GYC 2014: At The Cross

The 4th Angel: Literature Evangelism Made Relevant In A Postmodern World

Michael Tuazon

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

5. How to Reach the Five Major Religion Using Literature -Part 2

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at the Cross in Phoenix, Arizona.

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

I'm excited that you've decided to come and learn more about Muslims, about Islam, and just want to let you know that it's been a privilege being able to share with you what God has put upon my heart and upon Bill's heart as well.

And again, if you have any questions about anything or if you would like the presentations, we would be more than happy to give these to you.

Because of time constraints, we're not able to really fully go in depth into some of the subjects.

And so, it would be a lot easier, obviously, for us to just give you the presentations, give you some of the materials, and you can go from there.

If you'll notice that on your seats, I printed out a little printout, and that is how to witness to Muslims in using the Quran.

There's a lot more information and a lot more things that you can get and a lot more resources.

And there's, I learned a lot of this stuff, well, I did a lot of research, but there's also someone in particular who I learned a lot of this resources from and he shared his testimony at GYC.

I believe it was in Baltimore that he shared his testimony and his name is Sam Bonello.

He is in Australia currently but he has an email and he told me to give you his email in case you have questions.

He said he will give you all the material you want regarding this for free as long as you pay for postage.

So if you pay for postage, he'll give this to you.

He dedicated his life to learning more about Islam.

And his email is sam, Sam, Sam period Bonello, B as in boy, O, N as in Nicole, ELL0.

Sam, period, Bonello, B0NELL0, at gmail.com.

He is the best person that I know of in regards to making presentations for Muslims.

And so if you would like more printouts of what you have, and there's even more resources.

There's like, I think he produced something that has pages and pages and pages of how you can use the Quran or how the Quran talks about Jesus.

If you'd like those things, he'd be more than happy to give his materials.

His ministry used to be based in Michigan, and then God brought him back to his country in Australia.

So he is the best person that I know in regards to that.

I have to leave a couple minutes early because I have to be on stage right after this to talk about the outreach, which we're all gonna do, amen?

And so I'm gonna be ending this a couple minutes early, but my good friend Jason Carlson, he'll be coming up and talking to you about how you can do glow and also how you can do a youth rush as well, and that is how you can canvas.

And many of you, maybe you saw the video yesterday, saw the video of all the cold porters and the pre-GUIC.

Well, for those of you who want to do that more, Jason will be coming up at the end and he'll be talking about that, okay?

All right, well, we're gonna be getting right into it.

Giselle, can you grab a Great Controversy from up in the booth area?

Did you get your other canvassing bag back?

Okay, well, there should be a canvassing bag at the Souls booth.

If you can grab a Great Controversy, Steps to Christ, or you can grab the canvassing bag.

At the very end, I want to also share with you some things that we've done regarding the canvassing work and how we have designed a canvas.

Actually, Sam helped design this canvas, how to canvas Muslims in regards to our books.

We've canvassed Muslims and they've gotten our publications.

I'm going to explain to you those things in a moment.

All right, let's go ahead and start with a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, I come before you, an unworthy vessel, trying to share the little that I know.

There is a great multitude of people out there, our friends, the Muslims, and I don't have the slightest clue how we're going to reach 1.5 billion of them.

You set them apart as a special nation, as children under Abraham.

And so I pray that as we learn more, that this morning we would have a greater burden for this special people group, and that there would be missionaries, and that there would be people here, or at the very minimum we would know how to say certain things that would make them search the scriptures.

My mother brought me to the Philippines as a missionary when I was a kid.

She did some missionary work there and there's a really small island.

It's closer to Indonesia than it is to the Philippines.

If you look at the bottom left, it's that little red square.

That little red square is known as Mapun di Tawi-tawi and in that area, that's where they train the extreme version of Muslims.

By the way, Islam is the second largest religious group in the Philippines.

You have Catholicism with about 90 percent, then you have Muslims, and they are trained to be more of the extreme Muslims, the very, you know, the ones who you see flying planes into the World Trade Center.

They were the ones who, they're trained in that region, in that lower southern area of the Philippines.

And I zoomed in on a map to see where that island is.

That's the small little island that my mother brought me to.

It's real primitive there, and there's not really much civilization.

There's no electricity, there's no running water, no flushing toilets, there's nothing like that.

And my mom and her friends, this is before she took me there, they started a clinic and the clinic looked like this.

