ASI Conference 2024: Investing in Eternity

Seminars

Ramona Llull

Meeting Muslims in the Marketplace: How to Start Spiritually Fruitful Friendships for Christ

But today we will be having a presentation, Muslims in the Marketplace, Starting Spiritually Fruitful Conversations for Christ.

If you would bow your heads and we'll have a prayer together.

Loving Father, please inspire each person here with wisdom from on high that we can reach Muslims in whatever marketplace we may be working.

Bless the missionaries who are among us especially.

So talking about spiritually fruitful conversations with Muslims, I want to begin by telling you My most embarrassing conversation with a Muslim ever, 1 which I may not ever live down.

I was in London attending a training event for Muslim evangelism and our leader for that training decided to drop us off at a specific place in London where we could hold conversations with many Muslims.

And the place that he took us was called Hyde Park.

This is actually a fairly famous place in London.

I did not know it at the time, but it's a place for Christians and Jews and Muslims to get together and harangue each other for their faith, I can say.

And so there's people standing on ladders and shouting at each other, and there's groups of people that are just yelling all kinds of things about how wrong your religion is.

And our leader said, go talk to some Muslims.

So I went, and I was first strolling along to see what kind of conversations are happening.

And I was an observer at first, but I quickly got snatched into a conversation.

Like they just start to needle you with something.

And there was a very large Muslim man who came up to me, kind of towering over me, and he said, Miss, I have a Bible verse written on this paper.

Well, this Muslim man, he had, I don't know what version of the Bible it was.

I have not bothered to go and look it up for myself, but it was some obscure verse from the Old Testament with completely taken out of context with some vulgarities, I believe, about donkey genitals or something.

He said, young lady, you look like such a proper young lady, will you please read this verse from your Bible out loud?

And of course, it's a little awkward to read something like that.

So I said, you know, I think this is taken out of context.

You probably need to, no, read it out loud.

I said, well, I don't want to read it out loud because it's, it's, it's, he says, aha, your Bible.

And there was something in me that became frustrated because I knew that yes, there's some language that's used in the Old Testament that's a little awkward to understand if you don't understand it in the right context.

So I really wanted to explain to him the hermeneutics that we use for understanding the Old Testament.

And so he was talking pretty loudly by this point.

So I started to speak a little bit more loudly so that he could hear me.

When I did so, he spoke louder so that I could hear him.

And before you knew it, the 2 of us were speaking loudly enough for a crowd to gather around us.

And by this time, I realized, I think we've both lost.

And I've just never forgotten that most embarrassing experience, because you know what?

And maybe some of you have had experiences with Muslims in your workplace or wherever it is that you're meeting them in your neighborhood where you realize that, okay, we're talking past each other now.

And so I'd like to share, I don't know where my screen has gone here, I'd like to share with you some principles that have helped me in my interactions with Muslims and how to have spiritually fruitful conversations.

Now you might be listening to me and you might be saying, you know, I'm a little nervous about this.

Now you just shared a kind of crazy story.

I'm not sure I wanna go talking to Muslims in my neighborhood or my workplace.

And I understand there can be some trepidation about reaching out to Muslims.

What I wanna share with you today is something that I believe anybody can do.

You do not need to be an Islamic expert, you don't need to be a 10-year missionary, you don't need to be anybody very educated about Islam at all.

I think that if you have a genuine experience with Jesus Christ, and I'm going to share with you a few really basic principles about Muslim evangelism.

Even the elderly grandmother who has never left her hometown and knows nothing about Islam, you can go out right now today and have spiritually fruitful conversations with Muslims.

What if I told you that in fact you could bring a Muslim 40% of the way to conversion without giving a single Bible study?

Many people, they're nervous, like I don't know how to give a Bible study to a Muslim.

What if they ask me some hard questions that I don't know how to answer?

What if you could bring a Muslim 40% of the way?

Now you say, Jamie, where are you getting that 40% statistic from?

I'd like to show you something called Engle's Scale.

Now, Engle's Scale comes to us from the field of missiology, which is the academic study of Christian mission.

