys are amazing.

And when you get to real life, real life you've got to scrub floors.

In real life, when you drive somewhere in a car, you actually have to sit there for a while and drive.

Alan Parker

Wreck-creation or Re-creation

I'm not sure because I've had to change my watch several times.

I've had to change my watch several times.

Oh, well, we should give them a couple of minutes, just in case there's anyone trying to get here.

A little bit about me before we get into our formal section.

And then I'll do a pause here so that they'll know an audio verse to cut this part out.

But my name is Alan Piker, and I am a professor at Southern.

I teach in the School of Religion, but I'm on my way to Weimar.

So this is going to be a familiar campus to me very soon.

I used to work for Amazing Facts for 5 years.

I was in the Amazing Facts team and at the College of Evangelism, director of the College of Evangelism, and eventually of the evangelism department.

And then when we left, we left 3 years ago to Southern.

And we've had a great time there, but God is calling us back.

But we figured we'd get it done and out of the way.

And we were planning on more than 3 at 1 stage.

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father God, we thank you for being present in our meetings.

We pray that you'll be with our topic this morning as we deal with your purpose in recreation.

We ask, Lord, that you help us not to be dependent on the values that come from others, but to be dependent on the values that come from Your Word.

Thank You, Lord, for guiding and leading us.

So our topic, as you can see, is wreck creation or recreation.

And there's a very simple reason for that.

I believe that there are certain lifestyle choices that you can take that will either wreck what God is trying to do in your life or will recreate you the way he intended it to be.

And whenever you've had true recreation, you know what it's like to come back refreshed, revitalized, ready to face your work, ready to do everything that God asks you to do.

But whenever you've wrecked your creation through your lifestyle choices, you wake up with headaches, with lack of sleep, not feeling like you can face the week.

And So we want to take a look at the different options.

I want to begin with a young man here, Devon Moore, 18 years old.

And he seemed like just a regular kid, going to school, doing things that other kids do.

So 1 day, he's sitting in his car, and a cop comes out to him, asks a question.

He goes very nicely with the cop off to the police station.

And while they're at the police station, suddenly Devon grabs a gun, shoots the cop in the head, then in the body, then runs out, shoots another person, and then shoots another cop before getting into a car, a police car, a cruiser, and going on a four-hour high-speed chase till they eventually caught up with him.

And Devon, what was his response when they pulled him out of the car?

What made Devon make these drastic choices?

What made him make those kinds of choices?

What had he been playing that led him to do that?

And What he did in Grand Theft Auto was you shoot policemen and you go on chases in cop cars.

In the trigger of a moment, he's under a little bit of pressure.

And He's been playing these games over and over again until they drilled into him.

And he automatically goes into that mode, and he becomes the character in the video game.

There is a correlation, undoubtable correlation, between violent video games and violent state in life.

People say I don't feel any of those kinds of thoughts.

I can distinguish reality from something that's not reality.

But I want to question our entertainment choices and compare it with God's program.

If you look it up in the dictionary, it says the act of creating anew, something created anew.

God's plan was that we are messed up by sin, He is going to step into this world and He is going to recreate us.

Can you think of a place in Scripture that refers to that?

If any man is in Christ, He is a new creation.

God's plan is in our lifestyle choices when we're needing to relax and get refreshed that he would be able to recreate us into his image.

I'd like us to take a little theological point before we go into some of the practical things in recreation and recreation.

God's plan for the Sabbath, I believe that this was the highlight of the entire creation week.

Everything that he had been doing up until that moment was just to prepare for that moment when he would take Adam and Eve into a relationship with himself.

The whole work of creation was performed, Jürgen Multmann, a famous theologian, says, for the sake of the Sabbath.

The whole work of creation, Everything, every animal, every flower, everything that was done ahead of time was done so that God and man could enjoy it on the Sabbath.

That the Sabbath was about celebrating what God had done in creation.

God himself rests from his works, not because he's tired, but that he might be free to be himself and enjoy his creation.

I've got a whole universe to run, but on this 1 day I'm not going to run my universe.

I could be out there creating new worlds, doing all kinds of things.

But on this day, I'm going to spend time with you.

Grownups Playing Dress-up

Alright, let's start with a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we're just so grateful to you.

You've blessed us so much, Lord, with your word and knowledge of you, and I pray that you will bless us now as we're talking with 1 another that we will understand your word your plan for us and we will allow you into the deepest places in our lives thank you Lord amen today we are talking about grownups playing dress up.

