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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dan Vis: Finishing the Work

Daniel Vis

Keeping the Word

Feels like a little bit small group to be standing up here.

But I'd like to start with a story, actually.

This was probably about almost 10 years ago.

I was invited to New York to do a week of prayer.

And in the evening meetings, the different church members would come out, and I was talking about the importance of God's Word, especially here in these last days.

And 1 night, it was probably a Wednesday night or something like that in the middle of the week, I saw a very tall man come in the back of the church I hadn't noticed come in before.

And he had a very dignified sort of posture and he had this felt-rimmed hat and he was dressed impeccably and he just caught my attention.

You sort of notice sometimes people when they come into a group.

And during the meeting I noticed he was looking very intently at me and I had the distinct impression he reminded me of a gangster.

He just sort of had that look, you know, dressed up and his hat and everything.

And after the meeting he started pressing his way towards the front.

And I thought, oh no, I wonder what I said, because he didn't crack a smile.

He was just like serious and intent the whole meeting.

And he finally came up and I said, I have some questions I'd like to ask you.

Is there a chance I can have you come up to my office tomorrow and we can visit some?

So he sent someone down to drive me up to his office and the next day I went up to his building, his big tall building, and I was ushered up into the top floor.

We had his little presidential suite and we sat down around the table and started talking.

He said that when he was about 18 or 19 years old, he had discovered that the Lord had given him a special gift for being able to make money, a lot of money, very easily.

And he had started a company when he was 19, and within a few years it was a multi-million dollar company.

He sold it, he invested all his money in the stock market and then lost everything.

He started another company and within just a few years it was extremely successful.

He was making lots and lots of money, he cashed out, invested it again, and lost everything.

And he had done this like 3 or 4 times, he had started 3 or 4 companies successfully and he lost his fortune every time.

And he was starting another company, and it was doing very well.

He had all these government contracts, and things were going very well for him.

And he was thinking about this cycle that he had noticed in his life, and he began to start praying about it.

And The Lord had begun to convict him that the reason he had kept losing this fortune, God had given him a gift, but the reason he kept losing his fortune was that he had not really committed that gift to the Lord's work.

And so he said, This time I want to do something different.

I want to do something for the Lord with this new company.

Now I don't have any kind of business background, but he had a big corporate diagram.

Some were non-profit, some were for-profit, some were already in existence, some were in the planning stages, some were partially in development, and they're all interlocked and connected, and this big complicated business diagram.

And he said, what do you think about this?

And I was just kind of looking at what, you know, I didn't know exactly what to think about it.

Some of the parts I could recognize, there were certain business trading deals with importing products and reselling them, and that was generating funds to supply a publishing ministry or a health ministry, and all these different pieces were sort of connected together.

I just looked at this big puzzle and then something caught my eye.

Down in the bottom right corner of that chart, I still have a copy of it actually in my files at home, In the bottom right corner there's a little box that was part of this big diagram and all it said was finishing the work.

So it caught my eye and I looked at it and I said, well you know I understand what the publishing work is and I understand about the ministerial work and the health work and some of these different parts, but what is this box down in the bottom corner?" And I'll never forget, he looked me right in the eyes, and he said, we believe that there's a missing piece, and we're leaving room in our plans for God to show us what that is.

And I've thought about that over the years.

We've been wanting to see the Lord come for a long time as a denomination, for 160 some years, and we're eagerly waiting to see the Lord come, And yet it just seems like, you know, what is it really going to take to finish the work?

Is there maybe some missing piece, some missing key, something that we've overlooked?

Something we need to make room for in our plans?

Well, I believe there is, and that's what I'd like to talk about tonight.

Turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Matthew, chapter 28.

And while you're turning there, I'd like to just offer up another short word of prayer.

Father in heaven, as we prepare to study your Word tonight, I pray that you would send the Holy Spirit to speak to us and make things clear and simple to our understanding, that we might know what your will is, and I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

If we're gonna be serious about finishing the work, it makes sense to look at what the work is, what the assignment is.

Very familiar passage, I know you've read it before.

