Giselle Hasel

GYC 2017: Arise

Plenary

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC Beyond

This message was presented at the GYC 2017 conference, ARISE, in Phoenix, Arizona.

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

For the last 15 years, GYC has stood to encourage, to equip, and to inspire young people to do something amazing, radical for God.

But as we've looked at the last 15 years, at the last 16 conferences, including this 1, We've discussed and we've thought about it and we've come to the realization that really out of the last 16 conferences, all we've had is maybe 3 at most that were at least in name mission focused.

Every year we go out, every year we send buses and we do things for God, but that's just not good enough.

This past week we were thrilled to partner with Pathway to Health and to see thousands of people radically impacted for the rest of their lives almost instantly.

People who had surgeries, people who had all sorts of problems come in and leave enriched and knowing that God loves them.

We need to be able to do more just as much.

This is why we've had Ambassador for the last 2 years.

This is why we've spent so much time trying to look at different ways that we can empower each and every 1 of you to be involved in ministry.

And so we thought about it and we're terminating the Ambassador Project because it was such a success.

And you'll say, why would you, Why would you end it?

And that is exactly why we as GYC have started GYC Beyond.

We want to go beyond just the annual conference.

A movement is a movement of young people.

We're doing something, not just for 4 days, but 365 or 366 if it's a leap year.

And so we have realized it can't continue like this.

And so as GYC leadership, we have been praying and thinking, how can we empower you to be able to do ministry where you are?

Something is always better than nothing, amen?

And God can bless small endeavors and make them wonderful and successful.

And we at USC, we have been praying and we have been putting together resources, partnering with other ministries and speakers, providing resources for you throughout the year so that you are empowered, inspired, and guided to do some kind of personal ministry in your local church, wherever you are, on your campus, in your school, even in your family.

We had an appeal this morning for missionary service, appeals for following God's will.

But this appeal, the decision you make, has to go beyond this conference.

As we go throughout the year, we have to remember what decision we have made and ask the Lord to guide us into the right direction.

And we want to see next year, we want to come back and see what God will do.

So this year what we're trying to do is to once again make as many resources available as possible.

And we've got our website, gycweb.org slash beyond that we've set up to show a little bit of what's been done over the last few years, the number of baptisms, the number of doors knocked on, and to just give you an idea of what GYC has done, not only at our conference, but even through a small number of people who are involved in the Ambassador Program.

And so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be offering a podcast twice a month, which will be there to equip and train you in different ways.

Maybe I can't do evangelism in the traditional sense, but how can I be involved in whatever trade I do with what I like to do?

And so we're going to be trying to use that as an avenue by which you can be more involved.

We also have a workbook that we're going to be putting together month by month.

Every week you can do a couple pages with activities that will help you succeed and ultimately we want to be a support to you as an executive committee as the organizers of this conference and so we've set up a page if you open your phone up you look on Facebook you'll see there's a group GYC beyond it's a sub group under our main page it's a group and you can join that page and if you have questions if you're trying to do something in ministry, you can post there, and we will make ourselves available to try to answer questions, to help support and lift what you are trying to do.

I wanna share with you a quote that really has guided the GYC movement over the past couple of years.

"'Success in any line demands a definite aim.

He who would achieve true success in life must keep steadily in view the aim worthy of his endeavor.

Such an aim is set before the youth, GYC, of today.

The heaven-appointed purpose of giving the gospel to the world in this generation is the noblest that can appeal to any human being.

It opens a field of effort to everyone whose heart Christ has touched.

Friends, what would happen if we make ourselves available for that noble aim?

Let's go beyond and let's come back by God's grace at next year's GYC and have a soul winning celebration.

Let's have baptisms of GYC and let's bring people that we have won for Christ to GYC next year.

7 years ago, I was a young person without any experience, talents, skills, or abilities that I knew of.

But I had a desire to serve God, and so I asked Him to give me an opportunity.

The very next week, my opportunity came to me in the form of an invitation to pass out evangelistic flyers.

And despite the hot summer's afternoon, I will never forget the joy that was in my heart.

As I passed out flyer after flyer after flyer, I was overjoyed because God had given me a chance to be used by Him.

Over the years, God has taken me, and despite my flaws, my weaknesses, and my failures.

He's grown me and taken me to places that I could never imagine possible.

