ASI Southern Union 2015: Prepared to Stand

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ASI Southern Union

Personal Evangelism

Scott Moore

Watching and Observing

We are here to talk about how to share the Word of God more effectively.

And the title Watch and Observe is probably a little misleading because it really doesn't encapsulate what we are going to cover.

You know, they ask you for titles like a month or so in advance, and you give them the titles, and then you pray that your message goes somewhat with it.

So what we are going to do is, first of all, we are gonna look at 4 reasons that we give Bible studies, and then I'm going to go through 10 points that we will remember, we will want to keep in mind as we give Bible studies.

I have a friend, I'm into this mentoring thing.

And so I have a friend, his name is Bob Stevens.

Bob Stevens moved into the Lady Lake, Florida, probably, I don't know, it's been probably about 4 years ago now.

And he was not, he and his wife were not attending church on any regular basis.

And then he came to church, he said he liked the sermon, and then I asked him, I said, Bob, would you like to go on a Bible study with me?

And he said, sure, I'll go on a Bible study with you.

And that was like a year ago that we started doing this.

Now, when I go out of town, guess who does the Bible studies?

Guess we had these literature evangelists come through Lady Lake over the Christmas holiday and when they left they left us this stack of people to follow up on literature evangelism leads And so my secretary is calling these people, setting up appointments, and guess who is now giving a Bible study to a man that I personally have never met?

All because someone bothered to take time to be with Bob and to show him how to do it.

You know, my ministry initially was just train the masses, but sometimes, and you know, we need to train the masses, and at the same time we need to take 1 to 3 people, just like Jesus did, right?

And we need to mentor those people in ministry.

Jesus, of course, handled ultimately 12, but how many did he have in his inner circle?

So we're simply going to look at the fourfold purpose of giving a Bible study.

We're gonna look at these verses that are on the screen, and that is going to help us know what our first purpose for giving a Bible study is.

Before we read these, I want to know, tell me, anyone in here, tell me, what is the reason we give a Bible study on the 2300 day prophecy?

This is a trick question and and if you get it wrong I'm gonna tell you you got it wrong, but I'll be gentle about it.

Why do we give a Bible study on the 2300 day prophecy?

Okay, so the prophetic aspect of we can prove that this is valid, all right, I like that.

The 23, you say second coming, somebody else said what?

If you were going to boil the 2300 day prophecy down to a name, whose name would you give it?

Because the 2300 day prophecy is about Jesus Christ in the sanctuary, cleansing the heavenly sanctuary, And did you know that he has an earthly temple today?

So he's in that sanctuary, cleansing his sanctuary down here.

I used to teach a 2300 day prophecy, 457 BC.

Get your life right or you're going to the bad place.

For me now, the 2300 day prophecy is all about Jesus Christ.

What is the purpose of teaching someone about the seventh day Sabbath?

Answer, please, give me some indication here.

Why are we teaching people about the Sabbath truth?

Because that's our connection with our Lord and Savior.

How do we communicate that in a Bible study about the Sabbath?

Well, can't I fellowship with him on 7 days of the week?

So, but Sabbath for you is on Saturday, Sabbath for me could be Friday.

As for me, suppose I'm the Protestant Christian that worships on the first day of the week.

For me, I've always had an incredible relationship with Jesus and I've never worshiped on the seventh day of the week.

Okay, so for me, as a Protestant individual that has always had an incredible relationship with Jesus who goes to church on the first day of the week, how are you going to help me transfer from first day to seventh day worship?

Okay, so can you show me that bonding element in scripture?

By the way, let me just say something here.

Many of us are from a generation, and I'm including myself in that, by the way, I don't know if you do this, but I started quite recently, every 30 minutes my watch starts beeping except for when I'm up front preaching while we're on air.

And that reminds me that I need to talk to God.

So I don't know if you wanna start doing that, but the watch goes off, I reset it for another 30 minutes, and I just say, talk to God about something and then I go on and I'm finding that I get to pray for a lot more people that way throughout the day.

Anyway, let's go back to this, why are we presenting the Sabbath topic to individuals that have always had an incredible relationship with Jesus?

We are from a generation where if you prove this to me from Scripture, then I am going to follow it.

You prove it to me and then I will follow it.

We are no longer in that type of an atmosphere when it comes to sharing biblical truth.

We are in an atmosphere where, yes, I want to see it in the Bible, but how is that going to give me a different relationship with my God?

That is what, and you work with young people all the time.

My understanding is that is what young people want.

Young people want to experience that relationship with God.

This is why they will move from a seventh day church to a first day church.

Because in that first day church, they are finding an experience.

It's a real touchy, feely, relational experience with God.

So I'm gonna share with you how I do this on the Sabbath.

When it comes to having a relationship with God.

We've always had a great relationship as a Protestant first day keeper with the Lord, yet I want to get somebody to back up 1 day and apply that Saturday to the Lord Jesus.

At creation, and remember We haven't even gotten to the first purpose, but the reason I'm telling you this is because the first purpose is the reason that we give Bible studies at all.

So God takes day 4 and he fills up the empty space of day 1.

So he takes day 5 and he fills up the empty space of day 2.

Overcoming Excuses With Scripture

Wanted to tell you guys about a little product that we have.

This is called a Life on the Edge DVD set.

I was on an airplane trip from Washington State all the way down.

Let's see, it'd be Washington State over here from your viewpoint to Florida, and there was a young man next to me that was killing everything he could see on his little portable video machine.

