Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

A Dangerous Affection

Scott Mayer

01 Diamonds are Forever

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Dear Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the ability to come together and to talk about these things that we have in our modern world.

But Lord, none of this is valuable if we don't see a clearer picture of you.

So we just ask for your presence to be here today and Lord we may may you just shine through anything that is said and Lord we just want to draw close to you and be ready to see you come in the clouds.

So for most of you, how many of you have ever heard of Little Light Studios?

I was actually going to assume that I did not need to start at the beginning.

Sometimes if people are very unfamiliar with our work, it's like jumping in the deep end if I just kind of start in.

But I chose a couple of presentations that I wanted to share with you guys.

Today, I titled this presentation, Diamonds Are Forever.

I see a few people like, I don't know if I want to raise...

There is nothing inherently evil about a diamond.

And as you will see, there's something beautiful that God has illustrated in the use of diamonds.

It's an illustration for our Christian walk.

Most of my work that I do, I spend 95% of my time aiming at the teenagers and the college age range of our church.

I feel like they're the least spoken to demographic in our church, and I feel like we're losing them like crazy.

And so my work is really, if you could distill down what Little Light really is all about, it's how do you see the fingerprint of God in the world around you.

The more that you can understand and see God physically in his creation or things around and understand how he works, then when a deception comes along it's easy to see that as a deception because it's not characteristic of God.

So today I really want to just give you a window into this beautiful illustration of diamonds.

And no, this is not a talk promoting jewelry.

The word diamond, if you were to just go ahead and Google that and look that up in the dictionary.

It actually comes from a Greek word, ademos, and it means unconquerable and indestructible.

It's exactly what God wants you to do and to be.

So this illustration is a picture of where God wants us to be in our Christian walk.

Just keep that in the back of your mind as we go over some of these things, okay?

Just to give you an illustration of God creating the world with these beautiful jewels.

I mean, when we think of heaven, right, I can't wait to walk on these streets to see the glitz and the glamor and the things that God has created.

I mean, that's what we use to describe heaven, right?

We're going to walk on streets of gold, and the gates will be made out of pearls, and the foundation of the city of Jerusalem is all these precious stones, right?

But he did something interesting when he created humans.

Listen to what the Bible says in Genesis 2, 10 through 14.

When the river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became the 4 rivers, the name of the first is Pishon, and the name of the 1 that flowed around the whole land, Havalia, where there is gold.

And the gold of that land is good, and the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.

And the name of the second river is Gihon, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing these.

It is the 1 that flowed around the whole land of Cush, and the name of the third river was Tigris, which flows to the east of Assyria, and the fourth was the river of Euphrates." So here in Genesis, that was chapter 2 verses 10 through 14, here it God is describing what the land looked like.

Did you know that there was actually precious stones laying all around the land?

It was actually on the surface of the ground all over.

The precious wood and stone, silver and gold that had made rich and adorned the world before the flood which the inhabitants had idolized was sunk beneath the earth at the flood.

So this is a picture of when God created the world there was beautiful things laying all around on the ground, yet when He bent down and He created and formed man out of the ground, why didn't he use stones to put on you?

Why did God simply make you out of the dust of the ground when he had the access to all these precious things?

When he created Lucifer, listen to what Ezekiel 28 verse 13 says, you were in Eden, that garden of God, every precious stone was your covering.

You see, God created Lucifer as the most beautiful crowning thing of his creation, and he literally put stones in him.

Listen to what Ezekiel says, the sardis, the topaz, the diamond, the barrel, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, the carbuncle, all and crafted in gold were your settings and engravings.

On the day you were created, they were prepared." That's what the Bible uses, the word prepared.

When God created Lucifer, He placed these stones in him.

He fashioned them just like a jeweler and he put them on the outside of him and he made him extremely beautiful.

Lucifer looked at himself and he said, wow, look at how amazing I am.

And so God was illustrating something very important when he made you and me.

He made us out of the dust of the ground, and he said, the value of you is not what's on the outside of you.