And how many of you have ever played dress up?

Or as they would point out, 3 and a half, 4 and a half, and 6 and a half.

My daughter, especially, just loves dressing up.

She has her little friends come over and they like to dress alike or they'll dress up in her fanciest dresses and prints around the house or they put clips all over in their hair.

Not too long ago she and her best friend Ellie dressed up as Egyptian princesses.

They each probably had 20 hair clips in their hair.

And Ellie's mom overheard them talking to each other.

And she said, you need to clean up in the other room.

Saying, Why do we have to do all this work?

Yes, when you dress up, it's so easy to suddenly morph into feeling very different.

This is my son Seth dressing up as a fireman the other day.

And we sometimes kind of fall into the same habit.

We feel like a quick change on the outside makes us feel so different.

You know how it is when you get a new haircut or some new clothes and you suddenly feel so much more confident about yourself.

You're going out there and you feel like you look good.

But that is not exactly how God wants us to base our sense of how we feel about ourselves, is it?

A quick change on the outside, and now I feel like I am an Egyptian princess, right?

And when we fall into that trap, God wants us to come up to something so much higher.

God is not interested in a quick fix of decorating the outside.

Now, you know when God changes a heart, He changes it so that change comes to the outside, right?

You know, when I was trying to figure out what I would talk about here, I thought, you know, I know what I want to do.

I want to just Go over there and start out by putting up this long quotation about the length of skirts.

And then when everybody goes, oh, no, is that what it is?

But then I thought, some people are going to listen to that on audio verse.

And when I start droning about the length of skirts, they're just going to turn it off.

Because I don't think that's really where we should be focusing.

I think God wants to do something deeper.

This isn't an actual picture of that tree, but it was this massive tree in the backyard of the place that we were living.

I mean, this tree was so big, I would put my arms around it like this, and I could only get halfway around the tree.

Some of the branches were dying, and they were falling down.

We had a couple of windstorms when a big branch fell down.

My little kids play underneath this tree outside.

If something falls on them, they could be killed.

So we called up our landlords and they agreed to get rid of the tree.

So the first thing they did was hire somebody to come in and take scissors and cut off all the leaves of the tree.

All right, just want to see if you guys were awake.

In fact, these guys came in with their massive saws.

And it was really pretty impressive watching them.

And then they start going down this trunk in sections, I mean, this massive trunk.

And then they took their root grinder and they ground out all the roots down underneath, even down under the ground.

They ground all down in there to get rid of everything from this tree.

That's the way that I always process stuff.

And I thought, wow, what a good illustration.

When you weed the garden, do you do it with a lawnmower?

We know that if we weed with a lawnmower 2 weeks later, it's going to look just like it did before, right?

And yet, in dress, we've often tried to weed with a lawnmower.

Be sure you don't wear any jewelry or anything that looks like jewelry.

No glittery stuff around your neck, because that could make it look like you're wearing jewelry, even if it's not actual jewelry.

And while that's important, it's much more important that we get to the root.

These guys who were cutting down the tree, they knew they needed to get rid of the branches, because otherwise the tree wasn't going to come down right.

Sometimes we need to have some guidelines of this is where we need to dress.

And especially when you've got an institution or a school or something like that, you've got to have some basic minimum guidelines.

But God wants to do so much better, right?

iWorship

I notice some of you are sleep deprived, but I am too.

I finally got to sleep at 12 and then I woke up at 4.

But maybe if I had you up here running around, that would help.

So we'll do our best to keep everybody focused.

We want to begin with prayer and then we'll get into our topic for this afternoon.

Father God, we want to thank you that you are a God who is powerful.

Help us not to settle for substitute, counterfeit revivals and gospels, but to simply accept that you are the powerful God who can do powerful things right in our generation.

May we have a worship that is an encounter that changes our lives.

And you can tell a little play on words there.

I want to deal with what is worship like when God is involved and is there a counterfeit that is out there that we need to be careful about.

It seems like there's a lot of worship wars.

If you guys have been around a little bit, you know what I'm talking about.

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Series

Lifestyle of the Last Generation

Heavenly Music: Starting Now

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

But We’re Just Friends

55m

Wreck-creation or Re-creation

54m

Grownups Playing Dress-up

1h

iWorship

1h

Heavenly Music: Starting Now

1h

Health for Body, Mind, and Soul: Preparation for the End Time Crisis

1h

Sound Doctrine