GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

Mini-skirts, Mothers, & Muslims: On Being Called, Chosen & Faithful-Even to the Ends of the Earth

Homer Trecartin

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

6. Small Beginnings

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

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

Let's go ahead and bow our heads for prayer.

Father God, thank you that you love each 1 of us, that you know all about us.

Thank you that you have a plan for our lives.

Sometimes what we think is nothing would in the eyes of heaven be much greater.

If we saw how big an effect our efforts had, we might become puffed up and proud.

So maybe that's why you let us see only small glimpses of what's happening sometimes.

We pray that Your Holy Spirit will be here with us this morning, this afternoon, and give us your wisdom.

And around this entire facility is so many groups are meeting.

Pour out your Holy Spirit on all of us, we pray in Jesus' name.

We set, at least maybe not, maybe not, We may not write them down or tell them to too many people, but we have certain things that we want to do or accomplish.

And I suppose, maybe just in our hearts at least, all of us would like to accomplish something big for God.

There's nothing wrong with that, but how do we feel if we're not accomplishing something big?

Or if other people around us are not accomplishing something big, how do we feel about them?

You know, Would we make a sacrifice if we thought we could baptize hundreds by making that sacrifice?

Would we make the same sacrifice if we knew we might work our whole life and not see hardly any results for it.

And are we willing to do things that may not have such big results?

1 of our problems as individuals and as a church, as organizations have the same problem, let me take it out of the church realm and look at a business.

If a business is wanting to sell some particular product, they're going to go to the places where they can sell the most of it, right?

They're going to ignore the places where there's not going to be very many sales.

But that doesn't work for us because the gospel needs to go to how many people?

As a church we've done very well in the rural areas and in the islands.

Most of the people now live in the cities.

In the Middle East and North Africa especially, almost all the people.

We have a few rural areas in Algeria and a few in Jordan, a few in Turkey, but most of our area, you've got sand all around you and you only have water where you decide to build a desalinization plant and so everybody lives in the city.

If we're going to reach them, we need to live in the city.

We need to be working in those difficult areas.

And the other problem we've had is we go to where we can baptize lots of people.

But what about the areas where we're not going to be able to baptize lots of people?

Where it might be years before we would have 1 baptism.

You know, when our early church started reaching out, the early Adventists started reaching out in missions, they often went places where it was years before they saw their first baptism.

We've, for the last 20, 30, 40 years, we've somewhat ignored the areas where we can't go in and hold a series of meetings and have a big set of baptisms.

We've not spent much time or money putting people into those places where we knew it was going to take a long time for there to be any results.

But in our part of the world, there are results, it's just they're slow.

It takes a long time to build trust and a friendship and eventually a baptism.

So I wanted to talk to you a little about that today.

You know, 2016 is here now, and in a way, Christmas was a small beginning, wasn't it?

Jesus came as a baby, was a small beginning.

I think sometimes we focus too much on the size of something when it starts.

And usually the things I talk about are things that I've been wrestling with.

Okay, I probably was a year ago now, maybe a year and a half, I can't remember exactly.

Barbara and I have been 4 years now in the Middle East and North Africa Union.

A few years before that, before we were at the General Conference, we lived in Cyprus and worked throughout the Middle East.

So in a way it was coming back home, but It's been 4 years and a week, I think, that we've been there in the Middle East.

And it wasn't too long ago, a year and a half or so, that I was wrestling with some issues.

I was looking at the immensity of the task in the Middle East and North Africa.

I was looking at the massive challenges we faced in the governments and with finance and with all these other things.

I was looking at the tiny number of Adventists we have and I was really feeling overwhelmed.

But you know, I praise God that no matter how often we read the Bible or the Spirit of Prophecy, we can have read a passage many times before, but often God gives us on the very day we need it, just the passage we needed, doesn't he?

I won't ask you to raise your hands, but I hope that you're following along with the Revived by His Word readings that have been going on.

