GYC Conference 2023: But If Not

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Making Sons of Hell? The Don’ts and Do’s of Soul Winning

Aron Crews

Soul Winning for Satan? Why Our Picture of God Matters

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity to be at GYC this year.

Lord, Satan is not happy that people are here right now to learn more about you, not just in this room, but in all the presentations all this weekend long.

And so, Lord, we ask for your angels to come and your Holy Spirit.

We invite him into this place, into our hearts more specifically, to fend off the forces of darkness And to allow us an opportunity to get a glimpse of your love and to respond to that love, we pray in Jesus' name.

Okay, as was slightly mentioned earlier, the screen is a little bit tinted yellow.

We don't know why, so I do value my presentation slides and so it's kind of annoying to me, but you probably would have known unless I even pointed it out to you.

Making Sons of Hell, the Don'ts and Do's of soul wedding.

The presentation title is based upon a verse that we find in Matthew chapter 23 and verse 15 where Jesus speaking to the scribes and Pharisees, the whole chapter, he's basically blasting them.

Pointing out in love, pointing out in love critical mistakes and errors that the Pharisees and the scribes of his day were doing and practicing.

And he says to them in verse 15, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel land and sea.

In other words, you put in serious effort.

You get a ship and you go far, you get a camel and a donkey, you travel far, you go land and sea to win 1 proselyte.

You put in a lot of effort to win 1 convert, right?

We should put in effort to win souls for Jesus.

But then he says, and when he is won, when he is converted to the faith, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourself.

If you were here last night, you heard me mention, we often talk about soul winning, and we should do it, we should do it, we should do it, but we don't often talk about the danger of soul winning for Satan.

You are on the way, the trajectory for you is damnation.

You won someone and made them twice as fit for hell as you yourself are.

If we read 2 verses earlier, Jesus basically a parallel saying here, he says, For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men.

For you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.

You yourselves are sons of hell, And you are now not allowing others to go in.

But not only are you not allowing, but you are actually preparing them.

You're like spreading this virus that's making them even worse condition than you yourself are.

And then he says in verse 16, woe to you, and what does he call them?

Friends, if you are ever guiding someone, I hope that you are not wearing a blindfold.

I hope if if someone is leading after you, you know where you're going so that you can lead them appropriately.

But Jesus is saying, you're blind guides.

We read in a commentary written by Douglas O'Donnell and he says, commenting on these verses, he says, you see the scribes and Pharisees are not simply wrong about their beliefs and their teachings, et cetera, et cetera, but they are contagiously wrong.

They are like the English doctors during the early phase of the bubonic plague who told the sick to leave London for fresh air of the countryside and who, in doing so, spread the disease throughout the nation.

In Hosea 4, verse 6, the Lord says, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Don't underestimate, He says, the importance of right knowledge.

The Pharisees were misinformed about God and His plan, etc.

And don't underestimate the danger of uninformed enthusiasm.

We come to GYC because we're fired up about Jesus and that is awesome, but we need to make sure that our zeal for Christ has knowledge.

If we run into the mission field without first knowing the right mission or the true Jesus, we are in danger of making converts fit for hell rather than fit for heaven.

He goes on, how zealous are Muslim jihadists?

Religious zeal is not an indication necessarily of truth.

Woe to us if we have zeal without knowledge.

Woe also to us if we have knowledge without zeal.

Light that is full of the right knowledge of God and heat that is full of high devotion for God.

This is why I believe that when we get to the book of James, James says in chapter 3 verse 1, he says, not many of you should become teachers.

I thought we're supposed to be doing what Jesus says.

Go, therefore, make disciples, teaching them to observe all the things that I've commanded you, right?

We're supposed to be teachers of the gospel, but James here says, whoa, be careful, be careful if you're a teacher.

For you know that we who teach will be judged with what?

The Pharisees were teachers, but they were misinformed teachers.

They had many things right, but there was something in there that they were distorting the teachings of Scripture that were preparing people more for hell than heaven.

And those who are teaching these things are going to be held at a higher level of accountability.

What's interesting, he goes on right after this in verse 2 and onward, he begins to describe the tongue.

He begins to describe the words that we're speaking, right?

The things that we're teaching, the words that are coming out of our mouth.

And then he comes down to verse 6 and he says, And the tongue is A fire, a world of iniquity.

The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of nature and it is set on fire by what?

Gehenna, the same word that Jesus used back in Matthew 23 verse 15.

And here James says we need to be careful the way that we use our tongue, the way that we use our words, just as a small thing, a tongue is relatively small part of your body, but it has power to steer the whole ship to control so many things.

And so that is the introduction to the whole series.

Making Sons of Hell, The Don'ts and Do's of soul winning.

Now here's an overview of the 5 presentations that we're going to be getting into.

Soul winning for Satan, why our picture of God matters is what we're going to be covering in this first session.

Then the second session immediately following is entitled demonic doctrines and how not to teach them.

And then later this afternoon, do you even like people?

When I came up with that title, every time I read it I just laughed.

Then the fourth 1, farming, fishing, and fighting for souls.

