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Eugene Prewitt

Seeking a Healthy Mind

In front of those present, that without your help, that we will not understand it correctly.

Would you please, by your spirit, instruct us?

And I ask for this gift in the name of Jesus, amen.

So we are gonna have a Bible study, but before that I want to tell you some story and preaching us with the story.

If you have ever wondered or thought about the fact that your conversation is vain and you wish there was more substance to it, you wish you talked about more spiritual things, less non-spiritual things.

If you ever felt badly about how unspiritual your conversation was, you should know that Ellen White has given us 1 very concrete hint about how to have more meaningful conversation.

I'm going to tell you the hint, but I'm not going to tell you the reference because I don't have any clue what it is.

When you are working on sharing the truth with people who don't know it, people who are not yet Adventist, it fills your experience with talkable stuff.

There is stuff to say and things to talk about and stories worth repeating that aren't so bad or gossipy.

And yeah, if you wanna have more wholesome conversation, you heard the idea.

My wife and I are church planters, but we have to be low-quality church planters because we're gone 20-some weeks of the year, sometimes almost 30 weeks of the year from home.

And I don't mean 30 weekends, I mean more than 20 whole weeks we're gone.

And I don't recommend you try to plant a church that way, but you're not that way, so you should plant a church.

But we started about 5 years ago, planting the church in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

And I'll just tell you a few of the experiences.

1 time, I was waiting for 2 of my college students to get done giving a Bible study in a middle-class home, and I was parked in front of it when someone knocked on the window of the car And I looked and it was a man looking down at me.

We rolled down the window Turned out his name was a man Emanuel Emanuel Watson Emanuel asked what we were doing So I told him we're giving Bible studies.

I'm waiting for them to come out and he said He asked more about us.

I told him we have a Bible study every Saturday over at some public We were meeting then at a public hall He said meetings on Saturday What church are you with?

Now that's a pretty safe bet in the city we're in.

There were 0 Seventh-day Adventists there and a lot of people hadn't heard of them.

And I said, Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

I always say Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

Do you know why I say Seventh-day Adventist Christian?

Because many people are simple-minded and they divide the world basically into the categories of pagan, Christian, and Jehovah's Witness.

And when you tell them that you are a Seventh-day Adventist, they're not sure which of those categories you belong in.

And so it's just really helpful to help them categorize our church.

Does that make sense to you, what I'm saying?

So I recommend that if people ask you what church you're with, that you let them know you're a Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

And he told me that he had been baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist church in Chicago.

He had married a Seventh-day Adventist, and after they were in the church together for just a couple years, she left him for another man.

Now, granted, if you hear 1 side of a story related to something like marriage and divorce, you don't really know much about the story.

But this is the only side I'll ever hear, so it's the side I'm telling you.

And that was why he stopped going to church.

What a providence that he would come knock on the window of my car and ask these questions.

He asked about our church because I mentioned Saturday, the day we met together.

So Emanuel received extreme opposition from his wife When he was taking Bible studies I would come to his house to study with him and she would get in a huff sometimes just literally get angry that I was there and eventually communicated to him that he might have to choose between studying with us and her.

Under that kind of pressure, Emmanuel stopped studying with us.

But he's not dead, and there's still good hope.

But during this time when he was in the pressure, he decided to give up on keeping Sabbath.

And that day he received a phone call from a man he barely knew.

Michael called to say, Immanuel, you won't believe this, but I've just learned that the seventh day is the Sabbath.

Does it sound like God is trying to reach Emmanuel?

So Emmanuel is the 1 that told me this story.

Now this is significant to us church planners because we don't know this Michael Arms.

But what I didn't tell you is that Emanuel didn't remember his name quite right.

And we looked in the phone book and there's no Michael Armstrong.

We went to his house and he didn't know anything about it and was the wrong age and the wrong color and it just definitely wasn't the man.

But then we saw there was a Michael Arms.

And, you know, in a town that has 12, 000 people, that's close enough.

We dialed the number and someone answered.

And in just a few minutes, I was talking to Michael Arms, A man who had received a book.

I'm not going to tell you what book it was because I don't like the book.

But God can use not so good books to do good things.

This book was used to convince this man of a good thing.

Michael Arms didn't live at that number any longer.

What had happened was, years ago, when this phone book was made, I had an old phone book.

Michael's house had just burned down and The city as a kindness to him put him up in their cheapest hotel in town temporarily But when they made the phone book, that was the number they listed for Michael.

The night before we called him, we had been looking for him for more than 2 weeks.

The night before we called this number, Michael had gotten into a fight because he was inebriated.

He had been put in jail overnight and Then they had put him in this hotel and he was there when we called.

When we had finished 2 years of church planting, trying as hard as we could, we had a grand total of 0 baptized Seventh-day Adventists.

I mean, of course, we were church planting, we were baptized, but as far as, no 1 had been baptized in the church plant.

And if you work hard for 2 years in something like that, it might be enough reason to feel like you should go do something else.

You know, When you come around and speak at places like this, it feels like you're successful because people listen to you.

You can be really beguiled into thinking you're more successful than you are just by the fact that people give you attention.

I learned in those 2 years a lot of people gave me attention and that was all there was to it.

Does that make any sense to you what I'm saying?

So my encouragement to you is if you start church planting after 2 years, don't quit.

Because now, after 5 years, we have average attendance of more than 40 persons.

And it was soon after that that we began to have baptisms.

I need to tell this all in like 10 minutes because I do have a Bible study tonight.

But there was 1 young lady who ended up having children before she was married.

By the time she got to her third child, she thought she had married the man.

Thankfully, the man was the father of all 3 of her first 3 children.

She married him and then they had a fourth child.

But when that fourth child was about 3 years old, He left her for some other young lady.

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Seeking a Healthy Mind

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