And not only that, but he's given me the ability to work for him in ways that I'm passionate about and that are important to me.

I stand before you a very different person to who I was 7 years ago, simply because in being used by God, He has changed me.

This afternoon, I want to share 3 main ideas that I believe will help you get started on an incredible journey.

And not only do I think these will help you get started in service for God, but if you're already active, I believe they will keep you in service for God.

The first idea that I want to leave with you is you are not a big deal, but you are.

I think so many times we bring the world and its principles into ministry.

The world values being seen, being heard.

And perhaps this is why I had a friend who once shared with me his ambition to become the next General Conference President.

In fact, he even mentioned that he wished the Adventist Church would have open elections in a similar way to political parties.

I must admit, my friend later changed his mind and repented of his desires, but his desire is not really that unique.

Even if you and I are not as bold about sharing our ambitions with others, how many of us confuse our desire for ambition and success with our desire to serve Jesus?

You know, Jesus had this same problem to address with his disciples.

So many times his disciples were fighting amongst themselves over who was greatest, who had the most importance, Who would be closest to the King in the heavenly kingdom?

In response to this, Jesus shared with him his principles of the kingdom of God and ministry.

In Matthew 20, verses 25-28, Jesus said, ministry.

In Matthew chapter 20 verses 25 to 28 Jesus said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

But whosoever will be great among you, let him be his minister.

And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.

Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.

Servants work hard without recognition, without appreciation, and without applause.

You and I are not ready for ministry until we are willing to be invisible so that God can be seen through us.

500 Years Later: Is the Reformation Still Relevant?

Michael Hasel

5. The Protest Continues: The Remnant through Prophecy

This message was presented at the GYC 2017 conference, Arise, in Phoenix, Arizona.

It's good to see you this morning and it's good to be here with you again today and I praise the Lord that my voice is still here.

It's much lower than it normally is but But God has been good and at least I have a voice.

We sometimes take for granted our voices, don't we?

And yet it is such an amazing gift that God has given us to speak for Him and to testify of Him, and we want to continue that today.

So I'd invite you to bow your heads with me as we pray and as we open this last session up for this seminar series entitled, 500 Years Later, Is the Reformation Still Relevant?

Our Heavenly Father, we have been impressed as we have looked at history, both from the Middle Dark Ages all the way through to the last few weeks.

We have been impressed again that your word and its prophetic message is more relevant perhaps today than it has ever been in history.

And we pray today as we close this seminar with some concluding thoughts concerning the Adventist Church and the special message that you have given this remnant movement that your Holy Spirit would be present here.

We are simply fragile vessels like the ancient pots that I hold so often as I excavate in the Middle East.

All of us desire to be molded and shaped by your spirit so that we can become the vessels and be the vessels today to carry this message forward.

So we just pray again you would be with us and that these would not be my words or just my thoughts, but that you would use this broken vessel to communicate your word for today.

We began this seminar yesterday morning with a modern overview, if you will, very recent overview of where we have been in just the last few years and where we have gone as a looking at the events around the world and looking at the ecumenical movement in particular and the recent developments that have been taking place, particularly aimed and focused at the 500 year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which we noted was not simply a 500 year anniversary.

It goes back hundreds of years earlier, and we touched on some of those things.

We continued in our second presentation to look at why does this matter?

Is the protest, is the Reformation still important today?

And we went through a number of different teachings in the Roman Catholic Church and contrasted that with the teachings that we find in scripture and that we found find in the early reformers and I have to be honest with you this was a cursory one-hour overview you could spend a semester or 2 or more studying all of this and certainly there are many individuals who have spent their lifetime studying Reformation history.

We just kind of encapsulated some of the highlights of that.

We then continued in the afternoon looking at art and how art reflected and was used as artillery between the reformers and the Catholic Church and the counter-reformation after the Council of Trent.

And we witnessed how in art itself, you can see visually in the media, you can see this battle and this controversy taking place.

For some of you, that may have been a new perspective because we don't often talk about art in that way.

Others of you may have heard some of those things before.

And I just want to say, a lot of that research and work, especially in relationship to the Noli map that Giselle spent time with you on yesterday, was done years ago when she was pursuing some doctoral classes at Emory University and was taking a class in ancient Rome on prints, maps, and art.

