GYC 2012 Acts: The Revolution Continues

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2012 Seminar: Unleashing the Power - A Practical Guide for Finishing God's Work

John Bradshaw

Answering the Call

This message was presented at the GYC 2012 conference in Seattle, Washington.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

As I look around, I see some dear friends and former colleagues.

I even believe Doug Johnson from the Upper Columbia Conference is here somewhere.

I was minding my own business when Doug Johnson upended my life.

I was on vacation visiting my dear mother on the other side of the world.

We were pastoring in Lexington, Kentucky, where Tim Peterson had pastored a short tower some years before us.

And my wife calls me and she says, I got it.

We just got a phone call from the Upper Columbia Conference and they want to know if you want to move out to the Upper Columbia Conference and pastor a church.

And she said, it's somewhere in the Walla Walla area.

3 months later, we were in the Walla Walla Valley at the Village Church in College Place, Washington, and it was wonderful.

So it may not have been as long as I'd have liked, but I'm very grateful for the opportunity I've worked under such fine leadership at the Upper Columbia Conference.

Anyhow, that having been said, what time do we finish?

You know, I'm well known for finishing really early.

So, so I'm not gonna muck around with a lot of preliminaries at the beginning here.

We're going to talk about over these next 3, today and then twice tomorrow, 3 simple steps for finishing God's work.

I don't think that what I'm going to tell you...

This is a great way to advertise your seminar, I guess.

I don't think that what I'm going to tell you is especially revolutionary.

When I would arrive in congregations, I would say to them, I would say to my congreg- when I passed the churches, I would say, don't expect me to say anything that you don't know already.

I would tell my congregations that if I were to tell my congregation anything new, then there was clearly something wrong, either with them or me.

I'm committed to telling the old, old story.

Seventh-day Adventist preachers have it easy Because all we got to do is tell people what they already know.

It's simple and when we do that, good things happen as a matter of fact.

But I want to encourage you because I believe There are 3 very simple steps to finishing God's work, and we'll look at 1 of them today.

Keep in mind that this is a six-part seminar, and so we can't tell you everything now.

So if it seems to be pedestrian, then you just have to be patient.

If we finish and you say, well I thought he might have covered this, don't worry I will, but we'll cover that next.

You know, I wonder if the seminars are like the church service here.

There's something that fascinates me about these big gatherings.

When you go into an auditorium like the 1 we were just in, what do so many people have to do during church that they have to get up and wander around?

Are the bathrooms that busy or are people just busy?

There had to be 500 people walking around aimlessly.

So if you need to do that, I will call you out.

It happens at all these large gatherings, and maybe it's just the bathroom, I don't know.

Have you ever felt sorry for business people before?

Don't you feel sorry for the subway guy there on the fourth floor?

And he's gotta report to his manager tomorrow and tell him, I sold like nothing.

There were 7, 000 people in, I didn't even sell a 6-inch sub.

It was open and they just realized they were flogging a dead horse.

Our Father in heaven, as we share today, we thank you for your presence with us.

We are grateful to be here, but we're not, at least I hope and pray we're not here just to go through the motions.

Lord, we have talked about finishing the work for so long.

We've talked about going home for so long, and yet we've been going to camp meetings and church schools, and we've been going to church and ASI and GYC for some years now, and We're still here.

We understand there's a lot at play, but I am praying Lord please that you would help us to be intentional about doing something and being someone that will add up to the finishing of the work.

As Pastor Howard and I share, I just pray that you would do something that's bigger and beyond ourselves.

Do a work, speak to us through your spirit, touch our hearts.

Those of us speaking, touch our lips and our minds.

Please, we pray, when we go, I pray that we will be able to say it was profitable.

If the title for this seminar sounds simplistic, at least these first 3 presentations, that's because it is.

Unleashing the Power, and what I'm talking about is 3 simple steps for the finishing of God's work.

Interestingly, As you look at the Bible, there is little in the Bible that is complex.

Now I know what you're saying, you're going to say, well I don't know what the 7 thunders are.

That's alright, John didn't know either, didn't really understand them, you're not meant to know.

So that's not complex, it's just not revealed.

You know it's fascinating, the 7 seals, it's all important, but not even Ellen White wrote much about the 7 seals.

What we read about in the Bible is simple.

Granted, Zechariah can bend your mind a little bit, Ezekiel is fascinating, but when you look at the great overarching themes of the Bible, they're not mind-bending.

The only reason it's complex in any way is because we make it complex.

There was a book written a few years ago by a dear fellow where he compared 5 different versions of the Seventh-day Adventist gospel.

See we've made it complex and I believe we've made it unnecessarily complex.

Somebody was having a little audience with Paul 1 night, Paul and Silas, and they said, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

If you look at the subject of sin, pretty simple.

That's easy, although I hear in certain places a plethora of definitions for sin.

Stick with the Word of God and what some make complicated suddenly is not complicated.

Discovering the Power

Yesterday, by way of introduction, we talked about the concept of making ourselves available to the leading of God, to yielding to God's leading.

You can talk about it until you are blue in the face, but until you say, okay, I'm in, nothing much is going to happen in terms of the work of God, at least nothing much that you are involved in.

