ASI 2009: By Knowing Him

ASI 2009 Youth Meetings

Jessica Trinh Weekend

Jessica Trinh

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

I Will Bring the Blind

Dear Heavenly Father God, you know I come before you Lord without anything to offer.

And how amazing it is Lord that you would use someone like me Lord to pour forth so many blessings God.

Lord, I ask that I simply be a faithful steward of the blessings that you have given me, that it may be an encouragement to any who watches, Lord, and that your words may be used according to your purpose and to fulfill your will.

Lord, you know what is on my heart, and I simply ask that your Holy Spirit be leading to take out anything that needs to be taken out or add anything that needs to be added, Lord, to be tailor-made for anybody who is watching, God.

Guide my words, guide my thoughts, Father God.

We pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen.

Let me go ahead and share my screen here.

And I simply thought I could, it would be a chance to be able to share just what God has done to bring me to where I am now.

I am presently serving overseas in Southeast Asia with an organization focused on reaching the unreached.

When talking about the unreached, I'm referring to areas where there is less than 2% of Christian presence.

Countries with swaths of people who have never heard of Jesus ever in their life or even met 1 Christian.

Groups of people who don't even have Bibles in their own language.

Most of these Places are found in the 1040 window, which is a region of the world that is, when we say the 1040 window, we're referring to an area of the world that is referring to 10 degrees north of the equator to up to 40 degrees north of the equator, going from Africa to the Pacific Islands.

Now these places are considered hard to reach with the gospel because they have some of the most populous cities in the whole entire world.

You have many of these areas are heavily Muslim, atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, and which makes for an area that is very hostile to the gospel.

Some of the poorest cities are within this region.

We're talking about people living on less than $2 a day.

You take all these factors together, and that has, when you have lots of people, not enough money, an environment hostile to the gospel, you have a great recipe for making areas that are very hard to reach.

Now I share, I'm sure maybe many of you have heard of these things, but I always find that there's always 1 person who's not familiar with this information.

So you know just to give an idea of sort of the situation, okay?

If you were to make, you can see that circle right there.

It says that there are more people living inside the circle than outside of it.

And not just more people in that circle, but specifically more Muslims, more Hindus, more Buddhists, more communists, living inside that circle than outside in the whole entire world.

And so you can just like, I've always liked that map because it gives me just an idea of like, wow, there really is such a dense area to reach for the gospel.

And how is our church doing to reach these places?

Back In 2004, we had 14 countries unreached by the Adventist Church.

According to the most recent numbers I could find, in 2017, that number has changed to 22 countries with 0 Adventists.

That number, as you can notice friends, did not go down as time has gone on, but that number has grown, has increased.

In a country like Afghanistan, we have 32 million people and only 5 Adventists in that country.

In a country like Iran, 78 million people with 0 Adventists.

I have been told that it could be that there are underground members.

But a country like 78 million people, I sure would pray that it's more than 0 Adventists.

And, you know, just talking a little bit more broadly, in a more generic sense, in 2004, we had 5, 000 unreached people groups.

When we're talking about people groups, you can think of, you know, we have 200 countries, but inside many of those countries, there are groups of people that have their own language and their own culture.

5, 000 of those groups unreached in 2004.

Moving forward to 2020, that number, friends, is now 7, 414 unreached people groups.

6, 208 groups of them are in the 1040 window.

You know, typically, you lay these kind of numbers in front of any kind of business.

The executives would look at those numbers and say, what's your business model is failing.

The numbers are growing in the wrong direction.

But friends, we need to face the facts, the work growing faster than we can keep up with it.

And when I look and see these things, there's a quote that makes me that sort of speaks to what I think sometimes.

Unreached peoples are unreached for a reason.

They're hard, difficult, and dangerous to reach.

Every dot that you see is representing a people group, not just 1 person, but a people group, a group of people ranging anywhere from a population of 1, 000 to 100, 000 people that are unreached for Jesus.

Unreached, remember, is meaning they don't have 1 Christian.

They have never met a Christian in their life.

They don't have a Christian in their area.

They don't have churches in their area to tell them about Jesus.

They most likely don't have Bibles in their language to learn about and hear the gospel.

They're not going to find a glow track on their door.