And now it's called Believe It's Prophets, I think, where we're doing both.

And sometimes with our trips, Barbara and I get behind a little bit, so sometimes we read ahead a little bit.

We're not always on the exact same day as everybody else, but we're reading.

And we were reading through that year, again, the passages that were being looked at, and all of a sudden I came to 2 little chapters that I've read over and over before in my life, and they've always been meaningful to me but they really were what I needed those days.

There's some promises there that have given me great courage and I think they'll give you courage too for whatever challenges might await you as you leave GYC and go back to wherever home is or wherever God sends you.

But first I want to start with a little story.

I'm not a very good teacher either, but I do love to tell stories.

And this is a story that hardly fits with the news releases that we see sometimes of, you know, 3, 000 baptisms in 1 day, and I praise the Lord for those.

Maybe by the end of the seminar you'll feel like that it does fit with the seminar at least.

But We, as in all of the talks that we've been doing, I've been trying to be careful in most of them anyway.

I've not made it always, but I've been trying to be careful about giving too many names.

We are, they said they were going to post all of the seminars, and we didn't know that when we prepared for these seminars.

And so we've asked them to hold them back for us for a few days and we're going to edit out some of the names that I've given and then they'll be posted.

But on this 1 today, they're not going to have to edit it out because I'm going to change the names or leave them out.

I'm just going to call them 1 of our workers.

Many of you would know the names if I gave them to you.

It's somebody who has been quite prominent in Adventism.

He and his wife moved to our area a year or 2 ago.

They're still, like all of us, getting used to the people and the places and the language and customs.

And their language teacher recently introduced them to some friends of his.

Now this is not a picture of the friends, it's just a stock photo that we used to illustrate them.

I wouldn't dare show you a picture of the friends even if I had 1.

5. Open Your Eyes

Dear Lord, thank you for another year of life.

Thank you for another year that that we have to be able to live for you.

And at the same time Lord we're sorry that another year has passed.

We long for you to come and we pray that that your delay will not be lengthened because of our inactivity.

We ask that you will help us to be alert to your leading.

Open our eyes, fill us with your Holy Spirit so that we can do the work you need us to do.

All right, this morning we're calling Open Your Eyes.

We're going to be talking some about, well, why is it that we look around the world and in some places it seems like the latter rain is falling.

We see the church growing rapidly, lots and lots of baptisms.

You can go to certain countries and hold an evangelistic meeting and have hundreds of baptisms at the end of 2 or 3 weeks.

And why is it we see that in some places but not in others?

Will there ever be a day when there will be a strong and vibrant Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Middle East and North Africa, for instance.

We're going to look today at every time that the Bible talks about people's eyes being open.

And I think we'll see as we go through it, there are lots of lessons we could look at, but I think we'll see that often the problem is with us, not with God and what's happening in the world around us.

Often our eyes just aren't open to see what really is happening around us.

We're going to look at what some of the possibilities are.

But to start with, I wanted to share with you a little bit from probably your favorite class in high school.

I loved math and I am a biology major and I've never used biology and I do very little with math and instead I've been pastoring and working in the Middle East and other things.

But I wanted to share with you an example from geometry, from mathematics.

You may remember, you might wish you didn't, but you might remember that a point is defined as having how many dimensions?

A point is mathematically something without dimensions.

If you extend that point forever in both directions, you're supposed to have a line, right?

And how many dimensions does a line have?

If you drag that 1 dimensional line up forever, you end up with what we call a plane.

And you can imagine that plane as a giant piece of paper with length and width but no depth.

If you have a simple two-dimensional structure that you draw on that two-dimensional piece of paper, it would have 4 edges and 1 foundation, right?

It's a little building built on that piece of paper.

It would have 4 edges and 1 foundation, right?

Now it starts to get a little more complicated for most who are not mathematicians.

If you pull that two-dimensional building up into 3 dimensions, okay, we can picture that even though we were up late last night maybe.

If you pull it up into 3 dimensions, that you have a cube.

