GYC 2010: No Turning Back

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2010 Plenary Sessions

Justin McNeilus

GYC 2010 Keynote Address: No Turning Back

This message was presented at the GYC 2010 No Turning Back Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

For other resources like this, visit us online at GYCweb.org.

How many times have you heard that tonight?

How many people were here at last year's GYC by show of hands?

How many people were at the opening night last year of GYC?

Well, then you and I can share a common moment for a second.

Before I came out here, I instructed that no 3ABN cameramen come on the stage.

So you can rest assured nothing like that will happen.

Have you been unashamed since we last met?

Just a few commonalities before we jump into tonight's message.

There's interesting things about being the president of GYC.

1 of those is to see the dedicated volunteers that volunteer for GYC.

Did you know that GYC is built on volunteers?

Just before coming to this conference we decided, you know, we should get a gift.

We should get a gift for our volunteers and so we're adding up the numbers you know it was slightly over 300 people that volunteered to make this conference happen 300 Not many of you are that excited about it, I can tell.

Dedicated to the cause of helping you meet Jesus.

I think of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, vacations, all spent praying that you will find your creator at this conference.

You'll see a picture of them listed in the program booklet.

I would just invite you, if you see them this weekend, give them a hug.

If you don't want a hug, then give them a high 5 or a pat on the back, whatever it is you do, but encourage them.

They're 100% dedicated to their creator and they're dedicated to making sure you have a relationship with your creator.

The other thing that's somewhat interesting is you get a lot of feedback from people that come to GYC.

And it came apparent to me that on our blog, through our Facebook I think it was, and I'm not actually on Facebook so this was someone telling me and I may misrepresent it, but it was something to the fact that, hey, GYC calls themselves a grassroots movement but they have church officials preaching there.

And I'd just like to speak to that for a moment.

We're a grassroots movement, make no mistake about it.

But isn't it a blessing that church leadership wants to interact with the grassroots?

Isn't it a blessing that our church says We are excited about the youth, we are passionate about what they have to offer the church, and we want to be a part of it.

Since the last year, a lot of things have transpired, a lot of things have happened.

The GC came to GYC, they looked at the landscape of the church and they said to themselves self, we want GYC to be represented at the GC session we had a GC session, leadership changed things were brought to the floor and do you know that the leadership said, hey we should have a delegate from GYC.

They looked at you around here and said, hey they are doing something, they are part of the church, we want them part of our delegation.

And so I went to represent you as a GC delegate.

I actually got the chance to speak on the floor.

Almost as nervous as I am now at that time.

What I told them was, the conferences, the unions, the divisions, the local church need to start having young people involved in their leadership.

It is imperative that the young people represented here, represented outside of here, are involved in leadership in our church.

We're more than just young people that will 1 day lead the church.

We are church, we are young people that can lead the church today.

They put young people on the most recent committee to come out of the GC.

They looked again at the landscape of the church and thought to themselves, we want GYC to be represented on that committee.

And so I go as your delegate, as your representative to the GC on this committee.

And so I went to the first GC Reformation and Revival Committee meeting thinking to myself, alright, we are going to get a lot of things done.

In this meeting, our general vice presidents, Elder Wilson came and spoke at it, the head of the Review, the head of Adventist World Radio, the head of Hope Channel, the head of youth, World Youth, just a ton and a mass of people that can literally change the world.

So I get into that meeting, I'm thinking to myself, we're gonna do some things.

Until 02:00, we spent the time praying on our knees together.

Before any decisions were made, we seek the counsel of the Lord.

Not like a philosophical question, why do I exist on this earth, whatever.

And furthermore, why am I speaking tonight?

Because it's a question that plagues my own mind throughout the year.

And I think the most logical reason I can come up with is first off, God wants me to be here.

Second, GYC is built with a foundation that says if young people can do it, I can do it.

That is to say that if Justin can do it, if the executive committee can do it, if the 300 volunteers can do it, why can't I be doing something today?

And so I stand here, as Israel said, not a pastor.

I Went to school at Southern, graduated with a business degree.

This following Monday, I'll go back to work as a banker.

I tell you that is a little bit of a warning, because sometimes not all my points come together.