And someone named James Engle, he came up with this scale which depicts a person's spiritual journey numerically.

And you can see that it's moving from negative 10 to 0 to positive 10, with 0 representing conversion.

As you can see here, negative 10 is representing the furthest that a person can possibly be from Jesus Christ.

Antagonism and distrust towards Christianity and the Bible.

Then that person at some point in their life, we hope, will move to negative 9, where there's a curiosity about Christianity and the Bible and a willingness to learn about Jesus.

Another step forward to negative 8, acknowledgment of misconceptions about Christianity and the Bible.

There's a couple different variations out there.

I've modified this slightly for Muslim ministry.

Negative 7, the person develops a positive attitude towards Christianity and the Bible, and it's at negative 6 that they begin reading the Bible and just get that first elementary little grasp about the message that's contained in it.

As you can see here, if negative 6 is where they begin reading the Bible, everything from negative 10 to negative 6 is the pre-work that comes before you even give a single Bible study.

And that's why I'm getting that 40% statistic.

Even before you can give a single Bible study to your Muslim friend or colleague, there's pre-work that goes before that.

And that's where I'm saying that spiritual conversations in the context of loving relationships is humongous for the Muslim.

I want to share a story with you about how I was privileged to watch a Muslim woman move from negative 10 to negative 6.

My husband and I were working in the country of Lebanon for 7 years as missionaries and during the time we were there part of what I did was working with Syrian refugee women and I had various different projects and programs to try to win my way to their heart and develop friendships with them so that hopefully I could share the gospel.

So I had like a food supplementation program.

I had a small group that met in a certain place where we would do like health talks and mental health help for these refugee women and whatnot.

Anyways, 1 of the women that I was working with, her name was Rueda, and she was a young mother, maybe 19 or 20, and she had a baby girl, about a year and a half years old.

And we had become friends, and she was interested in being friends with this American, because that's kind of cool for them, right?

But every time that I would try to bring up spiritual things, she was very resistant.

And that was something that I would try to do every time we'd have a conversation.

I'd try to sprinkle in some spiritual thoughts or ideas and there was just a door closed.

Which for me was interesting because many of the women that I worked with were open.

Like Islam, like the culture is very open about spiritual things in general.

And so I noticed her as being unique in this point, that she's very close about talking about spiritual things.

Well, I kept trying my best and 1 day Rueda texted me in an absolute panic.

She's been vomiting and she's had diarrhea for like 4 or 5 days and She can't keep anything down.

And you know, 5 days of that is getting pretty serious.

That year I had a volunteer missionary doctor that was working there.

Yu came with me 1 or 2 days per week to visit my families.

She asked her husband and he said, thanks but no thanks.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

Who Am I - A Crisis in Identity

Jeremy Hall

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

03 I Thought... So...

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, we thank you for being our God.

We thank you for giving us the gift of salvation.

This wayward mankind has the opportunity to be redeemed through the blood of Jesus, and we are so thankful for that.

Lord, Satan is working overtime to distract us from what you have created us to be.

Lord, help us to look to Jesus because when we look to Jesus we're drawn to Him and our identity in Him becomes clear.

Bless us as we talk and share today and may everything that is said and done be to your honor and glory in Jesus name we pray amen the title of the message today is finding me the hidden struggles of youth identity crisis and mental health.

And for those of you that haven't been here throughout the week, my basic academic training at Andrews University is an undergrad in psychology and a master's in community counseling.

And so this is a topic that has great relevance to me and is 1 that is very important to me.

I have spent my entire career working with young people.

13 years of my career, of my 24-year career in education has been working specifically with secondary students.

And as a chaplain, I carried a client load of students here at the Academy and have continued to keep my tabs on this age group as they are struggling in a society that when I look back 30 years ago, it was difficult to grow up then.

But just imagining what these young people are going through now, it is mind-boggling.

And so, I have a great interest in this topic.

Today, we're going to be looking, as I said, in the specific areas of mental health.

Before we do that, I'd like to ask you to open your Bibles and look at 3 John.

We're going to look at just a few verses in this small but powerful book.

