GYC 2007: Be

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Tim Riesenberger - Christinity 101: How to Give Your Life to Jesus

Tim Riesenberger

WDJD

It is very true that in times of extremis, in times of desperation, in times when you have lost everything in your life, it is very easy to turn to God, is it not?

When you have no answers from your doctor, when you have no answers from your pastor, when your own parents don't know what's going on, when perhaps you yourself don't know what the problem is, You turn to God, don't you?

Now I can tell you that that is true in the medical field.

And the reason they come to see me principally is they want to know what?

Or they want relief of pain and they do know what's wrong.

Those are the 2 common reasons that I see people in the emergency room.

But what do you do when you don't have an answer for them?

What do you do when there's no treatment?

Now that's very easy to do when there's no answers, when you're in serious or critical condition.

But what about something that affects 60 million people, It is life-threatening, but it has no symptoms.

There is something that I see every day in my practice.

And how many symptoms does high blood pressure have?

How many people do you think even know that they have high blood pressure?

My mother called me up 2 days before presenting the seminar And she said, Tim, our best friend was exercising in the gym and he dropped in.

This guy was the best man at their wedding.

He was in perfect health, he exercised every day, lived a clean lifestyle.

They called me about 4 or 5 times in 1 day.

And I said, well, I'll tell you that as far as heart attacks go, because that's what they're saying this was, the first and last symptom for one-third of them is sudden death.

Most of us think, well, did he have chest pain?

You know, maybe this guy was not living a good lifestyle.

Unfortunately, his was 1 of the cases where death was the first and last symptom.

He had something going on that he didn't know about, that no 1 else knew about.

And I'm here to share with you that in our lives, it would be better for us to have the symptoms.

It would be better for us to perhaps have chest pain.

It would be better for us to have paralysis when the cancer of sin has found its way into our hearts.

But the problem is, there's often no symptoms.

So while they're setting that up, I'm going to share with you that it's probably better that we would have symptoms because it would lead us to seek help.

I can tell you a story of what happened to me that changed my heart.

How many of you have been to South America?

I can tell you that I was there and I was asked by a friend of mine to come do some medical work, common requests that I often have.

We went there to a very remote village in the middle of nowhere.

Took us about 3 hours from the nearest city.

There was no running water except for an hour a day.

There was absolutely nothing there as far as modern conveniences.

What we did as far as medical work consisted of my stethoscope, some water, some charcoal, and what we could get a hold of as far as poultices or whatever, maybe some cabbage.

A lot of what I did was really just lifestyle.

You could probably project it on the wall better and we could turn off all the lights.

I can tell you that when I got to the village, there were tons of people that wanted to see me.

They hadn't seen a physician or a nurse in their whole lives.

They described different symptoms, and most of the problems were fairly simple.

And I ended up giving them just a lot of counseling about the 8 laws of health, natural remedies, how to change their lifestyle.

Some of them were a little bit more complicated.

Something that I noticed throughout all of the times that I was with the people is that they were always trying to get ahead in line.

There were so many people and they would try to find creative ways to sneak to the front of the line.

1 time I took a break to go to the bathroom And I don't know if any of you have ever gone to the bathroom in the United States, but if you're a girl, then it's considered rude not to talk to the person who's trying to talk to you in the bathroom.

Now, if you're a guy and you're sitting there at the stall, you look straight ahead, you don't look to the right, you don't say, hey, how's it going?

You don't talk to the person in the stall next to you.

You just go about your business and then you can talk after you leave, right?

Or maybe when you're washing your hands, that's right.

But I can tell you that that was not the case there.

I had several people follow me into the bathroom.

And I'm sitting there relieving myself and they said, Doctor, una pregunta.

I thought, dude, I'm going to the bathroom.

Now I can speak Spanish fluently and I didn't say that to them and I said well why don't you wait until I come back to the clinic and then we can get you back in line and then I'll answer your question when it's your turn.

But there was 1 person that wasn't like that.

There was 1 person who never came to the front of the line.

In fact, when it was her turn, she'd walk back.

She was 15 and her mother was the 1 that was bringing her to be seen by the doctor.

And every time she'd bring her to the front, she'd say, No, I'm fine, there's lots of people a lot more serious than I am.

No, no, there's so many people that want his attention.

So she was the only 1 who wasn't trying to cut.