Not here because of the great points that I put together, not here because of the great leadership skills that I have, I'm here because I can spend time on my knees and so can you.

GYC is built with an understanding that says if we can do it, you can do it.

Friends, it's time for us to get involved.

Whether it's a local church, whether it's GYC, or whether it's even a GC committee, God needs us today as young people.

It's entitled, No Turning Back, as you can imagine.

And tonight we want to look through God's Word and answer the question of are we prepared to follow Him?

That is to say, when Jesus comes to us and says, will you follow me?

Nomthandazo Malambo-Amankwah

Even If

For other resources like this, visit us online at gycweb.org.

What a blessing it is to be here, to be part of this army of young people that is on a mission, as it were, to proclaim the everlasting gospel to the whole world in this generation.

I wanted to thank you and let you know that I have been overwhelmed by how many people have told me that they were praying for me.

And I ask you to keep on praying, not just for me, but for each and every speaker who will be talking with you this weekend, because we need an outpouring of the Holy Ghost.

We need the Lord to be with us and speak to our hearts each and every time we come here this weekend.

So it's a pleasure, it's a privilege, and I continue to seek your support in prayer.

Our message this morning is entitled, Even If, and if you'd like an alternate title, it would be, I'd Rather Have Jesus.

And as we begin, I want to begin by sharing with you a brief mission report, right?

I have the privilege of serving as the evangelism coordinator for Alive, Africans Living in View of Eternity.

And we at Alive are moved by this conviction that the African crisis really is fundamentally spiritual.

That the answer to it has to be Jesus Christ himself, right?

And so our vision, our burden, our dream as Alive is to inspire and train and mobilize young people in Africa to be effective in evangelism.

And this past summer, just to give you an example, we took 80 young people from Ghana, part of our Alive Ghana branch in Ghana, and we took 80 young people up to northern Ghana for a three-week mission intensive.

Now, northern Ghana is probably the hardest mission territory I've ever been to.

Temperatures there get up to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the kind of heat where you feel as if you're being baked in the African sun, like literally cooked.

And on top of being hot, It's intense, heavy rainfall.

And on top of that, it's mosquito infested.

Every single second, you're getting bit by a mosquito.

And we had this 80 young people, all graduates, all young professionals, go up to North Ghana for 3 weeks, right?

And these young people took it in stride.

They slept on the floor, they took the mosquitoes, they hid the rain, they went door to door preaching the gospel every single day for 3 weeks.

And at the end of that 3 weeks, by the grace of God, 165 souls were baptized.

But even more amazing for me is the fact that when the mission ended, some of these young people volunteered to stay in North Ghana.

I was like, who in their right mind wants to stay in such harsh conditions?

I mean, sleeping on the floor, the mosquitoes, the rain.

To nature, the newly baptized told them to keep on preaching the gospel.

Now as you consider these young people willing to stay in what is probably Ghana's poorest region, willing to make those sacrifices, quote unquote, We may be tempted to ask if they were out of their minds and I want to submit this morning that they had found something that was worth sacrificing for and Our message this morning.

We're going to basically answer the question, is there 1 thing of supreme value that is worth losing everything for?

Our gracious Father in heaven, Our gracious Father in heaven, Lord we have come this morning to hear a word from you.

Father we ask for the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Father we ask that every heart that is here this morning may be touched and may hear words directly from you.

Father as you promised Moses in Exodus 4.12, when you say to him, now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth and will teach thee what thou shalt say.

Speak to every heart and help us, Father, to truly, meaningfully sing the song, I'd Rather Have Jesus.

We pray this asking and believing in the name that you cannot reject.

If you have your Bibles, as you should have your Bibles, turn them with me to the book of 1 Samuel, chapter 1.

The book of 1 Samuel occurs immediately after the judges, at the time when every man pretty much did what was right in his own eyes.

And in 1 Samuel chapter 1, we read of a man named Elkanah who were told had 2 wives.

The name of 1 was Hannah, the other was Peninnah.

And verse 2 tells us that Peninnah had children but Hannah had none.

And the reason being, given in verse 5, that the Lord had shut up her womb.

And when I read verse 6, 7, and 8 in your hearing, And her adversary also provoked her sore for to make her fret because the Lord had shut up her womb.