They're not going to stumble across 3ABN on their satellite TV.

Because we know that Jesus will not come until every person has a chance to hear the gospel.

And he is too loving to give up billions of souls represented by these red dots.

And it's going to take more than just hoping satellite TV or Facebook or whatever technology we may be hoping to depend upon to reach these people.

It's going to, it requires an actual person who will personally bring the gospel to these people.

It was in 2008 when I graduated from La Sierra University and I had no idea what God had planned.

Just about 2 years before I knew that God had sent to me, follow me into ministry.

At the time, my faith was a bit in its infancy, and I didn't really know how to seek God in a more clear way, perhaps, or Maybe that's how God designed it.

The only thing that I knew that God wanted from me was to change my major from medical tech to theology.

But if you had asked me what career I would pursue by changing my major or what job I was expecting, the only sure thing I could tell you would be, I don't know.

You want to ask me about a five-year plan at that time?

I didn't even know in 5 months what God was wanting me to do.

But the mercy of God practically landed me a job at the Voice of Prophecy in 2009.

And I can say that those years of working in that ministry were some of the best of my life.

It was so good that I was excited to go back to work on Mondays, even when I went on vacation and I was looking forward to going back to work.

But even in a place where I felt like I was sort of putting to use what I knew and I was being used by God, there was something that was stirring in me.

Session, Jan Paulsen, General Conference President at the time, he did a spotlight in missions on the early church.

He was talking about the early church and when they realized, they actually came to the realization that the gospel was no longer, right, it became the instead of shut door to open door.

And they started to go out and he said this quote, so much of it was driven by their own personal personal commitment to go and do this.

There was just that strong conviction that we cannot do mission without going out, physically going out and being there.

So they made that decision at great personal sacrifice.

They went out with no thought of ever coming back.

They just went out to finish the work, to finish, to do mission.

You know, when he said that, and it was really just that quote, but I would look up that quote from the GC and I would rewatch it over and over because I was just so inspired by the early SDA church, by their sheer living dedication to finish the work.

When the church realized that the message was to go to all the world, they felt the conviction that they must go.

And they went out without with a plan of just not coming back.

And it blows my mind because this was in that time when they didn't have the travel options and the telecommunications that we have now.

I mean, I've complained about a trip that takes close to 24 hours to get on literally on the opposite side of the world.

But the believers in that day and age, they didn't even know if they would make the journey to the destination, let alone make it back.

And then in 2012, I went to an army Bible camp where they shared a video about the unreached and the billions of people who have never heard of Jesus.

And that video was like an arrow to my heart and 1 quote stuck out, no 1 has the right to hear the gospel twice while there remains someone who has not heard it once.

When I read that, it made me uncomfortable.

Jessica Frame

From Partyer to Teacher

I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to fly through.

So I hope you can listen to someone speaking really fast.

And we do have some really good pictures, and I'm going to talk about those and fly through.

But first, I just want to tell you a little tiny bit about myself really quickly, because you know what?

The whole purpose of this is to tell you God has a plan for people's lives, even when you don't know it.

Because like I told you a little bit last night, I was not a Christian growing up.

And it's a shock still today to me where I'm at right now.

Like when they find out I teach in a Christian school, they're like, what?

When I went to college, I started partying when I was really young, partied, partied.

Went to college, it got a lot worse and that's what ended up leading me to becoming a Christian was it got so bad, We'll start the pictures in a minute.

That's about the reservation and like this stuff, I don't have any pictures for it, but it got so bad.

I was partying and stuff and trying to fill this hole inside of me that like partying and dating and all this stuff and doing crazy things.

I was doing everything I could to try to fill some kind of a hole inside of me and nothing was doing it.

And it becomes really frustrating when you're doing that with your life.

I did more drinking and more drugs and it just was, it's like the hole was getting bigger.

And so I got to a point where I just wanted to die.

And I was taking so many different combinations of drugs and stuff just thinking well maybe I just won't wake up and that'll be awesome.

And it would have been fine with me at that point.

And then my dad came down to college and made a surprise visit, realized I was kind of a mess and he's not an Adventist, still isn't, but somebody had stuck a Doug Batchelor prophecy seminar thing in his mailbox and he went to it at the Adventist Church.