And Go therefore and teach all nations, or some versions say, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

That's the work, that's what the assignment is.

Baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, that's the first part.

And the second part is teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you.

We hold an evangelistic series or give a Bible study or help someone to understand what the issues are, and then they make a decision.

They want to be a disciple or a follower of Jesus Christ, and they're baptized.

It goes on to say that we're to take these new believers and teach them to observe everything that Christ taught.

There's the evangelism and then the training of these new believers.

And by the way, this is an important point.

But Jesus said the problem really wasn't with the evangelism.

If we're not doing the training, the evangelism is never going to work.

The evangelism has to be combined with training.

The baptizing with the teaching, if we're going to see the work finished.

But I want to focus in on that teaching part, the training part, the discipling part.

Notice it says in verse 20, teaching them to, what's the next word?

Maybe some of you have different versions.

Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever Christ commanded.

If this is the 1 thing we should be teaching every new believer, how to observe the things that Christ taught, what should we actually be teaching them?

I've been studying this theme out for a number of years, and I'm surprised at where this word shows up in some interesting places.

For example, in Matthew 27, verse 54, the same exact word translated, observe, in the Great Commission, The thing we're supposed to teach every new Christian, teaching them to observe, it's found in Matthew 27, verse 54, the exact same word in the Greek.

You can look it up when you get home and pull it up on your computer.

Now, when the centurion and they that were with him, what's the next word?

Watching Jesus saw the earthquake and those things that were done, they feared greatly saying, truly this was the Son of God.

What was this centurion doing there at the cross?

The Explosion Formula

Morning everyone and happy Sabbath It's a real privilege to be here.

This is my first time to Advent Hope but I feel like I'm among friends because there's so many people I know from different places that I've seen in different locations So anyway, I want to thank again the organizers of this for the chance to come and be able to share a little bit with you.

This weekend, I would like to talk about the Great Commission, the assignment that Christ left the church and what it's going to take to actually get the job done to finish the work to complete this assignment that Christ has given to us and Last night we spent a little bit of time talking about the importance of God's Word That's the power source for finishing the work.

And when we can help our members to learn how to tap into that power source to establish that living connection with God through the Word, it's going to revolutionize our churches.

And the work's not going to be finished until our people get back to the Bible.

In the book Gospel Workers on page 250, there's a quote where it says, the Word of God is our only source of power.

And so if we think we're going to find answers somewhere else, we're fooling ourselves.

But this morning I'd like to talk about another key, another essential, fundamental principle that has to be a part of our thinking in order for the work to be finished.

And so if I could, I'd like to invite you just to bow your heads with me for another short word of prayer as we ask the Lord to bless us.

Father in heaven, we thank you that we have this opportunity to be together to study your word.

I pray that you would send the Holy Spirit to us in a rich measure, that our thoughts would be directed, that our conscience would be quickened, and that you'd be able to speak to our hearts.

Lord, we acknowledge our dependence on you.

And we thank you and pray these things in Jesus' name.

What I'd like to talk about this morning is the word paradigm.

How many of you know what the word paradigm means?

The word paradigm is a way of thinking about things.

It's a frame of reference that we use to interpret the world around us.

It was popularized by a historian by the name of Thomas Kuhn in the late 1960s.

He wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And in this book, Thomas Kuhn argued that science did not advance incrementally by little small steps, as we generally tend to think it does, but that science advanced in big leaps and bounds when there was a radical paradigm shift.

And he introduced this word paradigm shift.

You've heard that before, I'm sure, as well.

Take, for example, the field of astronomy.

Around 400 AD, There is someone by the name of Plato that suggested the Earth was at the center of the universe.

And all these wandering stars, what we call planets, revolved around the Earth in uniform circular motion.

And if we could just develop a model of concentric circles and put the planets on the right size circles, rotating on the right axis at the right speed, that we could account for the positions of the planets.

And for the next 800 years, they developed better and better models based on this paradigm, this assumption that that's how the universe was set up.

By the time you get down to the fourth century A.D., someone by the name of Ptolemy came up with a model that was based on this idea that the earth was at the center and all the planets revolved around it in uniform circular motion, various patterns.