He was just playing these kill him up, shoot him up games.

He finished that so he gets out another portable device and blows up a few more things on his portable device.

And then all of his portable devices lost their battery.

His headphones were unplugged from his devices because obviously the battery was dead.

And so I said, man, would you like to watch a video?

He's like, sure, what kind of video do you have?

And so I pulled out the Great Controversy, part 1.

I actually had this on my MP3 player or my iPod.

And I had all of this imported to my iPod.

And so I hand it in my iPod, he plugs in, and he watches the first half of the great controversy Bible study.

And then when he's finished, he said, man, that was good, but it's not finished.

I don't have contact information for him.

So maybe at some point he did purchase this from us.

It's a DVD set that has 34 hours worth of presentations and it also teaches you how to give the Bible studies.

You can imagine it's quite expensive to create something like this in a professionally recorded situation.

So the price tag for a set of these 34 hours of DVD presentations, all of the handouts are on the 20th DVD.

All of the PowerPoints and keynotes are on the 20th DVD.

Once you purchase it, you can duplicate it all you want.

We just ask that you don't duplicate it to sell it, you duplicate it to share it.

And so that's called a Life on the Edge set.

What we are going to do this afternoon is we are going to help overcome excuses with scripture.

We are going to teach you how to overcome excuses with scripture.

When I'm doing Bible studies, I will ask people as we are going through the Bible study is this clear?

If they look at when I say if this is clear and they do this, what are they probably thinking?

And so even if they say yes with that expression on their face, what am I going to do?

Well eventually it comes to the point where you are calling for a decision from those individuals.

You are asking them based on the information that you have given them, all that information built up to a climax point, and they either decide to go with the truth or they decide to slide back this direction.

The incredible thing about truth is that once you know it, you can't get away from it.

And so because you and I have a burden for the people that we are studying the Bible with, then we are going to encourage them to make that decision to follow what God is asking them to do.

So our goal this afternoon, how many of you have a Bible with you?

Somebody can use my Bible as soon as we start the exercise.

If you like, does somebody have a Bible on the phone?

What I'm going to do is I'm going to pretend that we have just had a Bible study and our Bible study has been on the topic of the Sabbath, and so I'm calling for a decision on keeping the Sabbath.

And so I don't know who'd like to be my guinea pig, Who'd like to be the 1 that that gets to, oh look at there, that just went plum off didn't it?

All right so would you join me up here Miss Voorhees?

Now Miss Voorhees confessed earlier to the class that she was at my eighth grade graduation and and she even signed, were you the educational lady at that time?

And so I'm studying the Bible with Miss Alice.

Now I typically typically call her Miss Voorhees or Mrs.

Voorhees but but I've been down in Florida so long I just call everybody Miss and the fellows I just call by their first name.

And so we have just finished a Bible study on keeping the Sabbath.

So what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to use the key question when it comes to calling for a decision.

This key question is what would keep you?

So, Miss Alice, it has just been a privilege to study with you and to study the awesome topic of the Sabbath.

Tell me about what was your favorite part of the study?

Voorhees, is there anything that you can think of that would keep you from honoring God in this way?

No ma'am, I want you to play along with the situation.

So your greatest fear then is that your family, now How about your own family?

Would that then mean that your in-laws are not?

Miss Alice, if God could take care of your greatest concern, which I understand to be your in-laws and them feeling like you would be pulling their son away from them.

If God could take care of that, is there anything else that would keep you?

Okay, so we're just going to pause here in what we are doing.

I have just isolated what the biggest roadblock is for her keeping and honoring the Sabbath.

Now, for those of you who have given me your email address, this is a document that I compiled.

I compiled this document out of Louis Torres' book titled Gaining Decisions for Christ.

That book goes after illustration after illustration of how he used scripture to help individuals overcome their fear or their excuse or their reasons for not following what God has asked them to do.

And so I've blown this up, I've made it a little bigger here, let me move this mouse so it doesn't turn off on us.

I have typed all of this out for us with the Bible verses.

When I began my ministry of giving Bible studies, remember, I went to Mission College of Evangelism in the fall of 2002.

Spring of 2003, I was working for them and Elder Torres says, I've got to go out of town.

You're going to do the evangelistic meeting.

And so then it was all of a sudden up to me as this rookie evangelist to help people overcome the reasons they feel they can't follow God's leading.

And so what I did was I took this piece of paper and if I had my conversion Bible, the Bible that I had when I was first really involved in a relationship with Jesus, you would see an outline of scotch tape.

Because I took this and I shrunk it down on a copy machine as small as I could get it and still be able to see it.

You know, still being able to see it is very important.

And if you can't see it, it won't help you.

Back to Menu

Series

Personal Evangelism

Watching and Observing

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Personal Evangelism

Jesus Method

1h

How to Give a Bible Study

1h 15m

Evangelism and the Great Controversy

How to Give Bible Studies

40m

Emmanuel Institute Bootcamp

1. Orientation: Intro to Prophecy

2h 43m

Emmanuel Core Workout

Sabbath Part 1a

37m

Evangelism and the Great Controversy

Search for the Lost

52m

Ignite Your Local Church for Mission

Q and A and Final Charge

1h

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

Tools for Transforming Your Local Church

56m

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart - Part 2

54m

Witnessing to the Wealthy, Worldly, and Well-Educated

1h 26m

Sound Doctrine