AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Edwin Nebblett

Witnesses Unto Me: Personal Journey

Father in heaven, we want to be used by you to bless others.

And I pray, oh, Lord, that the words that are spoken are words that will go to the heart and that you will make use of them so that we can be encouraged.

It's never been about us, it's all about you.

Being a witness, I want to share with you, it has already been done here, talking about Acts 1 verse 8.

We are privileged, all of us, to be ambassadors for Christ.

We are commissioned to portray to the world the riches of his grace and the life-changing power of the gospel.

After that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and in all of Judea and in Samaria and even unto the uttermost part of the earth.

Christ called the disciples to be witnesses for him.

An effective witness is 1 who knows God and makes God known.

So I will be using this text throughout the 4 messages, and what I want to share with you is how I'm gonna go about to do that.

Followers of Christ today are similarly called to bear a personal witness to the words and teachings of Jesus, to the purpose of God to save the world through his son and to the effectiveness of the gospel in their own hearts.

But there is no more convincing testimony that can be born.

Without a personal experience, there can be no true Christian witness.

So in an ever-expanding circle, I'm going to take this text and I'm going to say that our witness begins in Jerusalem, and I'm going to consider our homes to be Jerusalem, then to Judea, and that I will call our church, and then to Samaria, our community, and then to the uttermost parts of the world.

However, the place that we must begin is in a witness that is a personal witness.

So the question that's going to be before us is, and that's what I'm going to explore over the next 4 sessions, how do we go about being a witness?

Now it's already been brought up by Pastor Butcher, and I really appreciate that, that you cannot start unless you receive power.

Wherever it is that you're called upon to witness, if you don't have power, you're not going to be effective.

You will be a witness, but you may not be an effective witness for the kingdom of heaven.

So this is what the disciples were doing in the upper room, and this power was a life-changing power.

This is what Sister Wise says, as in humility they, the disciples, submitted to the molding influence of the Holy Spirit, they received of the fullness of the Godhead and were fashioned in the likeness of the divine.

So this would allow them to continue the work that Christ had begun with such power that they would do.

And even the Lord himself said that they would do greater work than he did in proclaiming the gospel.

So we share best what we know and what we have experienced.

Now, the advantage and disadvantage of that is that when you're a PK and an MK, and you're a father or mother in whatever work they are doing, they're very busy for the Lord.

And unfortunately, 1 of the attributes of many children who are PKs and MKs are that they are not the most behaved children.

I say that from experience and from observation.

So what we found is that growing up, I had opportunities, which I will not detail, to be a model PK and MK.

But 1 of the things that I enjoyed particularly was where I lived.

My father was a pastor and then a conference official and then at the last venue, the mission president in British Guiana.

I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and I've learned as a child to adapt to the culture very quickly.

As a result, whenever I am speaking to someone from the Caribbean, not the Caribbean, the Caribbean, I change up my accent, you know, when I'm talking to somebody from down there, because you can't talk like you're a Yankee, you see.

And it's 1 of the things that we enjoyed doing was enjoying the fruit literally of where we lived.

Hence, I am a firm believer that mangoes are definitely 1 of the months of the tree of life.

So, all I can say is that has been my experience.

And so, when I moved back to North America and I was introduced to apples, I was not impressed.

Nevertheless, I just share that with you to let you know that this was my experience and even though I had a faithful mother, nevertheless when you are not supervised all that well, and you're climbing trees, it's going to be a mango tree.

And if the mangoes are not ripe, no worries.

You just took a little salt, a little pepper, and you got a green mango, and you dipped it in the salt and pepper, oh my, and you ate it, your teeth were set on edge.

My father, when we returned back to the United States around the age of 12, he did not have a call.

For those of you who are in the ministry, you understand exactly what I'm talking about.

So he went to work as, with his degree as an MDiv, as a social worker.

I did not know that, that if you have a master's degree in divinity it's considered to be the same as an MSW, a master's degree in social work.

So he did because he didn't have a church, he was pastoring but not officially.

Took an examination with the state, with the government, a civil service examination, scored very well.

And so as a result, the State Department reached out to him and said, we need you to work with us.

So he went to work for the State Department in the lovely country of Vietnam, where he became an individual that was repatriating the refugees coming from the Danang peninsula, those who were involved with the fighting, and they would put them into camps to take care of them.

And So as a result, my mother moved to Taiwan in order to be with him and left us children in college back in California.

When I left the wonderful country of the Caribbean and I came to the United States, I discovered foods that I had never been introduced to before, particularly sweet ones, very sweet ones in small packages, and they were of various nature, and I did not have the opportunity of adult supervision.

And so I indulged without seeing a dentist.

I went and got my college degree, then went on and did a master's degree in public health, and then entered into medical school there at Loma Linda University, whereupon 1 day I began to experience pain in a tooth.

And since there was a medical school there at Loma Linda, I went to visit the dental school.

And this is the days before digital photography.

The only way that you could really ascertain the nature of a cavity was to explore it with a probe that has a sharp end.

And so, Nigel, a friend of mine who was a dental student, had me sitting in the chair and I am fully expecting to get the best of care.

I mean, he had supervisors all around him, and so he began to probe my tooth.

Then he got to that tooth that was painful, and he probed and hit the nerve, and I arched out of the seat and screamed.

He found the problem and a root canal was, you know how it goes.

I had an experience and as I share with you this experience, you get it that I know what pain is.

And the kindness, I must confess, I have spent many hours in a dental chair.

So much so now I fall asleep while the dentist is doing their work.

But my experience is 1 that I share with you simply because I've experienced this.

You see, our lives are a witness 1 way or another.

They will give evidence to the world revealing the character of Christ or a spirit of self-seeking.

It reflects, which is reflecting of course the character of the enemy of God.

If we become a witness to the character of Christ in our lives we will demonstrate either the sacrificial love where love is given or selfish love.

You see the question before us today is what kind of a witness am I?

Or what kind of a witness does God want me to be?

You see, if I call myself a Christian, that means that I am to reflect Christ in all that I do.

Well, the truth be known that, well, this is where the rubber meets the road.

You remember the story of the lawyer who came to Jesus and he asked the question, Master, what is the greatest commandment of the Lord?

Jesus responded to him in Matthew 22, verse 37.

He said unto him, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.

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Witnesses Unto Me: Personal Journey

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