He was able to predict where these wandering stars would be at any given time with tremendous accuracy.

You could tell when there would be an eclipse.

In fact, for the next thousand years, there was almost no advance in astronomy.

I mean they still use the same tables, the same charts that Ptolemy put together.

It wasn't until a thousand years later that someone by the name of Copernicus said maybe the whole paradigm is wrong.

Maybe what we need to do is start looking at this from a completely different perspective.

What if instead of the earth being at the center, the Sun is at the center and all the planets revolve around the Sun and for the next few hundred years you have tremendous advances in astronomy.

It wasn't until a few years later that Galileo comes along and then Kepler and then Newton and Einstein and pretty soon we're putting a man on the moon.

See, for a thousand years there was almost no progress in science until there was a shift in paradigm.

Since we're here at Loma Linda, I'll give you another quick example.

About the same time as Plato, someone by the name of Hippocrates came up with the idea that there were 3 main biological systems in the body.

There is an arterial system, a venous system, and a nervous system.

And it built a whole system of anatomy and physiology based on this idea that there's 3 completely separate systems in the body.

And for the next 800 years, they were doing dissections and even vivisections, trying to understand exactly how the body worked until someone by the name of Galen, maybe you've heard the name Galen, came up with this masterpiece of anatomy and physiology around the 4th century AD, and for the next thousand years, that was the authority about how the body worked.

Certain paradigm resulted in a certain model of how the body worked, and for the next thousand years there was really very little advance in biology.

Until someone in the 15th century, about the same time as Copernicus, came up with the idea that maybe the whole paradigm was wrong.

Maybe that the veins and arteries were not completely separate systems, but it's actually 1 system.

And that the blood actually circulated through the body.

And of course you can look at Loma Linda now and the tremendous advance.

That all began to take place with a change in paradigm.

When the underlying assumption was changed, then everything began to explode in the field of medicine.

And this happened in every basic field of science.

We're locked into a certain paradigm, a certain way of thinking, and that controls how we interpret information, the questions that we ask, the models that we use to explain things.

And until that paradigm changes, there's only going to be the least little incremental advances in our understanding.

But when the paradigm shifts, then there's a tremendous explosion of insight and knowledge.

Now, I'd like to suggest to you this morning that if we're serious about finishing the work, there has to be a radical paradigm shift in our thinking about ministry.

I hope you can see this marker board here.

I'm kind of a teacher by heart, so I like to use a marker board.

I guess I should move up to PowerPoint or something 1 of these days.

But let's say that you're in a typical church and you're thinking about doing evangelism.

Now I used to live in Michigan for a number of years.

Samuel Pippin for several years and we lived in a town called Ann Arbor that had about a hundred thousand people.

More with the students but we'll just say for even numbers a hundred thousand.

So you're on a church board and you're meeting together and you're starting to talk about, we should do evangelism.

So we think we have a hundred thousand people in this town, maybe 40 or 50000 homes, and so the church board wheels begin to turn and they'll say what we need to do is, what are you going to probably do?

We need to do an evangelistic series, right?

And we're going to get a bunch of flyers and mail 1 out to every home in Ann Arbor and encourage them to come.

We're going to see if we can get a neutral location, maybe we did this 1 year, We had a evangelistic series in a hotel conference room.

It was like $800 a night, just 1 night for that meeting hall.

We mailed out thousands and thousands of brochures.

And so let's say we mailed out 50, 000 brochures.

We'll just sort of use this as an illustration.

If you mail out 50, 000 brochures, how many visitors or guests, we're talking about non-church members, are likely to show up on opening night?

Does anyone know what the current rates are for normal brochures?

So if we mailed out 50, 000, we mailed 1 out to every home in Ann Arbor, we might get 50 people to show up on opening night.

Now if you're doing evangelism and you had 50 non-church members show up on opening night, would you be excited?

I'd say praise the Lord, that's fantastic, right?

What we really want to see is them continue night after night after night, maybe for 4 or 5 weeks, and eventually learn more and more truth until they come to the point they're ready to make a decision and they decide for baptism.