And as he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of the Lord.

Then said Alcannah her husband to her, Hannah, why weepest thou and why eatest thou not?

Am not I better to thee than 10 sons?" For a woman in Hannah's position, this desire to have a child was enough to struggle with.

She wanted something that she could not have because God had shut up her womb, right?

And yet, what made a situation even worse was the fact that her adversary, Peninnah, provoked her sore.

That word means that she literally provoked her grievously to make her miserable.

Remind her every day of what she did not have, provoking her, making her miserable.

And that as a result, we're told in verse 7 that therefore she wept and did not eat.

And I wonder when was the last time you were so grieved you could not eat.

And then verse 10 tells us, she was in bitterness of soul and prayed unto the Lord and wept sore.

When the Bible says she was in bitterness of soul, she was in such deep distress, such distress she could have died.

And then in verse 8, Elkanah asks a very pointed question that we're going to reflect on in a different way this morning.

And Elkana, her husband, says to her, Hannah, why do you weep?

And as you read the story, Hannah was his favorite wife, the 1 he loved the most, despite the fact she had born no children, he still loved her.

And I can imagine him saying to her, Hannah, I know that you want children, but I am here and I love you.

Is the fact that you have me, is that not enough for you?

Because he had loved her and kept on loving her despite the fact she had no children.

But this morning I want to pause the story here, because I want us to hear Jesus asking that question this morning.

Eric Walsh

The Good Soldier

Let me just say that it is a privilege and an honor to be here with you tonight.

And I can tell you that to see an army of young people come together to be trained and to be educated, to uplift 1 another for the cause of Jesus Christ really thrills my heart.

In fact, I'm humbled even to be here because there are a lot of places young people could be this weekend, amen?

There are a lot of people trying to figure out where they're going to party this weekend.

But I praise God that we could fill a room so large that I really can't see the back of it.

And I praise God that God's church still has young people who are very serious about finishing the work.

So let's just say amen And let's give the Lord a hand praise.

Let's just tell God that we love Him because God is good.

We could go on all night about this, but I work in the field of public health, and I see young people all the time who are in dire straits.

And I've prayed with many of them many times and asked them to, you know, make wise decisions or to encourage them to do good things.

So I'm glad to know that I can go back and say, look, I've seen what God can do for young people.

If you don't mind, turn with me in your Bibles to the book of 2 Timothy.

The second chapter, 2 Timothy chapter 2 starting at verse 1.

And I'm going to read the first 4 verses from the second chapter of the book of 2 Timothy.

The scripture says, Thou therefore my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And the things thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also." Verse 3 says, thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

No man that woreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." Our message this evening is entitled, The Good Soldier.

Father God, we thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to go into your Word.

I ask, Father God, right now that you make me just a rusty old sorry old nail, Lord.

But Lord, I ask that you hammer that nail into a wall.

And then upon that nail, I ask, Lord Jesus, that you would hang a portrait of yourself so that tonight Eric Walsh is not seen or heard.

But Father God, I ask that we would hear a message from the throne room of grace.

In fact, three-fourths of the city wound up burning.

It started in July of 1864 on the night between the 18th and the 19th.

It was said to have started at the southeastern end of the Circus Maximus where flammable goods were being sold.

And once the fire caught in the ancient Rome, it was difficult to stop the fire because the way that the city was built, the homes were connected.

But not only were the homes connected, they were connected and the walls of those connected homes were flammable.

So once the city began to burn, a city of over 2000000 people, the city began to burn in rapid succession.

6 long difficult days to die down and then burn again for 3 more days.

3 great ancient historians Cassius Dio, Suetonius, and Tacitus all state that it was Nero who started the fire.

These historians also state that he played the lyre and he sang from the palace walls as the city burned.

There are those who argue that in fact what Nero really wanted was an opportunity to clear out sections of the city so that he could build a larger palace, something that he ultimately does after the fire is quelched by the battalions of firemen, building a large palace and over 130-meter-high statue of himself in gold.

Nero was a sick man, and history records that not only is he guilty of killing his mother and of killing his second wife, but Nero was the first of the pagan emperors to begin to torture the Christians.