My mother is a, she has her doctorate and teaches at Loma Linda University, but she had a desire to start a clinic.

So her friends, a few of them, they started a clinic in this remote area in the Philippines.

And 1 particular morning, like 2 or 3 in the morning, my mother tells me distinctly that she remembered hearing horses galloping.

And, you know, it's a very distinctive sound hearing the gallop, the horses gallop.

She didn't get up, but she remembered just thinking, wow, there sounds like to be a lot of horses.

Well, her colleagues got up, the other med school students got up, and they looked outside.

And on the second floor, they looked out.

There was a second floor area, and they looked out, and they saw horses surrounding the clinic.

Woke up the next day and of course it was very hard for them to make friends because they're Muslim and my mom and her friends are Christian and so they wanted nothing to do with the Christians.

1 night, 1 of the villagers, since they don't have electricity, they have a beer bottle, and they put kerosene inside the beer bottle, then they put a rag inside and They light that, and that's their lamp.

Well, this beer bottle, full of kerosene, fell from the bedroom drawer or from the, you know, from the, wherever it was placed, from the table, and it spilled all over a young girl, She was 7 years old.

She had, her body was 70% burned, first degree burns, and they didn't know what to do.

Well now, the villagers are desperate, and they brought her to my mother's clinic, and they said heal her.

Now those of you who are medical professionals here if you're out there in the middle of nowhere you have nothing not even IVs and you're given a young seven-year-old girl burned or her body being burned 70% and the Muslims go to you and say, okay your God's real, heal her.

My mom and her friends were obviously desperate.

They put whatever they could find on her.

4. How to Reach the Five Major Religions Using Literature – Part 1

We're going to go ahead and get right into it, so please, if you can find your seats.

And I'm just going to want to make sure that if there are seats available, we do have people at the end who helps find seats.

We have some ushers because, especially the last session, got really busy.

Just real quick, if you've been here from the beginning, again, if you have the Good News TV bookmark, you want to see the young lady in the back.

She cuts a little piece or basically does a whole punch.

And if you go through all of these, you get a GYC edition canvassing bag and you get a bunch of canvassing books so that you can canvass to others.

You can actually experience the joy of what we do, which is literature evangelism.

So I just wanted to again remind you to make sure to come here and to get a hole punched.

This is now going to be the fourth session.

So this is going to be the fourth session, and we're going to begin with prayer.

Father in heaven, thank you so much that we can study about other religions, but most importantly study your word.

We ask that you will be here, be present in our hearts and in our minds, help us to think, help us to be attentive, and most importantly God, we just again ask you to help us to have a greater desire for you and a hatred for the world.

My name is Michael Tuazon, I'm the director of Souls West.

Bill Crick is the director of literature ministries at Central California Conference.

And those presentations, if you are coming in, will be on AudioVerse.

He talked about how literature is relevant today.

And we're going to be shifting a little bit to talk about how literature is relevant to different religions.

And my goal is to give us some background about each religion, and then to look at some of their literature if we can.

Some it's worth it, some it's not, especially when we look at Islam tomorrow and we look at Jehovah's Witness and Mormons, it's gonna be helpful to look at some of their literature.

And then if we can canvas them, how can we canvas them or bring them back to the Bible?

So I'm going to be trying to accomplish a number of things this afternoon.

But before I give you the goals, I thought it would be nice to go through a review of what we're trying, what Bill was trying to do in the first 3 seminars.

The first thing that I want us to look at is this quote, and this is found in volume 5 of the Testimonies, page 746.

Ellen White says, Just before us is the closing struggle of the great controversy, when with all power and signs and lying wonders and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, Satan is to work to do what everyone?

So right before the end, right before the close of probation, there is 1 goal that Satan has and what is that goal?

Quote goes on to say that he may seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.

Evangelism page 242 goes on to say, he is a deceiver, he falsifies the character of God.

Now we know these things, we know what Satan did in Genesis chapter 3 when he lied to Eve about God's character.

He basically told Eve, God doesn't want you to know this, but if you eat this fruit, you're going to become a superhuman being.

You'll not only know good, but you'll know evil as well, like us.

Satan has lied about God's character from the very beginning.

For others to know the truth and what is that truth?

If you want to know why do we exist in this world, what is our purpose in life, this is what it is.

Evangelism, page 330, paragraph 3, Ellen White says this, the minister of Christ, do you consider yourselves the minister of Christ?

