GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

The Greatest Battle Ever Fought: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

Harley Southwell

01 Claustrophobia: Journey to the Heart of the Earth

02 Resisting Unto Blood: Tempted Beyond What We Are

03 Sleeping or Weeping: Which Disciple Will You Be?

04 Why the Son Had to Die

05 What to Do If You Betray Jesus: Can You Be Restored?

But I do have dual citizenship, and I've been here a number of times.

I've never been here before because it's just a bit too expensive to come all the way from the other side of the world at times.

And we have AYC in Australia, which is a quarter the size of this, but it's always a blessing as well.

So I'll just let you know where I'm coming from.

Currently I am pastoring in an area of central Queensland.

I don't know if you know your Australian geography very well, but you have here, basically, if you know the state of Queensland, you have the city of Brisbane probably down here in this far corner.

I am the pastor of the church at Emerald and the church at Longreach, which is this other star there.

Every 1 of these stars is places where I've done ministry, either like visitations or other things like that.

So it gives you a bit of a size of the district that I pastor.

So with Emerald, we have an established church there of about 40 attendees, and about 12 kids under the age of 12, so that's really nice.

Emerald is a mining town, And near Emerald is a place called the Gemfields, which has the largest gem deposits in the southern hemisphere of sapphires and rubies.

And so it's really an interesting place in the Gemfields.

People just go up there, they stake a claim, and then they start digging into the ground and just making their riches that way.

It's a bit of a wild west area, honestly 1 of the last mining claim areas in Australia.

Emerald is known for coal as well, a lot of large coal mines around and this coal gets loaded up onto trains and then onto ships and shipped off to places like China and India.

But you've got these huge, huge coal mines.

The first time we were driving through there, my wife Eliza was like, look at all those mountains.

I'm like, those aren't mountains, that's the dirt that they've moved off of the mines.

But we do have some mountains there as well and some beautiful national parks.

This is Blackdown Tablelands National Park, just a really beautiful place to go swimming and hiking and camping with some beautiful waterfalls and swimming pools there as well.

The other thing that Emerald is known for is cattle.

A lot of beef gets exported out of that region as well.

And Then you have our other church, which is out at Longreach.

Now, Longreach is called the gateway to the outback.

It's got the Stockman's Hall of Fame and other museums like that.

We have a church plant that's only 2 years old.

And it's very interesting planting a church in the outback, quite a different kind of experience.

Longreach is 4 and a half hours drive away from Emerald.

And so when we do go out to Longreach, we go out on the Friday and we stay and we come back on the Sunday and we visit with the folks out there.

We have about 7 attending at the little church there and it's a real, but it's a real blessing.

And usually it's a big tourist stop through during the cooler months of the year.

And so we'll often have some tourists that'll join us on Sabbaths as well.

They'll just passing through and they're like, oh nice, there's an Adventist church in the area.

And of course we get to talking and we find out we know people because that's the way it is in the Adventist world.

Qantas, the Australian airline, was actually founded in Longreach back after the wars.

And so they have a large Qantas museum there as well and you can go and walk around inside a jumbo jet.

This area is known for road trains and when you're driving between these 2, between our 2 towns, sometimes we'll have to overtake these road trains.

Let me tell you, that is a stressful experience.

Usually you call them on the radio and say okay look, Is it all clear?

And they'll be like, yeah, you've got the all clear.

But sometimes they can have 123456 or so trailers behind those semi trucks.

And other times you'll have a policeman come along, and he'll tell you to pull off the road.

And you wait for a couple minutes, and then large dump truck components and parts will come rolling past on these oversized loads which you have to get off the road to let them pass.

So it's a really interesting area to do ministry.

We've been there for 2 years and it's been a real blessing to be there.

The day before we came to, before we started to come to GYC, we spent a couple of days in Wisconsin before coming here, but the day before we left, we actually got a call from another conference.

So we're actually going to be going down to Newcastle in the North New South Wales Conference and from there I will be, the main reason I'm going down there is to be further involved with the student literature evangelism work in Australia.

So some of you guys may have known of Youth Rush.

Youth Rush has been started in Australia for the last 4 years it's been going.

Of the 9 conferences we have in Australia, there's 2 more to come on board now, and they're going to be coming on board next year.

So that's very exciting, but they need someone who's going to help to coordinate that more, and so I'm moving down to that area.

So I'll be 1 day a week, I'll be at the South Pacific Division office helping to coordinate the student literature evangelism work across Australia and New Zealand, and we're hoping we can eventually get it into the islands as well, like Fiji and Papua New Guinea and places like that.

So it's really exciting work in that space and I'll also be the literature ministries coordinator for the North New South Wales Conference as well as pastoring a local church.

So I'll be wearing a lot of hats but very exciting to be able to be stepping into that role.

My wife and kids are in the back, so if you hear a little bit of noise, that's from them.

That's their first time in the States, and I got to introduce them to the area where my mom grew up in Wisconsin.

We had a white Christmas, which was really special.

And later my wife will be sharing some special music with us as well.

So let's bow our heads and we'll begin our first session for today.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your great love for us.

We are so excited to be here, to be starting this journey of looking through the experience of Jesus, the disciples, and just a multifaceted look at the Garden of Gethsemane experience.

What happened here, the greatest battle that was ever fought, a battle that decided our destinies, even before we were born.

And so Lord, we just pray that as we spend some time looking through the scriptures now, diving deep, that you will speak through me and that you will speak to each and every 1 of our hearts, that you will illuminate the scriptures that you have inspired to our minds, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, claustrophobia, this is the title of my first session, first session number 1, claustrophobia, journey to the heart of the earth.

Now before we begin today, we're gonna be just looking about what is a phobia.

It's a extreme or irrational fear or aversion to something.

It's a psychological, mental health kind of condition.

And 1 time I saw in a bookstore, they were selling the pop-up book of phobias.

You know, a pop-up book, you open it up and if you have arachnophobia, pop-up spiders.

Anyway, we're going to do something similar today, actually.

There's a lot of interesting phobias out there.

We're not doing this to mock anyone who might have these fears because it's mental health kind of stuff, but it's just interesting.

We're going to go through about 10 different phobias here.

So that is 1 that I hope, well I'm glad I don't have because we're on the 17th floor where we're staying, but it's a bit like that when we look out the window.

Anyone know what anthropophobia might be?

Series

The Greatest Battle Ever Fought: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

01 Claustrophobia: Journey to the Heart of the Earth

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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