And when the fire was burning, 1 of the things that happened is that the citizens of Rome began to believe that somehow Nero was guilty of the fire.

Nero was so upset at the idea that he was being indicted, that he decided to turn his attention and the attentions of the citizens of Rome off of himself and onto another group of people.

In fact, he arrested and tortured a few Christians, and those Christians implicated other Christians, and so on until the young Christian religion, newer to Rome than most other religions, which was a religion popular among the poor and the destitute, that religion, if you belong to it, people were being gathered up and collected and tortured.

In fact, Tacitus, and Tacitus is a very important ancient historian.

There was a time when it was argued that there was no evidence of Jesus Christ outside of the Scripture.

But Tacitus writes, and I want you to hear this, Tacitus writes, therefore, speaking of Nero, he says, therefore to stop the rumor that he had set Rome on fire, he, the Emperor Nero, falsely charged with guilt and punished with the most fearful tortures the persons commonly called Christians who are generally hated for their enormities.

Christus, the founder of that name, the founder of the Christian religion they say, he says, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius, but the pernicious superstition repressed for a time broke out yet again not only through Judea where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, where all horrible and disgraceful things flow.

Tacitus makes it clear in his writings, he was a boy when the city burned, and he speaks negatively of Christianity, of course, because to speak positively of Christianity would have meant that he might have found himself being tortured.

But Tacitus anchors a few things in history.

He anchors in history the fact that not only did Jesus exist, but Jesus was put to death by punctious Pilate.

And I submit to you that the other ancient historian that does this, Josephus, are both important because even Josephus says that Jesus was the Messiah, being that he was a Jewish historian.

So I submit to you that out of this fire comes the torture of the Christians, but it also cements Christianity in pagan Rome as a religion.

How horrific was the torture of the Christians after the city burned?

It was so horrific because they would take Christians and they would put them up on stakes.

They would take animal skins fleshly ripped from off of the bodies of animals and wrap the Christians up in the animal skins and then release upon the Christians hungry dogs.

So terrible was Nero who wanted desperately to be a great charioteer, that Nero would take the Christians and sometimes he would put them on poles and he would light them on fire.

And at night Nero would practice his chariot racing as he bobbed and weaved in between the human torches that were Christians.

But no matter what they did, GYC, no matter how tortured the Christians were, 1 of the powerful things that happens is the Christian Church only gains strength.

In fact, Tacitus says something profound.

He says that as the average citizens see what's happening, many of them begin to feel sorry for the Christians.

And as Christians sing hymns, even as they are set ablaze, The last sounds uttered out of their parched mouths are songs of praise to God.

Can you imagine being a spectator and watching as 1 of these Christian dies?

And no matter how fierce the power of the Roman Empire is upon the group, no matter how pointed and directed the attack, no matter how hateful and slanderous the words, yet this group of Christians only continue to praise the living God.

Nero realized that if he was going to do away with Christianity, he had to do away with its leadership.

So for the second time, he goes and he arrests a very small, feeble, older gentleman by the name of Paul.

And Paul is drug in and thrown into a dungeon and left there to suffer.

Nero trying to make an example of him, trying to squash out this religion, who after a while they no longer said that their crime was burning down the city, but eventually the crime leaves being simply burning down the city and Tacitus puts it like this, he says eventually their crime is the hating of the human race.

Let me warn you young people that if you're going to be a Christian, the enemy is going to tell lies on you.

The enemy is going to try to galvanize the world against us.

You're going to be seen as barbaric, antiquated, out of touch, out of date.

You're slow, you're not that smart actually.

In fact, these pernicious lies have begun and a very sophisticated trap has already been sprung on the Christian world.

And in fact, much of Christendom doesn't realize this trap has been sprung.

When I look at individuals like Sarah Palin or the lady here in Delaware, just close by, who recently ran for the Senate seat in the United States, the lady who said she wasn't a witch.

You notice that what they do is when Sarah Palin is asked and and and and and O'Donnell are asked if they believe in evolution or creationism.

When these questions are posed to them there are commentators and pundits that now say listen I remember hearing Ariana Huffington say about Sarah Palin she is not qualified to be the president of the United States because she believes in a six-day creation.

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