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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

IONA Missions: Rooted in Christ

Benjamin Ng

Sleeping in The Storm

Our gracious loving Father, Lord, we're so thankful that you brought us safely through another week.

And Lord, as the sun sets into the Sabbath this evening, I pray the sun of righteousness would rise in our hearts.

And Lord, as we open the Bible to study, as we seek wisdom from thy words and the message that you have for us this evening, I pray that you would send the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us into all truth and to convict us and convert us as well.

And most of all, Lord, I pray that our hearts would be open to this message this evening, for we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

The title of my message this evening is entitled Sleeping in the Storm, And I'd like to invite you to turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Jonah.

Jonah chapter 2 is the more famous chapter of course to many of us.

Jonah gets swallowed by a big fish and he's spit out 3 days later and then he goes and does his mission in Nineveh.

But in Jonah chapter 1, a very interesting story and I believe a very prophetic application that we can learn from this chapter with us this evening.

And this story begins starting in verse 1.

The Bible says, Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness is come up before me." Jonah, a prophet of the Lord, and God comes directly to Jonah and says, Jonah, I want you to cry against that city Nineveh.

And I want you to give a very specific message, and he tells them, cry against them because their wickedness is come up against me.

And in verse, chapter 3, we also see, Chapter 3, and we see the message in verse 4 that Jonah had to bear.

For we see in verse 2, pardon me, it says, Arise, go to Nineveh.

God gives Jonah that same message, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.

And that message that he gave is found in verse 4.

And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey.

And he cried and said, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

He said, Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh, and I want you to tell this wicked city and all the wicked inhabitants, they have 40 days, and if they don't repent, I'm going to destroy the city.

Simply put, Jonah was given a judgment hour message.

Jonah was given a message that depended upon life and death circumstances.

Jonah, could I say in our day and age, he was given a present truth message.

And keep this in mind as we go through the rest of Jonah chapter 1.

Like many of us, God said in verse 2, arise Jonah.

We arise and God says, go east, and Jonah fled west.

God said, I have a message for you, Jonah, and Jonah runs the opposite direction.

But it says that Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord and went down to Joppa, and he found a ship going to Tarshish.

So he paid the fare thereof and went down into it to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

So Jonah flees from God's express command.

And in verse 4 it says, but the Lord sent out a great wind.

Now what does wind represent in the Bible, friends?

And in Proverbs chapter 1 in verse 27, that is where we find the direct interpretation.

If we were to put on our prophetic glasses for a moment, we see that when God sent out a wind, prophetically we're seeing, according to the Bible and its interpretation, God sent out destruction.

It says the Lord, verse 4, sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.

Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his God, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them.

And this is a situation that we see in our world today, friends.

China earthquake, Tsunamis, destruction that happens everywhere around us.

And dare I say, even in the United States, tornadoes, flooding, and all these sorts of things that we see.

And I'm not saying that God is the author of every single 1 of these disasters, but yet I know, according to verse 4, it said that the Lord sent out a great wind.

That wind of strife and destruction and despair, it came from the Lord Himself.

And notice how the mariners, those heathens, those people on the ship, how they're reacting.

It says they were afraid and cried every man unto his God.

And this is the exact situation that we see in the world today, friends.

We see Buddha, the Buddhists, they're crying out to the people.

We see the Muslims, they're crying out to Allah.

We see that when destruction happens on every side, all the pagans, all the heathens, all those that have a knowledge of their own God, they cry out.

But more than that, it says in verse 5 that they cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea to lighten it of them.

Somehow these heathens, somehow these pagans, somehow these people that don't know the true God, they're throwing out their possessions, they're throwing out their worldly things, they're throwing out the things that weigh them down to this world, even though they don't know the true God.

They're trying to lighten themselves from this load that they have on the world because they realize that something stupendous is about to take place on this earth.

But it says in verse 5, but Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship, and he lay and was what?

Somehow this prophet of God, somehow this present truth speaker, somehow this person that was given a judgment hour message, when he ran from the Lord, not only did he run, he ran down into the ship, down to Tarshish, And when everyone else around him was crying, Buddha, Allah, all the Hindus, everybody crying to their own God, throwing out their earthly possessions, this present truth speaker is fast asleep.

Verse 6, so the ship master came to him and said unto him, what meanest thou, O sleeper?

Arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us that we perish not.

Notice, it's the heathens that came to Jonah.

What are you doing sleeping in this time?

That this man of God had to be woken up by the ship master and the mariners.

Verse 7, and they said, everyone to his fellow, come, Let us cast lots that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us.

So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

Verse 8, Then said they unto him, tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause is this evil upon us?

We know that this disaster has come because of you.

That's what Jonah would have said if he was alive in our day and age today.

I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, which made the sea and the dry land.

Robbie Berry

David Ng

The Beehive

I hope you're not too tired, and I hope you'll be able to bear with us as we go through this last session.

I know Peter has spent a lot of time this morning as well as this afternoon talking about and showing from the Bible about evangelism, about the need for unity.

But what we'd like to do now is share a little, put a little flesh around that and give you a bit of testimony and tell you a little bit about what we've been doing in Virginia.

We've been working with a church there called Culpeper, my brother and I.

It's something that we were doing before we joined Iona at the beginning of this year.

But it's a model that we would like to emulate to other churches, and it's going to be part of our program.

So Iona is not just going to consist of a training school, but we'd like to be able to place our students after that out in the field and to be able to work with the churches and have long-term relationships with the churches.

And so we believe that this other piece of work that we're starting up is just as important.

So please join me as I tell you a little bit about Culpeper.

Culpeper, I started, I came to US last year at the beginning of 2007.

And this is not the time for me to share with you my testimony, but basically I had left my workplace.

I was running a software business out in Asia, Malaysia, Thailand, as well as Australia.