This is where we're going to really look at God's master plan of evangelism and look at the strategy he wants us to take for soul winning.

And then session number 5, which is going to be the only soul session tomorrow, we're going to be looking at some potential objections to some things and tackling a few of my personal favorite difficult Bible passages when it comes to sharing truth with people.

So let's now go on to soul, whoa, Yeah, soul winning for Satan.

I'm going to ask you guys a question that I've heard before and I think it's a really good question.

By a showing of hands, who thinks that it is good news that there is a God?

Raise your hand if you think it's good news that there is a God.

Demonic Doctrines and How Not to Teach Them

All right, well let's have a word of prayer and then we'll go ahead and get started.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity to study this topic with you, understanding the truth about soul winning, the dangers of soul winning for Satan, how we can win for you and not for Satan.

So help us now, guide us in this study, in this presentation.

This presentation is entitled, the series is entitled, Making Sons of Hell, the Don'ts and Do's of Soul Winning.

And it's based upon the verse that we read in Matthew 23 verse 15 where Jesus says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel land and sea to win 1 proselyte, that is 1 convert for the faith.

And when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

We often talk about the importance of soul winning for Christ, but what we don't usually talk about is the danger of soul winning for Satan.

And so here Jesus is addressing that very issue.

2 verses earlier Jesus said, you Pharisees and scribes shut up heaven.

You shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." And he calls them blind guides, blind guides.

And soul winning for Satan is what we covered in the last hour.

So now I'm going to do a quick recap of that, which this second session is going to build on.

So we began with the question, is it good news that there is a God?

And if you are here, what was the correct answer?

It depends on what kind of God we're talking about.

So not everyone has the same, let alone the correct, picture of God, right?

And this is what the war in heaven is all about.

The Bible claims that God is love, meaning that God is unselfish.

Everything he does is for your and my benefit and for the uplifting of the holiness and happiness of the universe.

But Satan presents an alternative suggestion, suggesting that God is not love.

And this war that broke out in heaven revolves around the character and the conduct and the government of God in heaven.

We took a look at the 3 titles of this dragon who made war against God in heaven, the serpent of old, the devil, and Satan.

We discovered that serpent of old points us to Genesis 3.

Well, before we went there, we read this statement from The Great Controversy where Ellen White writes that it is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God.

He thinks about ways he can skew your thinking about God.

Satan causes humans to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard him with fear and hate rather than with love.

We took a look at what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11, verses 3 and 4.

He explained what the original temptation was all about in the Garden of Eden.

He says, "...I fear lest somehow as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness that your minds may be corrupted etc.

"...another Jesus whom we have not preached you may well put up with it.

So what we studied and saw in the last hour was that in Genesis chapter 3 Satan presented an alternative picture of Jesus, another Jesus, and he misrepresented God's character as being 1 who is unnecessarily restrictive, someone who cannot be trusted, aka a liar, and said and claimed that God is selfish, keeping something from humans that would otherwise be for their best interest to have.

This is how Satan introduced another Jesus by misrepresenting the character of God.

Then we saw that a false picture of God believed inevitably results in rebellion.

If you believe that I'm a liar, that I don't take showers, and I stink, and I'm just a bad guy, would you want to be my friend?

If you think someone's a liar and selfish, no, you don't want to be their friend, right?

And so if we believe false pictures about who God is, number 1, we don't want to be around him, but if we do believe those lies, well, that's bad.

GYC didn't bring me water, but my mom did.

Sorry, it's my first sip of water in over an hour of talking.

So if we hold on to this false view of God and then we share with other people this false view of God, we're making sons of hell.

We're evangelists for Satan rather than for God.

And so how does God respond to these accusations that he is a liar, that he's selfish, that he's not trustworthy?

He responds not by recriminating, not by re-accusing Satan and you know all of these things and you know attacking Satan, but rather by simply demonstrating His goodness.

It's the goodness of God that leads us to repentance.

It's Jesus on the cross displaying the character and love of God that draws us, like a bug to a light but in a good way, you know?

We don't need to read the dictionary for a definition of love.

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us.

So we ended with these final quotes in the book Education.

Unselfishness, the principle of God's kingdom, is the principle that Satan hates.

From the beginning of the great controversy, he has endeavored to prove God's principles of action to be selfish.

And he deals in the same way with all who serve God.

To disprove Satan's claims is the work of Christ and of all who bear His name.

It was to give in His own life an illustration of unselfishness that Jesus came in the form of humanity and all who accept this principle are to be workers together with Him in demonstrating it in practical life." We shared last presentation that if you're caught in a war, you need to know who the enemy is.

We need to understand what Satan's strategy is to misrepresent God, how God responds to those accusations by demonstrating his love and goodness, etc.

And this will equip us to not be self-deceived into accidentally being evangelists for Satan holding on to false views of God, but rather believing the truth about God and being true missionaries for his kingdom of righteousness.

Our second presentation is entitled Demonic Doctrines and How Not to Teach Them.

And the first and second presentation are really, they go together more closely than any of the others.

1 Timothy chapter 4, verse 1, Paul writes to his understudy Timothy, he says, Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and what?