The minister of Christ who is imbued with the spirit and love of his master will so labor that the character of God and of his dear son may be made manifest in the fullest and clearest manner.

Manifest the character of God, right, in the fullest and clearest manner.

He will strive, that is talking about the evangelist, he will strive to have his hearers become intelligent in their conception to God's character.

And then finally, I have the great controversy.

Great controversy, page, Excuse me, Behold Your God, page 13.

So, especially if you were at last year's GYC, the theme was the great controversy.

And of course, if you are a Seventh-day Adventist, 1 of the key doctrines is the great controversy.

And so I have This quote, Behold Your God, page 13, the study of God's character is the very what?

So if I was going to ask you, what is the subject?

What are the nuts and bolts of the great controversy?

The whole world lies in ignorance of God as he really is.

And we who have lived in the world have been unconsciously influenced by this atmosphere.

There is no subject then in which the need to lay aside preconceived ideas and opinion is more critical than this 1.

Basically, the study of God's character is the most important thing that we can study.

He has deceived billions of people, and he has used literature as his primary plan to indoctrinate people.

Remember, Satan tries to counterfeit God in everything.

And I find it fascinating that God is all-powerful, God who is all-knowing, God who is not limited by resources.

He chose to reveal himself or he chose to preserve the story of salvation through what means?

Through digital copies, through DVDs, through Blu-rays.

What did God use as a way to share who he is?

Don't you think that God, who is all-knowing, could have looked into 2015 and said, in 2015, they're going to be using MP4s, Blu-rays.

Don't you think that God could have said, I could stream this on YouTube, Vimeo?

But God chose 1 specific way to preserve his story.

Jehovah's Witness, they have the New World Translation scriptures.

The next 3 sessions, there's 1 today, there's 1 tomorrow, this 1 that we're currently in, there's 1 tomorrow, 9 a.m., and there's 1 Sabbath afternoon.

We're going to be going over these goals.

Number 1, learn the basics of the major religions.

So I'm going to give you a basic, the basics of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam.

Bill Krick

3. Angels & Demons: Supernatural Beings, Literature, and the Struggle for the Soul

Welcome to seminar session number 3 of The Fourth Angel.

And today's title is Angels and Demons, Supernatural Beings, Literature, and the Struggle for the Soul.

Before we jump in, we're going to have 2 live testimonies.

The first 1 is by Janelle Andres, who is currently a Souls West student, Track 2, and she is from the beautiful islands of Hawaii.

And then we're going to have a testimony from Joel Moutre, who currently works as Assistant Literature Ministries Director of the Central California Conference.

Father, we invite your Holy Spirit, we invite your presence, we invite your power to be with us here in this room in the next hour.

And we pray that we can all emerge stronger and full of more faith and more courage to do what is pleasing to you at the end.

I've never actually worn 1 of these before.

Well, I'm very privileged to be able to have a testimony to share with you.

And what I'm going to be sharing with you is why literature evangelism has a special place in my heart.

First of all, to give you a little bit of background information, I was born and raised Adventist.

But, you know, just because I was born and raised in the church, it doesn't mean I had any less of the struggles that the world has, any less of the temptations.

In fact, I fell into the things that many of us fall into.

Most specifically, there was a relationship that I was involved in and my entire world revolved around this 1 guy.

And I started changing everything about myself, the career path that I was going towards, just so I could make him happy because he was everything that I cared about.

But you know, the entire time God was trying to give me a love that only he could fill and satisfy, yet I was trying to fill my own heart with this love from this guy and it really meant absolutely nothing.

And I didn't realize that until he decided that it was time for it to be done away with.

And after me and my boyfriend broke up, that's when I realized how empty that love that I was trying to fill my heart with really was.

After that, I decided that I wanted to travel the world and get away from all of the things that kind of reminded me about him.

So I decided that I was going to study abroad.

I lived on a cruise ship for 3 and a half months, traveling to about 15 different countries.

And while I was studying abroad, God was slowly pricking at my heart.

And I went to some third-world countries, such as, like, Ghana.

And while I was there, I saw people living so simply and how the little things just brought them joy.

I did a bunch of these service projects, kind of like little mini mission trips almost, where we would give toothbrushes to orphanages and teach the kids how to brush their teeth, or we would go and feed the homeless.

And it was interesting because I started to notice a pattern that all of these organizations that I was volunteering for all had a bigger purpose, and they were all Christian organizations that was ultimately trying to spread the gospel.