It's just always going to be other people doing something, other people doing something, other people doing something.

But it's crucial that we recognize that God is calling all of us, each 1 of us.

That's me, that's you, that's old, that's young, that's able-bodied, that's infirmed.

No matter your condition, whoever you are, God is calling you somehow and some way to be on the front lines of evangelism and soul winning.

When I was 5 years old, I played on my first football team.

Now, I need to clarify, I was raised in New Zealand, so this wasn't this American-style sissy football where they have all pads on and helmets on their heads and all of that.

This is what we would call is like football, but for real men.

And I started playing when I was 5 years old.

And I probably stopped playing when I was about 20, 22, or 21, or 22 years old.

And That was only because I was too broken to carry on playing.

We played on Saturdays And I remember missing 1 Saturday in 17 years.

I didn't want to be standing on the sideline.

As a matter of fact, I was sitting in the car with my mother and I was 7 years old.

The reason I wasn't playing is because I had pneumonia and had been hospitalized with pneumonia.

I don't know why my mother thought that that was too big an issue for me to get out there on the field and play, but she did.

Broke my nose, oh, hang on, I broke my wrist.

It was hard to play with a cast on my wrist, so I guess I missed a week or something like that then.

But to not be out on the field and to be standing on the sidelines is a draining experience.

When it comes to soul winning and evangelism and witnessing in God's work, you do not want to be on the sidelines.

And what I learned too playing football, not that for some reason it ever happened to me, But if you don't pull your weight, if you're not putting all you are and all you have into doing the work that God has called you to do, now I'm talking about in a sporting sense, the coach will find someone else.

And what I learned playing in teams for 17 or 18 years in a row, however many it was, there's always someone else.

And there's always someone else who will do your job.

I played, I was, this is getting lost a little bit here, but I played with some outstanding athletes.

He was a, really, he was a world-class athlete.

And now, when we were kids, it was evident that he was outstanding.

And 1 year, he said to us, you know, I don't think I'm going to play next year.

And in New Zealand, when I was a child, playing soccer was really an admission of your lack of manhood.

And you know, we were kids, we didn't figure out till it was a bit late that that's what he was after.

So he stayed and got to the end of the next season and he said, I think I'm gonna leave and go and play soccer next year.

And we all looked at each other and looked at him and said, have fun.

The single best athlete I've ever played with.

And I haven't even witnessed many who were as good an athlete as this guy.

He's 45 years old now and doing triathlons.

He's still a, he's still a, he's still a, he still makes me sick.

And we said to him, hey, good luck, have fun out there.

And we gulped and said, well, it's time to get on with the show without him.

The point is you don't want to be on the sideline.

And if you think the work of God is so fragile that it cannot survive your absence.

Because Jesus said, even the rocks will cry out if that's what he needs to use to preach.

So there's a place for you in the work of God.

You don't even want to be on the outside.

But if we start to drop our guard and fail in intensity, there's somebody else that God can use to take our place.

We talked yesterday about the concept of yielding.

Our Father in heaven, we thank you that we can be here today.

And Lord, as we discuss today, I pray that you would set a fire burning in us that would blaze brightly, not just now, but forever.

We want to be an integral part of serving you.

Now I will tell you, as we told you yesterday, yesterday and today, at least these 2 morning sessions, I'm talking a little more big picture and conceptual.

What you really want to hear is Pastor Jim Howard, when he starts to talk about the nuts and bolts and the tools and the things that you can put in your toolkit and your work belt and in your armory.

What he's going to be sharing is absolutely vital and I would appeal to you not to miss it.

There are many other things, I've got to tell you this, there are many other seminars here that are worth hearing.

But none of them will be as useful to you in a practical, soul-winning sense as what you hear Pastor Jim Howard talk about in parts 4, 5, and 6 of this seminar.

So whatever you do, you just don't want to miss it.

He's going to be talking to you about the tools you can use, how to turn your church congregation into a soul-winning center, how you can not just talk about plans but make them happen.

And he talked about that a little bit yesterday, but what he's going to be discussing is absolutely vital.

And so recently, it was a year or so ago, a 29-year-old man from New Jersey decided that he would attend a wilderness survival training course.

It was held in the state of Utah in the month of July.

And I'll tell you the name of the company that ran it, but that might be a little bit unfair under the circumstances.

You see, you get these guys who never played rugby in their life and now they need to prove to themselves that they're men.

Some of us, we got that figured out long ago.

But this guy was 29 years old, I think he had an office job, And you know, you can just die on the vine.

And he said himself, no, I've got to go and push myself to the limits, and get out there in the outdoors, and defeat it, and not be defeated by it.

And so he and a number of others went to the school in Utah.

The people who ran the program, it was their intention to push people to the limit.

And they said to them, no food today, no water today, other than what you can find out there in the desert.

I don't know if you've been in too many deserts in Utah in July, but there's not typically a whole lot of water out there.

Temperatures that day got up above 100 degrees.

Beyond Good Intentions

I want to share just a little resource with you that I think you might be able to use.

If you are not familiar with this, something that I am doing at It Is Written is a one-minute daily devotional.