And 1 of the things that her very well-known professor said to her after she was finished with her research on the Noli map, and it was a very difficult semester because all of the source material that she was using for that presentation was in Italian, All of it.

She was a French major in college and speaks French.

They're both Romance languages, as you know, Latin-based languages, but they're not Italian.

And we are, We're very dependent on Google Translate.

This was years ago when it was just first starting to come out.

And luckily, her father, who she does come from an Italian heritage and background.

Her last name, her maiden name was Sarli, which is a good Italian name from the south of Italy.

But her dad was able to help a little bit, but it was not easy.

I remember pouring through those documents and those books and those articles.

But this is what 1 of her professors said, or her professor in that class, she said, you know what?

Digging back and looking at the sources, and this was something that the reformers were very into, and Melanchthon and others, she says, I still believe that there is a truth to be found.

You have to understand for a major professor of art history at a major university to say that in the 21st century is kind of unique because we live in a very postmodern age where truth is something that's very relative and you kind of create the truth and the interpretation of the art based on your experience with it, not necessarily based on the art itself and what it originally was intended to convey.

At any rate, we went through 2 presentations.

And today what I want to do is I want to go through and raise the question, and maybe I should have titled this a little differently.

I would maybe retitle this, The Reformation Continues Rather Than the Protest Continues.

The protest kind of seems very antagonistic, doesn't it?

But I think that what we need to understand is that we as a remnant church called for this time in Earth's history we have a very special message to give and that message is a continued message of reformation.

We could have cited many other reformers, the magisterial reformers, the radical reformers.

We cited Luther often, but Luther did not come to a complete understanding of all of the truths of scripture, and we're still working towards that today.

We cannot assume that we have everything and that we cannot continue to learn and continue to grow in our walk with God and in our understanding of scripture.

And so that Reformation in our own personal lives and in our interaction with the Bible, that Reformation must continue.

And so I want to look today with you at some of the key elements that I believe make the Seventh-day Adventist so unique in this time in Earth's history that it has become for me, and I've been around a little while, but I'm not as old as some of my in-laws, my parents, who have been working in the church and have been around much longer.

But what has, for me, become a very convincing reason to see our place as a prophetic movement in history.

And I believe truly that God has called us for such a time as this.

Is it possible that the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been called for such a time as this.

Is it a coincidence that so many of the unique doctrines, and I'm going to focus on a few of them today, not even all of these, okay?

But the 5 S's, sometimes we refer to them.

My daughter just took a freshman level class at Southern Adventist University in Adventist Heritage, and she learned about the 5 S's, which are kind of the more unique messages of our church and what distinguishes our church from many other churches.

But the Sabbath, which will be tied into creation in our presentation today, the state of the dead, the spirit of prophecy, the continuing work of the spirit of prophecy today in the work and writings of Ellen White, and the sanctuary with Jesus as our high priest, and of course our emphasis on the Second Coming.

Several years ago, we had a special Staley Lectureship at Southern Adventist University, and a very well-known Baptist theologian came and spoke on our campus.

The Staley Lectureship and other lectureships that we have inaugurated since that time continue to open dialogue with other Bible-believing Protestant Christians that we bring to our campus in order to learn from them and for them to learn from us.

He is very well known as a writer and particularly a well-known person for also some of his creative writing, very similar to kind of C.S.

Lewis's approaches with the Chronicles of Narnia and that kind of thing.

He's written some kind of, I don't know if I would call it science fiction, but some kind of works that are displaying the gospel in a more story form.

Anyway, he was sitting with us at dinner, and he asked this question.

He says, why is the Seventh-day Adventist church growing in the leaps and bounds that it is around the world?

How do you answer that in a few sentences?

But my former dean and my colleague and dear friend, Jack Blanco, who some of you know worked in his own personal life in documenting his own journey through scripture and created as a result of his own personal devotions the clear word.

Professor Blanco did not hesitate in answering.

He says, we believe that Jesus is coming very soon.

We need to get the message out that Jesus is coming and that people need to repent and come to him.

And I thought, wow, that's the nutshell, isn't it?

That's the nutshell, that's what drives us in many ways.

So today, what I want to focus on, we focused yesterday on the authority of the Bible alone, or sola scriptura.

Today I wanna focus on the historicist interpretation of prophecy, and then we're going to look at a few of these other elements just more in passing.