And she kept saying, oh, you know, there's so many other people here, they're a lot worse off than I am.

Well, eventually we got to the end of the day.

I had gone all day without eating anything.

In the Wilderness

Loving Father in Heaven, thank you so much for showing us that we need a new heart, for showing us that we need to come to you and to be changed.

Lord, now I pray that you would help us to grow, Help us to learn how to know You, how to know Your Word, how to follow You.

And what is the importance, Lord, of approaching Your Bible and approaching Your commands?

Lord, I ask that I would once again be hidden, and that only Jesus would be seen.

Could someone try to turn that back on for me please?

Have you ever wondered about studying the Bible?

I mean, there's several seminars here about studying Daniel, studying Revelation, how to approach the Bible, how to give Bible studies.

But have you ever wondered what the necessary ingredient is to study the Bible.

And I'm going to be sharing that with you this morning.

Does anyone remember the verse in Isaiah?

According to the law and the testimony, right?

If they speak not according to this word, right?

You know what's interesting though is that before that verse, there's something else.

It says line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.

Is that the key to understanding the Bible?

I can tell you that all of those principles are good.

Our prophetic principles, understanding that we need to take what the Bible says about every verse, right?

On a topic, before we come to a conclusion.

Have you ever heard the saying, a little knowledge is dangerous?

It's when people only understand a partial amount of a topic, they can come to the wrong conclusion.

If you read the verse that says to the thief on the cross, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

Because of course, in the original manuscript, there's no punctuation.

So if you didn't read a few chapters later when Mary throws herself on Jesus at His feet, and says, Master, Teacher, And He says, do not detain Me because I have not yet ascended to My Father.

Because He said to the thief, today, on the day of My defeat, I'm giving you the assurance you'll be with me in paradise.

But was he with Jesus in paradise that day?

Well, we know that because who wasn't even there that day?

So sometimes if you don't know the whole of a certain subject, you'll come to the wrong conclusion.

But I can tell you there's many seminars that you can go through about understanding the Bible.

There are many study guides, and they're all very helpful.

But I'm going to share with you the key to understanding, the key to having your devotions, a meaningful devotional life.

And without this, all those seminars will be meaningless.

Everything that you learn, whether it's from me or someone else, will not help you.

All of the spirit of prophecy will not help you without this understanding.

And it happened to me on another mission trip.

I can tell you that this is our group outside of our hotel in Peru.

We spent time together in the city eating meals together.

Sometimes we were just out in the open air sharing with people and occasionally we had buildings that we could teach in and preach in.

Many times we had fancy things, chairs and whatnot, but oftentimes we had just benches and maybe chalkboards.

And I'm going to share with you that when we went to these churches, They intentionally split us up into different groups.

They wanted to send us how many at a time do you think?

And mainly that was practical because 1 person spoke English and the other person spoke Spanish.

So they wanted to make sure that we could be understood.

Now they had a novel idea when it came to me.

They said, well Tim, you speak Spanish and English fluently, so we'll send you by yourself.

I said, well wait a minute, how about 2 and 2?

No, no, that's fine, And we'll send you to the most remote church." I said, thanks.

So I was sent to a church without a roof, without any walls.

It had a mud floor And it had basically some rebar sticking up out of the ground.

And that was all that Maranatha was able to start.

Now, at this church service, it was very, very simple.

And when it began, they started talking to me.

Now, when you've gone to another country, a foreign country, and they know that you're different, they know you're from somewhere else, what do they expect you to do?

So, so you're going to do the Sabbath school, the special music, the children's story, the sermon, A.Y., afternoon meetings, and we're going to close Sabbath with Vespers by you.

And so that's kind of the same in Peru, like most of these countries.

And so I did my best to sing my heart out, to preach my heart out.

The only break we had from church is going home to eat.

And then we came back and there was more.

See, there wasn't anyone looking at their watches to see if it was what?

Because they didn't have watches actually, most of them.

But they were not about an hour for church.

All day was church in this country, like it is in most countries.

Is that after the sun went down, after we were done with Vespers, they waited until the Sabbath was over to have the announcements.

And I can tell you there's something else I learned from them.

Just recently my sister has had a very hard time and this last Sabbath she did not come to church.

For those of you who know the story of my sister, it is very amazing.

