AMEN Australia 2020 Conference: Centres of Influence

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Daryl Cheng

A Day in the Clinic

I just want to say a quick word of prayer as we get into our talk tonight.

I know we've already prayed, but I feel pressed that we ask the Holy Spirit to be with us.

We pray that in the short time we have to spend together that you will inspire and encourage us as we go through this little passage, but that we would also inspire us as we ponder upon our theme, centers of influence.

I've titled my short talk tonight, a day in the clinic.

And this will be a familiar concept to many of you who work in a clinic setting or perhaps in a hospital setting or even in a community centre setting.

It really portrays what I think is at the crux of the theme that we've considered that Aaron so nicely expounded on last night.

I'm just going to try and build on that in a slightly different fashion, but still coming to the same core point that truly the centers of influence concept is a powerful 1.

When we talk in the Adventist church about centers of influence, let me just make sure this is working here.

When we talk about centers of influence in the Adventist church, we often think of these types of things.

There are obviously many more that you can select from.

But what you see here is 1 closer to home in Byron Bay and 1 further away in Vietnam where they've started a Adventist center of influence.

We often think of a building, we often think of a venture, which may be a health food store, a restaurant, a cafe, TV station, or many other different ways of influencing people through a specific location or through a specific type of ministry.

And so my sister shared a little bit about Lifebox.

That's a concept that some people have turned into an everyday function.

They run a vegetarian restaurant or a cafe and then use that to influence people to lead more healthy lives.

I want to approach the concept of the center of influence in a slightly different fashion tonight.

When you think about the center of influence, and when you talk to people in the world who are secular, who have no concept of Christianity or religion or no interest in them, you actually see that the concept or the word center of influence has a very different meaning.

It's a term that's used in terms of referrals and in terms of sales and in terms of building a business.

You see, centres of influence are not buildings.

They actually refer to key contacts in business.

When you cultivate a centre of influence in business, it is an effective way to build your practice, whatever that practice may be.

It may be a medical practice, dental practice, sales of a particular item.

Through cultivating these centers, you affirm what they call client relationships, you build new opportunities, you develop a stream of ongoing referrals, ie someone will send someone else your way, and will increase your value to different organizations.

People say that to build centers of influence in the business world is a long-term strategy that requires significant dedication and investment in cultivating relationships over time.

If you have 3 to 5 centers of influence, your business is estimated to be able to increase by 60% because of the influence that those people have on their circles and their networks.

And so there are courses, there are webinars, there are lectures that you can attend to teach you how to cultivate a center of influence.

I want to go back to the textbook where this methodology was developed.

Specifically tonight, I want to look at certain examples of senses of influence, not talking about the traditional way in which we think or the spirit of prophecy quotes that we may come across referring to this topic, but really honing in on a people-based influential model.

If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Matthew 9.

I'm not going to put the verses up on the screen.

I'm going to use pictures instead to illustrate my point.

We're not going to read the whole story, but Matthew chapter 9 is termed Is I've coined the phrase or I have termed it Jesus's day in the clinic and you'll see why as we go through This entire chapter you will see that there are 6 miracles that I will illustrate here.

It is a chapter of healing, it is a chapter of health, it is a chapter of a consultation day in the clinic.

And many of you will know that this kind of picture here that I've shown you is an example of what you face, a crowded waiting room full of patients, different types and all shapes and sizes, all ages and ethnicities.

And This is what Jesus encountered in Matthew chapter 9.

And I'm going to spend a little bit of time tonight going through the chapter and as you see the different encounters that you have, I want you to keep that concept of center of influence at the back of your mind.

Because I believe that Jesus built 6 centers of influence in this chapter.

There were no buildings, there was no purchases, there was no fancy vegetarian food, there was no lifestyle-based courses or therapies, there was simply encounters with patients and their families.

The story starts in Capernaum, the city which Jesus is based.

And if you look at verse 2, you'll find the first encounter.

The first encounter is with a man who's paralyzed.

And this man who's paralyzed, if you look in verse 2, is brought to Jesus on a stretcher.

He's brought to Jesus on a stretcher by his friends.

And if you look at the companion passages in the rest of the Gospels, you will recognize that this is a man that is lowered down from the roof into the house where Jesus is speaking.

It is this patient that we come across on a daily basis.