And there are some days we go nuts and go as long as 2 minutes.

The reason I want to tell you about this is this.

But secondly and more importantly is the multiplication effect.

We were in a bank the other day, my wife and I, and we met a fellow in the bank, and Melissa gave him this little business card size thing talking about every word that's the name of our devotional and where people can find it.

We didn't know if this guy was a Christian or an atheist or a believer or an unbeliever or what.

But Melissa just thought that this would be good to encourage him.

We were back in that bank a week later, and when we were done talking to whoever we were talking to, he pulled us aside and said, ''Look, I just want to tell you how thankful I am for that 1 minute daily devotional.

And the first 1 that he watched was 1 that we did about holding a grudge or not holding a grudge.

I've been having real challenges in that area and God really spoke to me and I've kept watching it and it's been such a blessing.

He said this, I thought it was interesting, he said, it's improving me.

So whatever it is, he feels like he's being blessed and it's not that we want to leave him there, but of course, hopefully, he'll transition over to maybe the It Is Written website or an It Is Written TV program, or perhaps we can offer him something else when we next see him, or this is the beginning of what God has...you know what I'm saying?

So, I would encourage you to go to our website and subscribe to receive it.

It doesn't put you on a 100 mailing lists, you're only on that 1.

Then what we discover is that people are putting it on Facebook because for 1 it's on our Facebook page.

If you're not following us on Facebook, do that because then there's stuff that you'll see there.

A guy on Friday night told me, he said, there's someone I had Bible studies with 35 years ago.

And pretty well fallen out of touch with him, other than they're a Facebook friend.

He said, I've been reposting every word every day.

And these people that I studied with 35 years ago now want to study the Bible with me again 35 years later.

And people are saying, we're hearing from unbelievers, non-Christians who are saying, hey, this is answering questions I've had.

It's just a minute long, it's not offensive, we don't talk about the mark of the beast, it's a little risky to do that in 1 minute.

Don't go around Identifying the Antichrist.

I really only have about 53 seconds to speak because of the intro and the outro.

I could just imagine saying, in the Bible it talks about the Antichrist and the Antichrist is, boom, have a nice day.

We try to make it so that it's not so general, it's not meaningful.

I think it's meaningful, but this is just a little tool that you can have.

Because if something comes along, we had someone say to me at 1 of our Ed is Written partnership events, can you do something on the subject of gratitude?

Because I've got this brother who's no longer going to church but he's really big on gratitude and if I could tell him it's about gratitude he'll watch it.

Well we've just done 1 on gratitude so we did a couple more and so this guy's relentlessly sending these off to his backslidden brother saying why don't you watch this.

It's a tool you know and maybe you can use that as a witnessing tool.

Heavenly Father, as we talk about 3 simple steps for finishing the work, we've talked about yielding, we've talked about receiving the Holy spirit, a gift that you are willing to give.

And now Lord, I pray that as we talk about moving beyond talking about it, as we start to transition into the action phase, that you'd help us to be people of action.

I thank you that here in this room there are plenty of people, their life is characterized by soul winning, I'm thankful.

But if any 1 of us here are not living a life characterized by soul winning, Lord would you please press us into service, use us as we are.

Or if you need to change us, change us and use us then.

But Father, if all of us could do something for you, I believe something great is going to happen.

Some of you have heard me say this in another forum, so I apologize for the repeat, but I think the illustration is fitting.

There are some people who look at their children as tax deductions.

Instead, I look at my children as sermon illustrations.

And I always clear it with my kids if I'm going to talk about them, so normally it's okay that I do.

I've learned that children are great followers.

Earlier this year, I had a very good fortune of being able to visit my home country of New Zealand.

As wonderful to have your mom when she's 85 or still have your mom.

1 of the neat things about going home with your kids is you get to do all the things you used to do when you were a kid, but now it's because you want your children to experience it.

The truth is you just want to do it again.

Not far from my hometown, there's swimming pools, it's hot pools, thermal pools.

There's a lot of thermal activity in New Zealand, and so thermal swimming pools are everywhere.

I grew up going out to the swimming pool.

Long story short, I noticed my daughter was doing some little thing where she was laying on the edge of the pool and falling into the water, just a kid thing.

There was a steel bar that ran along the edge of the pool from 1 end to the other and she was holding on to that and tipping in and just being a kid.

Well, just a moment later, my son pops up out of the water, right next to my wife and I, I guess, and Shannon.

And I notice He's got a gash in his chin.

Now she was holding on to this bar and falling into the water, but she had the presence of mind to actually let go of the bar when she fell into the water and Jacob not knowing quite what she was doing went into the water but held on to the bar and so flipped him right around and bang his chin went into the concrete wall of the swimming pool I'm just thanking God it wasn't his teeth or something else And he ended up with a gash on his chin.

And his mother said, that'll need to be stitched.

You just need these butterfly steristrips.

It's funny how husbands and wives are different.

I don't know if it's the same in every household or not.

And I say, he'll be fine, his mother says.

Series

GYC 2012 Seminar: Unleashing the Power - A Practical Guide for Finishing God's Work

Tools for Making Disciples

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