iShare 2012

<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>

Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

iShare 2012 Seminar: Shift: Discipleship 101

Heidi Carpenter

Shift Discipleship, Part 2

Okay, let's begin with a word of prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to be here as we begin.

I'm so glad you guys are here for our second segment.

How many of you stayed or were here for David's first segment?

Let's begin with a word of prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to guide in this session as well.

Lord, we want to thank you and praise you for being a God who is so faithful to us and for showing us such a beautiful picture of your character.

Father, I pray that you would guide us in this next session, that we would be drawn closer to you and that we would be more motivated to serve you out of love and more motivated to be soul winners after your own heart.

Father, we thank you and we pray all these things in Jesus' name.

For those of you who were here before, tell me what you learned.

Can I have 1 thing that stuck out to you out of the last session?

Make friends with people who will naturally be motivated to reach out to them.

Okay, making natural friends, it gives you a natural motivation to be friendly with them.

Okay, what's another thing that you learned out of the last segment?

I appreciated that Phillip and Nathaniel had a special place that they would pray together, and so that's how he knew where to find them.

I think that's something that we lack, that when we're mentoring, we need special places for us.

Yeah, there was that personal connection, and he knew exactly where to go, he knew who he was going to, And I'm sure we all have people like that in our lives.

People who we know we're reaching out to, people, you know, those top 10 that you're just praying for with all of your heart.

I think that 1 of the biggest focuses, if I'm correct, David, was the focus of ministering to those that we love.

It's very easy to minister to those that we love.

It's not super hard mentally, because you already have that love in your heart for them.

And the question that we're going to deal with today is, how do we have this same love for strangers?

Because that could be a little bit harder, honestly.

It's a little bit harder to possibly go up to them and feel completely natural from the get go.

And yet when we view them as those that Jesus died for, as those that Jesus loves, there is not a stranger in the world.

There's literally not a stranger in the world.

I've been reading through Matthew for my devotions here recently, and just finished the book.

It was such a blessing to read through Matthew.

And if you'll turn with me in your Bibles to Matthew, we'll be looking at the best example of ministering to strangers, Jesus Christ himself.

He ministered to people who he had never met before, and yet, yes, he ministered to people that he knew their very thoughts.

I honestly, I can't get over the love and compassion that Jesus had for people when he was here on earth.

Whenever I read Matthew, I am blown away once again by his attitude towards humanity.

It's something that I don't naturally have.

Naturally, when I get tired, I don't want anyone around me.

You just want to go home and sleep, and you don't want to see anyone.

But Jesus had a totally different personality, motivation in his service.

And I think of that actually, there's a story I'll share with you before we get into reading some verses in Matthew.

We'll be starting by the way in Matthew chapter 4, so if you want to keep it open to Matthew chapter 4.

I was in Nicaragua and I was doing some evangelism there.

Went down, How many of you have heard of Share Him?

You're able to go into another country and preach all through the doctrines and share Jesus with them.

I was touched by the genuine love that I received in those other countries, though.

I have not felt that love anywhere else in the world.

I can guarantee it, except for with my closest, closest friends.

Those are the ones that have shown me that kind of love.

But when I came to Nicaragua, I found that the person who drove me to the meetings back and forth every night, he'd pick me up from my hotel and then he would take me in to the place where I was supposed to preach.

He took me back and forth every night and I found out halfway through that he had given up his job to become a tax driver so that he could have a vehicle to take me back and forth.

Right before we come, he's like, I'll surrender my job, no worries.

So he would drive during the day to earn enough money to pay for gas to use the vehicle that he was renting to take me to the meetings.

Another group of ladies in the church, they would always put my sermon title up on the wall.

And they didn't, you know, anyone who's a teacher, you know those little pop-out letters that you can paste up on bulletin boards and stuff, they didn't have little pop-out letters.

They cut them by hand every night for whatever we were doing, and they would do them in different colors every night.

But they were spending all of their time doing that.

When I was preaching there for church on Sabbath, like halfway through the meetings, they told everyone to separate into groups, and they said it in Spanish, so I didn't know what was going on.

But I kept hearing my name popping out of all these groups, and I'm like, what are you guys doing?

They're like, we're taking every 30 minutes today and we're praying for you and for the meetings.

You know, just such dedication, such love, and I started to see the difference between their self-sacrificing genuine love and my heart.

And I see I've seen that in Jesus' life as well.

Look at Matthew chapter 4, and we're looking at verse 18.

You know the beginning of Jesus' ministry?

He was calling the disciples, and he said in verse 19, follow me and I will make you fishers of men.

He's having disciples join him and if you go all the way through 23 through 25 of chapter 4 of Matthew, it says Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people, and his whole existence was to bless humanity.

Back to Menu

Series

iShare 2012 Seminar: Shift: Discipleship 101

Shift Discipleship, Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Shift Discipleship, Part 2

37m

Sound Doctrine