She just recently became a Seventh-day Adventist, but she was not at church.

And what do most of us do in this country when you find out a missing member is not there?

Did you know in third world countries they don't do that?

If you're not at church, you know what's going to happen?

In Gethsemane

I'm very excited about this presentation because it is dedicated to a friend of mine.

His name is Seth and he was 19 and he loved GYC.

And he tried to encourage as many people as he could to come.

His sister is here, and I'm very thankful for that.

And so, of course, first and foremost, this presentation is to Jesus and to each 1 of you and everyone who will hear it.

And secondarily, it's for our memory of Seth because he was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was just 19.

In fact, I would never have met Sierra or her family had it not been for Seth, their brother.

We met when I was in school at Stanford and I had the opportunity to see them at church, take them out to a meal.

I still have his tie that Sierra gave to me.

So this session is going to be dedicated to him.

And I pray that you would receive a blessing as well.

Before we begin, I would like to ask the Lord to be with us.

Loving Father in Heaven, what a joy it is to be here with you.

And I just pray that you would help us to remember the lessons from Seth's life and I pray Lord that you would give us grace and strength as we learn about 1 of my other friends.

I pray Lord that You would be seen and heard and felt today and not myself.

I pray Lord that every 1 of my friends here would see Jesus, for in His name we pray, amen.

I'm gonna share with you what the 3 most powerful words I believe are in the Bible.

Now, I'm going to have some of you think about maybe some Words that are powerful to you.

But I'm going to share with you what I believe is stronger than Any of those things that have more power to change someone's life and bring them to God than even those words.

Before I begin, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine.

He was an Academy student and he was 15 years old.

Now unfortunately, Sean was diagnosed with osteosarcoma.

Now unfortunately, that's a very quick, very aggressive form of cancer.

But thankfully, he dropped out of Academy, got treated and was cured.

Sean was not just a fighter, he was a scholar.

Even though he had missed a year of academy, he ended up going back and he finished everything in 2 and a half years.

All of Academy, he crammed in the 2 and a half years.

And he also had a family, it was very loving.

Now I met Sean, unfortunately, as a result of a night at work.

I was in the emergency room and usually what happens is the patients will come to triage.

The nurse will assess them and she will decide how serious they are.

She will put them in order and then put them in a room when we're ready to see them.

1 of the nurses came up to me and said, I think you need to see a patient outside in the waiting room.

That kind of scares me because they don't say that usually.

So I went out to the triage and I saw a young man who was kind of pale, breathing hard, and his name was Sean.

And I asked him, the question that I ask every patient, what seems to be the trouble, why I can't breathe?

And he said, well, I've had cancer in the past, and what has happened is I've had fluid accumulate in 1 side of my lungs, and that's what it feels like now.

I said, go ahead and bring him back to this room.

We weren't ready, but I just brought him straight back.

And after a while I noticed that he was having more and more trouble breathing.

And I said, Sean, Do you think you're going to need me to help you breathe a little bit?

I'd already put him on some oxygen and that seemed to be helping, but he seemed to be getting worse to me.

He's like, yeah, I think I'm going to need some help.

So my plan was to put him on the ventilator And then after that, drain the fluid in the lung, help to re-expand it.

Is that when you come into the hospital, in order to draw blood to give you medications, what do we need to do?

None of the nurses were able to find a single vein on his body.

They couldn't understand why it was going on.

They said, we can't get an IV in this young man.

And I can tell you that I looked around him and there was no veins.

And so at that point we're left with a very few options.

I can go for a subclavian line underneath your clavicle or your collarbone.

I can go into your internal jugular vein here in your neck.

Or I can go into your femoral vein here in your groin.

I decided since I didn't need to do this right away, I would just go for the femoral vein.

Now I can tell you I've done hundreds of these lines and I couldn't find it.

And I can tell you that at 1 point I thought I had struck his bladder because I drew back yellow fluid.

And I'm like, uh-oh, I think this is urine, but it wasn't.

He had so much what we call edema or fluid in his soft tissues that I had just gotten a pocket of lymphatic fluid.

And at this point I actually prayed in the emergency department.

And I asked Jesus to help me to find the vein.

Series

Tim Riesenberger - Christinity 101: How to Give Your Life to Jesus

The (Almost) Irresistable Witness

Transcript

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