The value of you is that you are made in the very image of God, the very character of God.

And don't you find it interesting that in our day and age, since creation, we've been trying to pick up these stones off the ground and we've been trying to put them on as our value.

But he was doing something very special with you and me when he created us.

He wanted us to know that our value is not on the outside.

So I want to give you a little window into this very interesting substance called a diamond.

If you actually look at the value of what a diamond is to us in terms of gold.

If you had a pound of a diamond versus a pound of gold, that diamond would outweigh that gold by miles.

It's a much, much, much more valuable substance than we have gold.

And you know, we always talk about the gold standard or gold is this and then we kind of compare everything to gold, but in reality the diamond is a very, very, very precious and expensive thing.

There's 4 things that it takes to make a diamond, and those 4 elements are the way that a diamond is created.

Almost everything that is living is made of carbon, right?

Carbon, they call it the building blocks of life.

Pressure is needed to make a diamond, and time.

So I want you to keep these 4 elements in your mind.

Those 4 things are what create a diamond.

02 Real Eyes Realize Real Lies

Dear Gracious Heavenly Father, we just thank you so much for the ability to have a camp meeting like this.

That we get a chance to come and just, like what was said in the sermon before, just to drink from the fire hydrant and soak in all these amazing topics and things.

But Lord, it means nothing if we don't sink it into fertile soil.

And so we just ask that you open our eyes, soften our hearts, teach us the things that you want us to hear today and help us to apply them to our lives.

We love you and thank you in Jesus name, amen.

For those of you that were here yesterday, I gave a presentation that really kind of compared what a diamond is like to our Christian walk because I really believe it's always been about the same thing with God.

What God is expecting of the ancient old followers of Him is nothing different than what He's expecting from us today.

And I believe that He wants us to desire righteousness, to desire purity.

And so that was what I kind of wanted to share with that message yesterday because as we kind of get down the road here with some of these messages, there is some very crazy things that I'm starting to see pop up in our world.

And this should not be a shocker to any of us.

But I see a big problem and my problem is as I engage and interact with young people I feel like our discernment is becoming more and more difficult.

Do you kind of feel like there are so many things in our world today that are presented to our young people that are so blatantly evil that we should have no problem being able to decide whether that's true or not, but yet we have a big problem with that.

So my purpose for this particular presentation today is really to show you that there are some ways that I believe that God can open our eyes and we can begin to to distinguish discernment.

So I want to share with you the dictionary definition of discernment.

I believe this is 1 of the things that we lost in the Garden of Eden, right?

So much information was given to Adam and Eve.

In fact, when you read the Spirit of Prophecy, did you know that the angels came and described everything that there was a deceiver and he was going to try and deceive them.

They gave them the information, yet we are still here today.

But as we've come down through time and humanity has been weakened over and over and over again, our discernment, our judgment is getting difficult.

But praise God, I believe He's given us the proper tools to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong.

I mean, maybe you guys have seen this on the internet.

How many of you see the colors black and blue?

How many of you see the colors white and gold?

So those of you that see black and blue, raise your hand.

Those of you that see gold and white raise your hand.

That's very interesting to me that you can look at the same photo and yet we are interpreting this information completely different.

How many of you think that A is darker than B?

Raise your hand If you think that A is darker than B.

How many of you think that B is darker than A?

How many of you believe that they are the same color?

We have some very bright-minded people in here.

I showed my wife and my children this afternoon and they didn't believe me.

But to your eyes, you are able to perceive something different simply because there's a shadow in the picture.

So your brain then registers those as 2 different colors yet they're exactly the same.

How many of you believe that A is darker than B?

How many of you believe that B is darker?

How many of you believe that it's the same?

But when you see the lines in a different way, 1 will appear lighter and 1 will appear darker, but if I took away all those lines right there, that's exactly the same gray.

In fact, I had to rebuild this for my children because they did not believe me.

They were like, no dad, you're just messing with us.

The perception that we have, it's really interesting that 2 people can look at the exact same thing and interpret that completely different.