The Spirit of Prophecy in Ministry of Healing, page 75, tells us about this encounter.

It says that the discourse was interrupted.

Jesus was talking in this house and the Savior looked upon the mournful countenance and saw the pleading eyes fixed upon him.

He knew the longing of that burdened soul." This is a patient who we encounter not too uncommonly in our clinic.

This is a patient, if you want to put it in another way, is a patient who has lost hope and perhaps is depressed.

Depressed because he's unable to walk, but perhaps the mental strain of having the stigma of sin associated with him and his family has made this man unwilling and unhopeful for any solution to his problems.

Have you encountered a depressed patient recently in your clinic?

Have you seen that beneath the veneer of the things that they come to ask you about is really a dread, a sense of disappointment, a sense of discouragement?

We talk often about the increase in mental health burden during this COVID pandemic and this is evidenced by the fact that this is the very first patient that Jesus sees in his clinic that day.

And the light continues, it was Christ who brought conviction to his conscience, now the conscience of this man, when he was yet at home.

When he repented of his sins and believed in the power of Jesus to make him whole, the mercy of the Savior had blessed his heart.

Many times we think that the journey of this man to healing started when he was lowered down into the house and Jesus said, take up your bed and walk.

But in fact, the Spirit of Prophecy tells us that his conviction started at home.

Depressed patients, sometimes you need to plant seeds or you need to be able to share with them things that will start to germinate when they're not in your clinic.

I.e., Jesus started to build this center of influence even before the man came to his consultation room.

When he repented of his sins and believed in the power of Jesus, The mercy of the Savior blessed his heart.

Jesus had watched the first glimmer of faith grow into a conviction that he was the sinner's only helper and had seen it grow stronger with every effort to come into his presence.

Going left, going right, trying to avoid the crowd.

His faith was not getting less and less as he grew more and more despondent, perhaps, as some people would put it.

But his faith was getting stronger that he would try again and again and again and eventually be lowered from the roof to meet Jesus.

In your encounters with depressed patients, in your encounters with people who have seemingly lost hope, do we plant seeds so that that center of influence can bloom and blossom 1 day?

In my hospital, we have a gait lab and you can see here a picture of a patient that is in the gait lab is a publicly available photo so I can share it.

And she's being assessed in terms of her gait.

And so the gait lab is trying to assess the different positions that AFOs or other means of equipment can help her to regain some of the balance and stability that she needs to walk.

This is not an instantaneous overnight process.

This is a continuous multiple time over and over again evaluation process that needs to happen.

And so we see here that again and again and again as they go through this experience They slowly gain more confidence and more confidence and more confidence And so my question is when we see these types of patients in our clinic Do we give them little bite-sized bits that help their confidence to grow on a daily basis?

To cut the long story short, verse 8 in Matthew chapter 9 says, When the multitude saw it, they marveled and glorified God, who had given power to such men.

And this was the impact of what the situation, what the conversion story of this man, the healing had done.

If you look 1 verse earlier, he arose and departed to his house.

In other sections of the Gospels, we hear that this man goes everywhere telling people about his healing and his faith that had been strengthened.

This man, this depressed patient, was a center of influence.

Moving on to the second patient, Jesus had just finished his healing and suddenly he comes across the patient that no 1 wants to see.

You know, if you're a doctor, you've seen this before.

Everyone avoids this patient and tries to shuffle the patients in the room so that they don't have to see this particular patient.

They avoid them, maybe they put them at the bottom of the pile, they don't read their medical record because everyone knows that this is the most difficult patient that our unit has or that has ever come into your clinic.

And you get this inner sense of dread when you hear and see that this patient is coming or attending your clinic that day.

Matthew is the patient that no 1 wanted to see.

And you all know about the stigma that's associated with the tax collectors and the impact that that has on his life.

He was shunned, he was ignored, he was ridiculed, he was hated, people were bitter because of his position.

And many times we see this in our patients.

We see the stigma that others, maybe even our own colleagues have towards them or maybe we identify that in our mind secretly we know that we wish we didn't have to see them.

We wish we could bottle them up and send them far away.

Jesus instead comes in Matthew chapter 9 verse 9 and 10.

It talks about how he enters into Matthew's house to sit at the table to continue to talk with Matthew.

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A Day in the Clinic

Transcript

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