This was like 10 years, 15, a little bit more than 10 years ago, and he happened to go to that seminar.

So when he came down to where I was living 15 hours away and saw that I was a mess, he's like, I don't know what to do with you.

And for me to even hear my dad say that was shocking because we didn't go to church growing up.

So it was kind of like, wow, why is dad talking about Jesus?

So he took me to the Adventist Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which is where I went to college and stuff.

And the very first time I went in that church, it was like God surrounded me with people that made me feel like I was not a bad person, and I never stopped going.

And I immediately was like, wow, this is what I needed inside.

And so I quit hanging out with all of my friends.

I was halfway through college, and I literally did not have any friends after that.

Because I had to separate myself when you're doing drugs and stuff.

It's just hard to continually be around that.

And so at that point, I actually tried with my best friend to tell her, I'm going to quit and she made fun of me, actually tried to hit me and was like, what you think you're better than us now?

So at that point I realized, I'm going to have to separate myself from all these people.

The last 2 years of college, I never really made any Christian friends because there weren't a lot of young Christian people at the beach.

And I'll tell you what though, that last 2 years of college, me being alone, not having a lot of friends, but learning about God for the first time in my life at 22, 21 I guess I was, the most fulfilling time in my entire life.

Like you can be completely alone as far as human beings go, but if you have God there and he's working on you, it feels awesome.

And I've never felt as great as I did at that time, and it was wonderful.

For some reason, I changed my major to elementary ed while I was in college.

I hated school up until the day I graduated.

And somehow, I took an Education 101 class, ended up becoming a teacher.

I didn't even tell my dad for a year that I changed my major because he was an art major, didn't want to hurt his feelings and it's like I don't know why I'm doing these things but it's like God was moving me and I didn't even know it.

After college and I started teaching public school I loved it.

I taught in a really disadvantaged school.

I got all the kids that none of the other teachers wanted.

I just enjoyed the challenge of trying to make them want to do good in school and want to do things and be positive.

I loved that job, but still there was something missing.

I worked there for 3 years in the public school, and I loved the job, but I still felt like I kind of wasn't living up to my potential, and I didn't know what to do.

At the end of it, it said my talents were working with disadvantaged children.

And I was like, great, I already knew that.

I thought I was going to find out something that was going to give me a purpose and, you know, lead me on to something a little bit more fulfilling.

And I was kind of sad after that seminar because I already knew that I liked working with disadvantaged children.

Long story short, I used to fly out here to hike a lot because South Carolina is flat and I love the West.

I emailed the conference office here and said, I'm getting ready to come on a hiking trip.

I'd like to see what it's like and join up with it because our church is not doing anything mission-like back east.

I just feel like I want to do something for God.

All I wanted was like a week-long mission trip and ended up, they emailed me back and they're like, there's no mission stuff going on, but you sound like the perfect person for this job.

There's this little school on a reservation, it's been opened 1 year.

There are 4 kids that have been kicked out of public school.

This is what it looked like when I got there.

There's no money, no supplies, but you could live there for free.

You'd have to find your own money and kind of grow the school and find all the money to run the school and just make it into like a real official thing.

Why would she think that someone would want to leave a well-paying job, move across the country away from everybody they know onto a reservation, and why would you do that?

And so Literally, I never gave it another thought.

I kind of made fun of it to my friends and stuff.

I was like, can you believe this lady thought I'd actually do that?

And then I don't even know how long it was later.

Like literally I didn't even think about it.

Somebody was praying for me or something so you know what guys God has a plan for your life and you might not even know it and as long as you're open to him and open to doing what he wants he will work things out and it will shock you and I'm still shocked And that's been 7 years ago since I moved out there.

When I got there, some of you that cooked in the cafeteria today saw that's where the school was, was in the front end.

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Jessica Frame

2 Teachings

Essential Jessica Frame

I Will Bring the Blind

54m

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I Will Bring the Blind

54m

From Partyer to Teacher

29m

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From Partyer to Teacher

29m

I Will Bring the Blind

54m

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Jessica Trinh Weekend

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ASI 2009 Youth Meetings

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Aug 5 – 8, 2009

ASI 2009: By Knowing Him

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