And my wife and I decided that we wanted to serve the Lord full-time in ministry.

So we came over and we started out in Culpeper, we were studying there, but my brother came to help me settle in, and the first Sabbath of the year, 2007, he preached a sermon in Culpeper Church, and this is a country church.

It's about 40 members at that time, and he came and preached a sermon.

There was really no young adults at the time, but it just so happened that Sabbath, these 2 young people came in, and he preached a sermon on sacrifice, he made an appeal, and they decided that they wanted to recommit their lives to the Lord.

And my brother asked me to start Bible studies with them, and that was the beginning of our story.

And basically what we did was we formed a small group.

My brother and I, we come from Australia, and we've been involved in small group ministry on and off for about 10 years.

In fact, the church that we were working or grew up in over there has gone on to plant 2 other churches in the last 6 years and is planning their third church plant called Gateway 3 next year or so, I believe.

So they have, we come from a church with a lot of experience and a lot of appreciation for this tool called small group ministry.

And so we started this first small group.

It's a little blurry because I used my cell phone at the time to take the picture.

But we started off there about 123456789, about 9 people.

And it was basically those 2 boys that you see in the middle there, their names are Drew and Thomas.

Their father came along and from there, over the course of that time, they brought their cousin, the guy trying to do the karate kick.

And so we were just focusing on small group Bible study, trying to implement slowly the things that we had learned or experienced in Australia.

By about April of 2007, we decided that we were going to have a camp so that, you know, family, the people in the small groups could invite their friends.

And we had about, all up, almost 20 people for that camp.

So that was our first outreach camp, what we call an outreach camp, and the theme was My God is Real.

We also did a bit of health outreach by the middle of the year as well at 1 of the church members' house.

She invited her friends over and she was really well connected in the community, so we decided we would do some health outreach.

We did a Mother's Day program and the same group of people that we'd started the small groups were.

They also helped out in the kitchen and we prepared this program for the mothers and we invited mothers from the community as well.

This was 1 of the, by about June, July, we split into 2 small groups.

What you saw in that first picture was the church.

We had moved out of the church and moved into 1 of the guys' houses, Thomas.

And so we were meeting in his house in Culpeper, and we were beginning to meet also in another church member's house in Madison.

And later on we moved to Orange, which is where Robbie is from and he'll be sharing a little bit about that.

By this time we had about 10 people, as you can see, 10 or so people in the group in Culpeper.

In the group in Madison we also had about between 6 to 8 people, so we had grown to about 18 people by that time.

Then began the summer, and we spent about 10 weeks, unfortunately I don't have any pictures, but we did about 10 weeks of cold portering, selling books.

We decided we would try something different as well and we sold vegetables.

We had a organic farm at the school, so we took the vegetables, we went out and tried to sell that as well.

And believe it or not, the community responded really well to that And we were able to use that to share with them the health message as well.

By the end of the summer, we had about 150 contacts, both in Bible as well as health.

And by November, sorry, by September, we decided that we would do another outreach camp.

We wanted to, we had new members in, and again, we wanted to build more relationships.

And I'll talk more about the principles behind what we were doing later on.

But we had our second outreach camp, it was called Reach for Life.

Again, we had about 20 or so people for that.

By November, Ben had already joined us in the summer, my brother, and he preached our Prophecy Seminar.

At that time we were told that a lot of people had come and preached in Culpeper and not a lot of people had come.

In fact, there was 1 where they had publicized for months over television, newspaper and things like that and only about 10 people came.

But praise the Lord for this prophecy seminar, we went out there, we only printed about 4000 cards but we believed in personal touch so we went out and handed out each 1 of these cards rather than typically what most churches do today which is mail it, we went out and gave it personally and spoke to the people as much as we could and we had about 50 people per night, averaging about 15 non-Adventists.

So Ben preached that and it was a 10-day prophecy seminar.

What we wanted to do was test the waters to see how the community would respond and they certainly responded favorably.

Again out of these meetings we had more contacts and we continued to work with them.

We had about 4 people doing Bible studies, as well as various church members.

So 4 part-time Bible workers as well as church members working together.

For the next 5 months or so, we continued to do Bible studies, continued to do door-to-door as well as doctrinal Bible studies in the homes, and by May we had our public evangelism.

And we had a real tough time finding a location.

So in the end, we decided that we would have a tent right next to the church.

The church is, in fact, on 1 of the highways, and so it's very visible, and a lot of people saw the sign, and we did quite a number of people walk in as a result.

As Peter mentioned, it was about 4 weeks, 20 days, And we had somebody from Zimbabwe come.

His name was Rodney Millen, and he preached a really powerful series.

And at the end of it, this is the evangelism in the tent.

The Bible workers or the part-time Bible workers also filmed it.

And so every night after recording it, we would provide the CDs of the night before, and people were able to buy that and distribute that to their friends, as well as we continue to use that to hand out door to door.

But at the end of it, we had 17 baptisms and re-baptisms.

And in the last 5 years, I believe The number of baptisms have been, I think, a total of 3.

And so for this church, it was a real, you know, it's a real powerful experience.

We basically grew the church almost 50 percent, And church attendance has gone up because family members are beginning to bring their own family members in.

And it's been a real powerful journey for all of us that have been involved.

1 of the people who got baptized, as Peter mentioned, is our friend, Robbie Berry.

And we met him last year around September?

And we started studying with him, and he's going to share his story with you a little bit, and then I'm going to come back and share with you a few of the principles that we put together and a little bit about the program that we would like to implement for churches who are interested.

And so I'll pass the time over to Robbie now.

David asked me to share with you guys about my testimony.

As you already know, I'm new to the Adventist faith.

Series

IONA Missions: Rooted in Christ

The Beehive

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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Sound Doctrine