In a typical evangelistic series, how many that begin usually end up making a decision for baptism at the end?

It's going to vary from place to place and speaker to speaker, but we'll just say a typical average.

We might actually get 10 people to make a decision for baptism.

Personal Discipleship

Hopefully you didn't eat too much at lunch, and your mind is thinking, and you're alert and clear, got lots of energy, ready to go, I hope.

When you think about how to condense this whole concept of training down into 1 or 2 presentations, when we think that it took Jesus 3 and a half years of 24-7 interaction with his disciples, and that's the master teacher.

3 and a half years to be able to train these 12 men to be real effective disciples and workers.

How we can cover much of anything in just an hour or 2 this afternoon is a little beyond me.

But we can at least introduce the subject and maybe share a few foundational principles and I can also point you to some resources that might be valuable to you.

I haven't really said much about our ministry before now but maybe I'll just say a couple quick words before we get started as there's still people coming in.

I've been involved with the FAST ministry for a little over 10 years now And the reason we named our ministry FAST is because we believe that God was calling people to hold fast to the Word of God.

Many times people ask me, what does FAST stand for?

But the burden behind what we're wanting to do with our fast ministry is help people learn how to hold fast to the Word of God.

And that means more than just memorization.

Memorization is part of it, but as we saw this morning, we not only want to store it in our mind, but we also want to build it into our life and hold fast to it in that way.

And we want to be able to share it faithfully with others.

And so there's sort of this three-fold process where we take in the Word of God, live it out, pass it on to others.

And we've been developing training tools to help Christians do that.

There's an interesting quote, I should have got it before I came here, but it's on Great Controversy on page 599, I believe.

It says, The first and highest duty of every rational being, I like these statements, they start out that way, they just kind of leave you hanging.

The first and highest duty of every rational being is to know what is truth from the Scriptures, to walk in its light, and to encourage others to do the same, basically.

So it's to know what is truth, to live it out, and to encourage others to also practice God's Word.

And so this is what the focus of our ministry is.

We have a website you can go to to get some of our resources.

The web address is just www.fast.st, like street, fast.st.

And we have an actual little online school we're developing.

We're putting more resources up all the time.

There's a free course on how to memorize you can take, and some other resources available for purchase as well.

And we also have an 800 number, I'll just give 2, you can jot it down.

And so if you'd like to call us and learn more about our work, you can do that.

I also have a few little brochures, they look like this.

I have them up here in the front, maybe someone can put them on the table in the back and you can grab 1 on your way out.

But it has a little more information about our ministry.

What I'd like to do this afternoon, the next hour, 45 minutes, 30 minutes, is talk about this whole process of training and discipling and go over just some basic principles, how to do it.

It's 1 thing to talk about it, but it's another thing to actually accomplish it.

In our most typically in our educational system in the world today we do a lot of teaching but not always a lot of training and there's a big difference between teaching and training.

Teaching involves the transmission of information from 1 person to the other.

So I can stand up here and I can say, Sacramento is the capital of California or something like that.

And as long as you can remember that information, I've taught you, I've given you that information, there's been a transmission of information.

But if I wanted to say teach you to be a master cabinet maker and I got up and gave you a lecture about how to use all the tools and the different kinds of wood and how you assemble the pieces together, do you think you could just go from here having heard a lecture or 2 on how to make a cabinet and have your first piece of woodwork come out looking beautiful?

Well, most of it just doesn't work that way because it's not just a transmission of information, it's a transmission of a skill.

And discipleship is more than information, it's a way of life, it's a lifestyle, there's skills that are involved.

And so all we can really do this afternoon is just begin to look at some of the skills we need to dig out and acquire and build into our life.

It's more than just information, it's skills, transmission of skills, and the process by which we can learn those skills and teach others those skills also.

So I'm going to give you kind of an outline.

I'd like to share with you 3 or 4 main keys to training others and to being a disciple ourself and then there'll be some sub points under those.

But maybe we can begin with just a word of prayer.

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Dan Vis: Finishing the Work

Personal Discipleship

Transcript

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