I share this with you because I want to start to begin to open up your mind.

How is it possible that 2 people saw the same exact experience and 1 of them would call that experience evil and 1 of them would call that experience something good, such as in Jesus' day, that the Pharisees were constantly calling what Jesus was doing was evil.

1 Corinthians 2, verses 10 says, to another, the working of miracles, to another, prophecy, to another, the discerning of spirits, to another, diverse kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues.

All of us have been given different gifts in life.

Some of us are able to grasp very complex things about the Bible and are able to teach it in a very interesting way.

If you've ever seen some of those pastors, some of my favorite ones to listen to, I love the way that Ivor Myers sometimes comes at a particular Bible verse and it just jumps out at you.

I remember seeing a Bible verse where he went through every book of the Bible and showed exactly the order that every book of the Bible is written in.

It couldn't be written in a different order.

It was literally telling the story of the gospel in the way that it was presented to us.

I believe that God has given each 1 of us gifts.

Some people come up to us all the time and that know our ministry and they say, how did you see that in that movie?

Is there some special way that you're looking at it?

I'll tell you, there's nothing special the way that I'm looking at it.

The way that I'm able to see something in a movie is the more that I read my Bible, the more than I can see the problem.

In fact, I grew up with an incredible amount of Bible knowledge and I saw none of this stuff in the movies until I picked up my Bible and started reading it.

You don't learn to see a counterfeit by studying counterfeits.

In fact, you talk to anybody that works in that field for the FBI, they study the genuine.

In fact, they know the genuine so closely that when a counterfeit is presented to them, they can spot it immediately because that's how closely they studied the genuine.

If you remember the story in Luke 2 25 through 34, I want to point something out to you.

As baby Jesus came into the temple, he was presented as the custom was with any 1 of the babies.

This is not an unusual scene that is happening in the Jewish culture.

They've seen this day in and day out, day in and day out, and it always fascinated me that Simeon was able to look at that baby and immediately recognize there was something different than him.

Luke 2 25, And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was just and devout and waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him." There's something interesting when the Bible gives you this kind of information because it says that he was a just man, he was a good man, right?

So he's looking for it and he's listening to the Holy Spirit.

You see the Pharisees knew Jesus was or the Pharisees knew that the Messiah was around that time.

03 Idol Time

Dear Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we know that time is quickly wrapping up.

And Lord, you have just blessed this church with so many truths, so many things that we just feel blessed.

And sometimes, Lord, sometimes it's difficult for us because we have all this truth surrounding all the time.

And we just ask that Lord teach us to know what is important at this day and age.

And Lord, it's not enough just to know, but teach us how to apply it to our lives we love you and thank you in Jesus name today's gonna be a talk that really kind of talks a little bit about clothing garments something we all actually deal with in our day and age and our life, right?

In fact, it's been around for an extremely long time.

And as I started kind of doing some of this research, it's very interesting.

I have 2 young children, 9 and 11 years old.

And I think when my daughter came out, she was the type that I said, oh boy, she's gonna give me a run for my money already.

And she's already will change multiple times and you know, clothing is a big deal in her world.

And so, you know, it's kind of interesting.

I grew up with all brothers and hey, clothing was even a big deal to us as well.

But I learned some new things by kind of putting this presentation together.

And I think there's a lot of spiritual lessons that we can draw out of our simple clothing.

So bring your mind back to the very, very beginning.

In Genesis 3, 6 through 11, We have this first illustration of us covering ourselves, right, and we lost that covering.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom, She took it and she ate it.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it.

And then their eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked.

Now I always kind of had a question about this part.

Do you, When you read the Bible, do you ask questions?

Like sometimes you read it and you're just like, wait, wait, how come when Eve ate that piece of fruit, she didn't realize she was naked until she went back and gave it to Adam and he ate it?

Like, Why did it take for both of them to all of a sudden eat it before all of a sudden, like, why didn't you walk up to Adam and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not wearing any clothes.