I want to focus particularly on the Sabbath and creation, or particularly on creation, and look at that today.

The Reformation stood on the imperative of the Bible.

It was the Bible that gave rise to these new insights that challenged Rome and its traditions.

And it was the Bible that gave hope and gave freedom to the ancient Well ancient I shouldn't say that to the reformers who were living at that time and 1 of the things that they discovered from their Bible study Rediscovered I would say They certainly did not invent it because we find that this is the method that is used in scripture alone, but that was the historicist interpretation of prophecy.

Now we may think today that the historicist interpretation of prophecy and our understanding of the identifications that we have been talking about during this seminar, the contrast between the papacy and the church and so forth.

This is all stuff that Adventists have come up with.

But we've learned that that's certainly not the case, right?

That this has been around for a very, very long time.

And that we have, in fact, been standing on the shoulders of the early reformers who have worked on this.

We have built on what they have established.

And if you have a chance ever to read through, and I know it takes about this much space in your shelf, but you can also go online to the LNG.

4. Art as Artillery: The Papal Counter-Reformation

All right, let's ask the Lord's presence.

Dear Father, thank you so much that we are part of a golden thread of truth that has been handed down through the generations and looking towards your second coming.

Lord, We want to be as faithful as the reformers were.

We want to be bold, courageous, and have the conviction that they have.

We need to memorize it, we need to know it, so that this conviction will penetrate every cell of our body.

We know this is what we want to live and die for.

And that we are willing to do this because we are going to see you and your face soon to be coming to make things right.

Please be with us this afternoon for 1 more lecture.

Help us to stay awake and give us the mental stability and energy and help me to have the presence of mind.

Use my lips, speak your words through me Lord.

Art as artillery, the papal counter-reformation.

I say this with a little bit of a clause because really the counter-reformation effort in art started after the Council of Trent.

So I'm going to start a little earlier than that.

So we'll just lump it together, but it's not really all counter-reformation.

I want to first, just because I believe in the power of art, and I want to share that power with you, I know it's a lot to learn.

There's a lot you have to learn to really use art and to understand art sometimes.

But really, it's not rocket science, okay?

At Seventh-day Adventist, we actually know a lot about art, and I'll tell you why.

He is the ultimate artist where we get all of our ideas from, because all of art comes from nature.

We get these things from God, and we remix it into our own experience, and we express our ideas.

And it's an amazing thing that we can take part in this thing called creativity, right?

We do it, some of you like writing poetry, some of you like writing music, and some of you like the visual arts.

And if you look at the heavens, what does the Bible say?

The heavens declare yeah, the glory of God.

And it also says in john 1, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.

So God has an amazing power because his word can make things happen.

And in that sense, I wish it would be much easier for me as an artist.

Man, I have an idea, just speak it and boom.

But what I want to get to is that nature reveals God as an artist, Christ as an artist.

And Christ does this Because he's showing us his love for us.

His art, by default, shows us his mind, shows us about his character.

There's actual in art, the Fibonacci rule, I don't know if you, yeah, there's actually something that keeps repeating itself in nature.

And you know that whoever designed this is the same person.

And when God placed us here, he didn't just place us haphazard in an ugly place.

Actually there's a discipline called neuroaesthetics.

Now I'm not a doctor and I'm not a psychiatrist, So this is like a little bit stepping out of my comfort zone.

But it's from the University of Emory, where I went to.

There's a lot of research, and they're saying that beauty heals the mind.

But you can sense that when you're walking in nature.

There's a beauty of nature is very healthy.

And in the seventh day of creation, and I don't know if you've ever seen an artist working, but if you've seen an artist working, they're working and they're working, whatever they're doing, sculpture, painting.

And then they step back and they're looking at it a little bit.

And then they're like, no, it needs something.

Back to Menu

Presenter

Giselle Hasel

All Recordings

GYC Beyond

58m

5. The Protest Continues: The Remnant through Prophecy

1h 20m

4. Art as Artillery: The Papal Counter-Reformation

57m

2. The Revolutionary Protest: Just a Misunderstanding?

1h 10m

1. The New Roman Empire: The Modern Rise of the Papacy

52m

Art as Artillery: The Visual Battle Between the Reformers and the Counter-Reformation

49m

Panel Discussion

58m

Sound Doctrine