Demonic doctrines and how not to believe them.

He says the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, expressly says, right?

So somewhere in Scripture or in his own interaction with God, the Spirit revealed to Paul, I believe through Scripture probably and individually as well, that in the latter times, Notice what it says, the latter times some will depart from the faith.

It doesn't say depart from the church, it says depart from the faith.

Depart from the church, but not necessarily the faith.

Bringing in with them these false demonic doctrines.

Do You Even Like People? Why Having the Heart of God Matters

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity to gather together to study more about soul winning, the don'ts and do's of it.

And now as we learn about your heart and how we can have your heart, We ask that you fill us with your spirit and guide us in our time together.

So this is the third presentation of the series entitled, Making Sons of Hell, the Don'ts and Do's of Soul Winning.

And that title is based upon the verse that Jesus shared, the verse where Jesus shares in Matthew 23, verse 15, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel land and sea to win 1 proselyte, that is convert, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

And so what we covered in the first 2 presentations was basically taking a look at Satan's master plan of evangelism.

Satan's ultimate strategy is to misrepresent the character of God.

God is love, the Bible claims, we believe, but Satan claims that God is selfish, that God is a liar, that God cannot be trusted.

And that's what he began to preach in heaven in this war over this idea, this controversy over who is God, what is he really like began in heaven.

Then it came down to earth in the Garden of Eden.

We dissected Genesis chapter 3 and we saw that before Eve ever physically sinned by taking and eating of the fruit, she downloaded a false picture of who God was, right?

And so our journey is to make sure as soul winners that we are representing Christ correctly.

And so we need to see about his character of love.

Then we saw in his second, our second presentation, which was entitled, demonic doctrines and how not to believe them.

And that was an overview of how basically Satan infiltrated the Christian church.

During the Dark Ages, after Christ formed the church, Satan infiltrated the church and began to bring in with him different demonic doctrines.

And so those different doctrines have perverted the character of God.

And so our calling as Seventh-day Adventists, as Christians in large, but specifically as Seventh-day Adventists, is that we are to bring people back to the Bible and understanding who the Antichrist is, right?

The apostate Christian Church helps to identify some of those false doctrines which then we can replace with the true biblical doctrines.

And the most significant, in my opinion, doctrine that distorts and perverts the character of God is the false teaching about hell.

This is just a very sad, very sadistic doctrine.

And it's 1 of the very best doctrines to use to actually share with people, both who are atheists, who have this false belief, and in 1 step.

When someone's coming to Christ, they're usually taking steps like this.

When you get the belief about hell cleared up, it's like this.

It's like taking a very large step forward, both in the minds of atheists and in Christians who believe this doctrine.

So that's what we covered in the first 2 presentations.

And oh yeah, I should have had that up, right?

So winning for Satan, why our picture of God matters.

Number 2, demonic doctrines and how not to teach them.

And now we're going on into our third presentation, do you even like people?

So let's go to our first verse and begin the presentation slash Bible study.

We read in 1 John 4 in verse 20, it says, if someone says, I love God, do you love God?

Okay, we have a bunch of God lovers here.

Okay, you who love God, if you say, I love God, but hate your brother, you are a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?

In this commandment we have from him that he who loves God must love his brother also.

Well, according to this verse, if you don't love people, aka also like people, Well, there's something that may be a little off.

Jesus says, by this all will know that you are my disciples.

If, If, that's a big if, you have love for 1 another.

By the way, for years I've been trying to get GYC to use this verse as their theme verse for a conference.

Just imagine it, Here's the theme for next year's GYC.

You can totally see that on a t-shirt, can't you?

Talk about love, you can talk about disciples.

But here Jesus is saying, hey, how is the world going to know that you are my disciples, that you represent me, if you love people?

We read from the pen of Ellen White in Ministry of Healing where she writes the strongest argument.

You can't get any stronger than the strongest.

The strongest argument in favor of the Gospel is a loving and lovable Christian.

You thought it was memorizing the 2300 day prophecy, right?

You may have thought it was knowing this or knowing that, but here she says the most powerful argument in favor of Christianity, of the Gospel, is just simply being loving.

Is it easy for people to love you or when they get close they get poked, right?

I mean we just read these 2 Bible verses and 1 statement from Ellen White basically that says if you don't love people it's not good news, right?

And as we've learned in our first 2 presentations, the whole point and purpose of soul winning is to represent the character of God correctly.

And so if you're not like Christ in his character by being loving and lovable, well then, forget all the other methods of soul winning, like how to get a Bible study and how to do this.

And if we don't start with square 1, The foundation, we need to be loving people.

We're not going to get very far in any kind of soul winning success.

Let's look into a little bit further because I keep saying love love love What is love really mean in?

1st Corinthians chapter 13 we read about love Paul writes Well, actually he writes more so what love is not because the church in Corinth Corinth was having a problem They weren't bearing being very loving and so Paul says hey you're doing this and that's not love and you're doing this and that's not love, and you're doing this and that's not love.

If God is love, as we read these passages, we're gonna learn something about who God is.

Love and you can substitute, if God is love, you can substitute love for God.