That cube would have 4 foundations and how many edges?

It would have 12, if you count the bottom 2, it would have 12 edges and 4 foundations.

Now, we can't picture the fourth dimension.

In our minds, we're three-dimensional beings.

But mathematically, if you expand this three-dimensional cube into the fourth dimension, it would have 12 foundations.

Do we know anything in the Bible that has 12 foundations?

Now I don't know if that means that it's a four-dimensional structure or if John was just having trouble describing it or what, but there are many mathematicians that believe that the New Jerusalem is a four-dimensional, at least, structure.

In fact, there are a number of articles and books that have been written through the years by mathematicians who focus on the four-dimensional language in the Bible.

And there are a lot of places where they see evidence of a fourth dimension in the Bible.

But for today, I want to back up to something easier for us.

Fourth dimension is beyond us and it's too hard to think much about.

I want you to imagine with me a two-dimensional world, okay, like a photograph, but a two-dimensional world.

In a two-dimensional world, people couldn't pass around each other.

They could only climb over each other because remember in 2 dimensions there's no depth so they can't come out here to go around.

If I stuck my finger through their universe, what would they see?

They would only see the outline of my finger where I poked it through their universe and they would wonder where it came from and what it was.

If they built a room, let's say that they went in and built a room and that then they went inside and locked the door.

Okay, this is a two-dimensional room that they're building.

Nobody could get inside that room without unlocking the door or breaking down the wall, right?

At least no two-dimensional person could.

But if I, as a three-dimensional person, walked over to their little room that they've built, and I stepped inside with them, all they would see is my outline, and they would wonder how I got in there.

I mean, what miraculous thing did I do to be able to step inside their locked room.

Maybe you're beginning to remember some stories in the Bible after Jesus' resurrection when they wondered how Jesus suddenly appeared in their room.

They would think that I had some sort of powers and could pass through walls.

In a two-dimensional world, people couldn't see what was happening on the other side of the world.

Their little eyes couldn't see down here.

They could only walk around and look, but they couldn't see across the world.

None of them could see anything outside their two-dimensional world.

I could come over and stand right beside them, but because they're two-dimensional beings, their eyes don't see into the third dimension and they wouldn't know that I'm standing right next to them.

In fact, there could be thousands of two-dimensional universes stacked side by side and they would never know it.

All they can see is within their own two-dimensional universe.

It would be very hard for them to understand the text that says, He's coming with clouds and every eye will see Him.

How could every eye on our world see Him coming at the same time.

But it's really quite easy to accomplish.

All God would have to do is open their eyes and let them see into the third dimension, and if suddenly their eyes were opened, They could all see all of the other universes and they could see me standing here if their eyes were in the third dimension.

All of them at once, no matter where they were on the world, even if they had dug into a cave and were hiding, even if they were in prison, they would be able to see me as a three-dimensional being, or see Jesus as he comes, all their eyes.

And mathematicians tell us that the same thing would happen if a multi-dimensional God, 456, whatever, were to open our eyes so that we could see out of the third dimension all of us on earth, no matter what room we're in, no matter what prison, no matter what cave we're in, no matter where we are in the world, all of us could see Him at the same time, no matter where we were.

Today I want to think about having our eyes open.

The Bible talks about it quite a few times, not always applying to the fourth dimension, but it always means seeing something that we didn't see before, or seeing something in a way that we didn't see it before.

4. Approaching Footsteps

Dear Lord, I want to thank you again for your promise to pour out your Holy Spirit on each of us and I pray that on each seminar, everybody that's going to the different seminars, the speakers, the leaders of GYC that have been organizing all this fantastic event.

Help the atmosphere that surrounds this place to change not only our lives, but the lives of the people around this city who interact with us in different ways.

We pray that you'll be here with us now this afternoon, in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, come on in, those of you that are coming.

I told you that I was drawing the title and a few of the illustrations from a couple of books.

Familiar to Foreign by Sarah Lanier, you're welcome afterward to come up and look at these.