And it was then that God was really putting in my heart, like, I want you to go into ministry, I want you to live a life that is not for yourself, but is for other people and helping them to get to know God.

And so I came back to the States, and I was like so determined, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go into ministry, But I absolutely had no idea what kind of ministry.

But little did I know, God had a specific ministry that he wanted me to be involved in.

The very month that I came back to Hawaii, he sent 2 literature evangelists by the names of Greg and Karen Wilson that happened to be Bible working on that same island.

And it was interesting because I was so determined that I was gonna plan the kind of ministry that I was gonna go into, that I was applying for all of these Christian organizations, not necessarily Adventists, but organizations that really focused in outreach and ministering to other people.

And I was going to apply for these internships, but there was a bunch of resumes and essays, and it was kind of crazy how hard it really was to apply for it.

And so at Bible study 1 night, where I met Greg and Karen Wilson, the 2 literature evangelist Bible workers, as I shared the prayer request, Karen came up to me that night, and she asked me if I needed help with my resume and with my applications.

And I was like, yeah, that would be awesome.

So as we would spend time together, every single time we'd hang out and we'd work on these resumes and things, it would always lead into an impromptu Bible study.

And it was interesting because, you know, like I said, I was raised Adventist, but I never really studied the Bible for myself, and I've never really been taught how to study the Bible.

And when I would study it with her, it was the first time that the Word of God was really pricking my heart, and it was being, like, really personal to me.

We would read verses, and Karen would tell me, like, I want you to insert your name right there because he did that for you.

And every time we'd hang out, she would always tell me, hey, you should think about canvassing or you should think about this program called Youth Rush.

And you know, I liked her so much that I was like, I'll pray about it.

And that's all it took for God to be like, all right, that's good enough.

Long story short, in that aspect, I went to Youth Rush that summer, And God just changed my entire world.

It was really interesting because the more I was trying to reach out for these souls, I realized that the first heart that God was trying to win was my own.

It's really amazing how God can use you in trying to reach other people, that He's saving you at the same time.

And I started seeing Him do that in my life.

As I kept doing this work, knocking on people's doors, going out of your comfort zone to go into theirs to bring them the Gospel in a very simple way in the messages in our books.

There was this 1 experience where there was this man who was literally on his deathbed, and he told me that he could die any minute.

And before I left, he told me, he's like, you know, something that's really interesting is just 10 minutes ago, I was on my knees praying that God would show me that he loved me.

And then here you are coming to my door with a book telling me that I can understand how God is my friend and that he does love me.

And you know, it's interesting because there's so much more that this work can do that we don't even really see.

The time that I was really sold out for this work is when I met someone that reminded me of my own family member.

Do any of you guys have family members or loved ones or friends that you're praying for them to come to God?

Maybe they've drifted away or they've never given their heart to God.

1 of them was specifically 1 of my cousins.

And as I was talking to this guy, everything about him reminded me of my cousin.

And that's when it dawned on me, you know, The people that you're going and trying to reach, these are someone else's family members.

Who knows if they're praying for them to get reached.

And if someone had the opportunity to go to your family member, like wouldn't you want them to spread the gospel to them?

But that's the same thing that you're doing in literature evangelism, is you're going to other people's families that they really want to bring to Christ.

And after that, God was really pressing on my heart, like, I want you to be in this work longer.

Like, I want you to continue to reach out, and I want you to get trained more.

And God was putting on my heart that he wanted me to go to Souls West.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

5. How to Reach the Five Major Religion Using Literature -Part 2

44m

4. How to Reach the Five Major Religions Using Literature – Part 1

49m

3. Angels & Demons: Supernatural Beings, Literature, and the Struggle for the Soul

53m

2. Literature’s Role in the Last Days

52m

1. Literature Distribution for Today’s Mind in Today’s World

44m

6. Sharpening the Entering Wedge

44m

5. Top 10 Things a Young Person Can Do to Achieve Maximal Mental and Physical Capacity

1h

4. Reaching Millions for the Master

57m

3. Benevolence in the Big City as it Relates to God’s Work at the End

52m

2. Prayer in Medical Missionary Work

53m

1. The Three Angel’s Message Played Out in a Persons Life: How to Live a Testimony of Health

56m

6. Joining Jesus at the Cross (Hebrews 11-13)

55m

Sound Doctrine