3 John and verses 2 to 4, and then we'll skip down to v.

Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in how many things?

We could spend the hour just unpacking that and its relevance to mental health.

3, for I rejoiced greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you." There's so many powerful messages here as it relates to our identity.

I rejoice greatly when brethren came and testified of the truth that is in you just as you walk in the what?

I have no greater joy, the Scripture says, than to hear that my children walk in truth.

Looking at verse 11, beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good.

He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has not seen God." Remember we shared earlier in the week Isaiah 520, woe to those who call evil good and good evil that put darkness for light and light for darkness.

We are living in an age where we are seeing the Scriptures fulfilled before our eyes.

Proverbs 23, 7 says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

I think, so I am." This idea of our thoughts, the mental processes, the psychology of how we relate to ourselves and to other people is such a powerful thing.

We have a lot of material to cover today, and we're going to be moving fast.

So I ask your forgiveness if I am speedily moving today.

Before we get going into more of the substantive elements of this presentation, want to look a little bit at mental health and its impact on society.

Were experiencing depression that is severely impairing their ability to function at school or work at home with family or in their social life 16.3 percent of youth ages 12 to 7 report suffering from at least 1 major depressive episode in the past year.

11.5% of youth, over 2.7 million youth are experiencing severe major depression.

10.6% or 2.5 million youth in the US have severe major depression.

And let me tell you, as a therapist, severe major depression is debilitating.

It is a tunnel that you do not have the capacity to see out of.

Life is hopeless and then of course, consequently, unfortunately, young people start to have suicidal ideation because they cannot see hope and prosperity in their future.

I will tell you, anecdotally, that the impact of mental health is hitting Seventh-day Adventist institutions.

Our secondary principals are crying out to us, please help us.

We have so much mental health need in our institutions.

Young people are struggling, they're coming, it is impairing their ability to perform academically, it's impairing their relationships.

And so by God's grace, here in the Michigan Conference, we have just received a privately funded grant to provide mental health resources to our schools for the upcoming school year.

Not only that, but 2 of our academies in our conference have already been accessing this mental health support.

It is impacting our young people so much that it is starting to push education to provide specific resources, Adventist education that is, to our students.

60 percent of youth with major depression do not receive any mental health treatment.

That's 1 of those statistics you pause on and let sink in.

Young adults aged 18 to 25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI or any mental illness, meaning they have a mental illness, they qualify, it is clinically diagnosed, and it could be a variety of different things.

As compared to adults aged 26 to 49, so you can see in young people ages 18 to 25, they have a higher prevalence of mental illness diagnosis than even adults aged 26 to 49.

And then of course as you get older, in the age of 50 and beyond, you see that that drops dramatically.

Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest prevalence of significant mental health illness at 11.4% compared to adults 26 to 49 at 7.1% and then you can see again that that drops significantly lower.

Even in states with the greatest access, nearly 1 in 3 are going without treatment.

And this is from the Mental Health America website.

The prevalence of any Mental disorder among adolescents.

This information I'm going to share is based on the diagnostic interview data from the National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement.

In ages 13 to 18, an estimated 49.5% of adolescents had any mental health illness, meaning they had a range and a variety of different things.

And of adolescents with any mental health disorder, an estimated 22% had severe impairment and or distress.

That's almost a quarter of those in this study.

Mental illnesses are common in the United States.

It is estimated that more than 1 in 5 US adults live with a mental illness, which represents 58 million Americans.

4.5% of adults report having serious thoughts of suicide.

This has increased every year since 2011.

So these adolescents who are having struggles with mental illness become adults and their bandwidth of capacity is already compromised and then when they move into adulthood, they have more and more responsibility, more and more stressors on them and their ability to cope is marginalized even more.

And so we're seeing these young people carry these challenges into adulthood and it is significantly impacting our society.

24.7% of adults with a mental illness report an unmet need for treatment.

More than half of adults with a mental illness do not receive treatment, totaling 27 million U.S.

And this is from the National Institute of Mental Health.

How about the financial impact of mental health?

Serious mental illness is a significant public health concern.