I mean, there's some questions that I have, like what's going on here?

So they sowed fig leaves together, they made coverings for themselves, and the man and his wife heard the sound of God, and they were walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God from among the trees of the garden.

They decide that they need to cover themselves.

They're covered, but then the result of that and having the wrong covering produced a fear in them to the point where they wanted to hide from God.

I just want you to remember that point, okay?

White says, the white robe of innocence was worn by our first parents when they were placed in in by God in the Holy Eden.

They lived in perfect conformity to the will of God in a beautiful soft light.

The light of God enshrouded the holy pair.

I wanna point this out that, I think it's beautiful that she calls it the white robe of innocence.

It had something to do with their character.

And I want you to, I want to also point this 1 thing out to you, I want you to notice that we have always had a covering over us.

There was always something, even to this holy pair, that Jesus was covering them even then.

And, but when sin entered, they severed their connection with God, that the light which had encircled them departed, naked and ashamed, they tried to supply the place of the heavenly garments, sewn together by fig leaves and a covering." Now I want to speak expressly to the women in this room because it's easier for you to understand this, even though our clothing is getting more confusing in this day and age.

Do you find it interesting that we have always tried to put our clothing back on since the very beginning, yet we live in a world that constantly wants you to take it off.

And because it's interesting to observe clothing and the trends and the fashions and now it's almost like clothing is getting so minimalistic, if you can be as blunt as that.

And it's almost like I'm naked and I'm proud of it.

There's a reason for that that I believe that is a spiritual lesson that we really need to digest and and take a hold of.

So I want you to keep these concepts in your mind because we will circle back around them in the end, but I wanna give you a little context of the psychology of clothing.

And maybe you guys, I'll enter some of the males into this.

When you buy a piece of clothing, does anyone in the room seem to gravitate to 1 color?

Okay, I have to actually physically force myself to not buy blue.

And it's very interesting if I observe, I go to my closet, how many different combinations of a blue shirt do I possibly need?

Yet I will gravitate towards a blue shirt.

We all have these likes and these dislikes, right?

And it's very interesting, I started observing, what does clothing color say about you?

Did you know that there's actually a whole psychology behind this?

There's books that are written on this and why I'm fascinated with it is color is very interesting.

Did you know that certain colors produce certain feelings in us?

Do you know what the color red and yellow do to you?

Have you ever wondered why McDonald's, Carl's jr.

Well, I guess you guys don't call it Carl's jr.

You call it Hardy's all of those Burger King you name it red and yellow because they have found that the combination of those 2 colors will actually produce a physical feeling inside of you so I find it very Interesting and this is also in in filmmaking.

In fact, there is an entire science on how to just color your films.

If they're green, if they're blue, if they're cold.

Did you know there is a color combination that we like to physically see when we see a movie?

Do you know what the most common 2 colors that you put together in a film are?

The colors are opposite on the color wheel, and you often see, I mean, you can see major films like Transformers and, you know, all of the big blockbuster films.

They all have this color palette of teal and orange.

You guys can look this up on your own time.

But color science produces a particular feeling in you.

Series

A Dangerous Affection

02 Real Eyes Realize Real Lies

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Evolution from Head to Tails

1h 6m

The History of the Church and The Reformation

02 Light Through Darkness

1h 16m

Music and Worship: The Chief Battleground of Satan, Part 2

1h

From Home to Eternity

04 Capturing the Joy of an Adventist Home

36m

Plenary

Learning to Be Human Again

1h 14m

Whole Marriages in Broken World

Raising Godly Children in a Ungodly World

36m

Education Reformation

Education Reformation: Inexcusable Ignorance

59m

The Health Message

The “Why” of the Health Message

58m

From Home to Eternity

01 Capturing the Joy of an Adventist Home

1h 4m

The Book of Romans

The Bible and Politics

39m

Restoring Connection

04 From Dysfunctional to Functional Families

1h 1m

ASI 2012 Youth Meetings

ASI 2012 Youth Meeting

54m

Sound Doctrine