And Miniskirts, Mothers and Muslims by Christine Maluhi.

I think I checked recently, maybe in the last couple of months anyway, and I could still find some used copies on Amazon.com.

But wonderful books on how to deal with the culture of the Middle East and North Africa especially, but really applying to many of our intercultural relationships.

We have a gentleman here who is from Ethiopia, where there are a lot of Christians and a lot of Muslims, and he was just mentioning to me that the culture is really that.

It's the culture of the area, not the culture of Muslims specifically.

The Christians and the Muslims will do many of the same things.

He was saying how he almost starved when he came here to America too, for the same reason.

He politely refused everything that was offered to him and then they didn't offer it again.

So yes, it's cultural whether you're Christian or Muslim to do many of the same things.

All right, you can come up afterward and look at the books if you'd like.

If you wanted to ask your roommate, and remember we're talking about direct and indirect conversation and the purpose of words.

If you wanted to ask your roommate if your music bothered them, you wouldn't go to your roommate and say, does my music bother you?

Because they will always say, no, no, it's fine.

If you have a Middle Easterner move in next door to you, and you decide that you want to hose down your driveway.

So you ask him if you could park your car there for a few minutes.

He's going to say yes, even if he knows that just around the corner, he's got a group of 5 cars coming to park in his driveway and he doesn't know where he's going to put them, but he can't bear to say no to you.

You know, we're really interested in the truth.

How do you get the truth from a Middle Eastern friend or neighbor?

How do you not be perceived as offensive when you're talking to them?

And again, I want to emphasize, first and foremost, pray a lot.

We need God's guidance as we go into these situations.

But back to the illustration about the post office.

If you're in Turkey and you want directions to the post office, how do you get directions if you know that even if they don't know where it is, they're going to give you directions to some place?

Well, you could ask a man on the sidewalk next to you to go ask that man on the corner how to get to the post office.

Okay, this man next to you, If he knows where the post office is, he's going to say to you, oh, I know where it is and he'll tell you.

If he doesn't know, he's not embarrassed because you didn't ask him where it was.

You asked him to ask that man where it was.

So he'll go ask that man where it is and if that man knows, he'll tell him.

If he doesn't know, he's not embarrassed to say to his fellow countrymen, I'm sorry, I don't know where it is.

He's not telling you he doesn't know, he's telling his fellow countrymen.

Well you could ask them what kind of music do you like to listen to instead of a yes or no question.

Ask them what kind of music do you like to listen to.

Or better yet, ask 1 of your friends to ask them if your music is bothering them.

Your friend won't be embarrassed, and they won't be embarrassed to tell your friend, and then your friend can come back and tell you, yeah, you know, they really don't like that kind of music that you're playing.

As for parking in your neighbor's driveway, what you could do is go over and knock on his door.

He would, of course, invite you in for tea.

And after you've talked for a little while about weather and politics and family, then you could casually ask him what he has planned for the rest of the day.

Of course, by then you could have moved your car 3 times and washed your own driveway without having to bother him at all, but then think of the wonderful interaction you would have missed.

So we need to be careful about direct questions in dealing many times.

It might seem strange to us, but it's their way of trying not to offend somebody.

They don't want to hurt a neighbor or a friend.

In most of our Western societies, we've been taught from babyhood to be individuals.

But your new neighbor will probably be from a group culture.

I may not take time to go through this illustration, But let me just say that if we have a group of people, and this is a real problem at GC session time.

It can be a problem in any big gatherings.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

6. Small Beginnings

52m

5. Open Your Eyes

41m

4. Approaching Footsteps

1h

3. Miniskirts, Mothers, & Muslims

59m

2. Even THEM?

52m

1. Risk Takers

59m

Be Mine

47m

His Real Presence

29m

As Old As Methuselah

27m

Questions Answered

27m

Ready to Serve

16m

Satan’s Trap: Chasing Rabbits

28m

Sound Doctrine