The estimated economic impact of SMI is more than $300 billion every year.

It represents $193 billion in loss of earnings, $100 billion in health care expenditures, $24 billion in disability benefits.

Then we move into something that psychologists call the psychosomatic effect.

Does my brain affect my body and vice versa.

Positive psychological well-being can reduce the risks of heart attacks and strokes.

Depression has been linked to many chronic illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis.

The mortality rate from cancer and heart disease is higher for people with what?

Depression and other mental health conditions.

There Will Be No Americans in Heaven or Asians, or Africans, or...

Bob Stewart

03 How Many Cultures are in the Bible

Father in Heaven, Lord, as we spend some more time here today talking about culture and those that you are going to take to Heaven, we pray, Lord, that the word of God will speak to us.

Father, we spend all week and most of our lives studying school, we're studying the words of men and women.

But in this particular instance, we definitely need to find out what you have to say about this subject.

So Lord, guide us today and send your Holy Spirit to give us understanding is our prayer in Jesus name.

It has, I think it's in this 1, where it talks about the quote that I gave you on screen the other day, yesterday, and these are quotes from Spirit of Prophecy.

We're obviously, as Seventh-day Adventists, we want to know what does the Bible say, right, ultimately, and the Bible does say a lot, oh thank you, about this.

But we also understand that the Lord gave us a special gift in the spirit of prophecy.

And so these are some quotes, by all means they're not all of them.

This is only half of them, I'll give the other half probably tomorrow, something like that.

And it's just something to read and recognize that what I'm sharing with you is not just something that's my personal opinion, okay?

This is something that we can see in the Bible and also in spirit of prophecy very clearly.

So the question or the title today is how many cultures are in the Bible?

And I'm going to tell you right now it's a trick question.

Well, we're going to go into the trick part of it in just a second here, and go ahead and take a seat.

All right, so yesterday, we wanna kind of just briefly recap what we looked at yesterday.

We looked at what the enemy knows about culture that we don't.

We saw that in the beginning that the devil reads the Bible, whether we realize it or not, he knows what the Bible says.

And because he was created in heaven, he knows all about the culture of heaven, correct?

But he is actually the originator of a different culture because when he began to focus on himself, he created within himself a different culture that was out of harmony with what he had, how he had been created by the Father, by Jesus.

And so automatically there was some discord there, wasn't it?

And what did he do with that new way of thinking?

He began to put his imprint upon his other fellow angels and began to spread this new culture.

And so, of course it spread until there was finally rebellion, and so the devil knows all about this concept of culture, that there is really a primary culture of heaven, and really of the rest of the universe.

I don't know if you've ever thought about that.

But I think we can surmise, we don't know for sure, but I think we can pretty well surmise that even though there may be thousands of other planets that are populated by created beings in God's universe, there's really only 1 culture.

Because if God is the father of all those different creatures, then what kind of imprint is upon every single 1 of them.

Even though they may live on a cold planet, a wet planet, a dry planet, you know, whatever it may be, they might live a little bit differently, but basically they're all gonna be reflecting the culture of heaven, what God ordained.

And Satan knew that and so he's the 1 that originated the many problems with culture that we have today.

Alright let's take a look at how things progressed.

We talked about the origin of culture a little bit yesterday in Adam and Eve and we looked at the the line of Cain and then Seth, right, we saw the lineage there.

2 different cultures you might say to start.

The sons and daughters of men and the sons and daughters of God were the 2 cultures that started out in the planet.

And then after the flood we had the 3 descendants of Noah.

We had Japheth, we had Shem, and then we have Ham.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Meeting Muslims in the Marketplace: How to Start Spiritually Fruitful Friendships for Christ

1h 10m

03 I Thought... So...

1h

03 How Many Cultures are in the Bible

59m

06 Inside Out

22m

06 Inside Out

31m

Unlocking Your True Potential

1h 10m

End Time Integrity

1h 16m

You Don’t Need More Time

1h 24m

The Power of Hospitality

1h 28m

06 Inside Out

28m

02 I Am That I Am

57m

05 Delivering the Message

59m

Sound Doctrine