Christians who desire to serve their community will find that there are a lot of opportunities all around them. How can you minister in your community? How can you get involved? Let’s talk about planting the seeds of God’s love right where you live.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

<p>Christians who desire to serve their community will find that there are a lot of opportunities all around them. How can you minister in your community? How can you get involved? Let’s talk about planting the seeds of God’s love right where you live.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Creative Outreach for Everyday Life

Amy Austin

01 A Lifestyle of Service

02 The Gift of Giving

03 Celebrating “the Holidays” in a Secular World

04 Called to Serve I

05 Called to Serve II

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Heavenly Father, we're so thankful for your love and we are so thankful that we can share that love with those around us.

Just bless our time together, Lord, and send your Holy Spirit to minister to us so that we are able to minister to others.

It just gets noisy and distracting for me.

All right, so let's see, what have we talked about?

We've talked about developing a lifestyle of service, Weaving it into all the intricate details of everyday life, and then we talked about birthdays and how to use our birthdays for Outreach and service and then yesterday we talked about all sorts of fun holidays so today we are going to the title is called Called to Serve, and we're just gonna go over the various, both of today and tomorrow are basically about the community.

Today is about specific groups of people that we can minister to, but all over the Bible we see that we are called to serve others, correct?

Yes, to love others, to care for others, to build others up, and to help others in their need.

Galatians 6-2 says, carry each other's burdens and so you will fulfill the law of Christ.

Next, Hebrews 13-15 says, don't forget to do good and to share what you have because God is pleased with these gifts, or these kinds of gifts.

John 15 12, this is my commandment, that you love 1 another as I have loved you.

Proverbs 19 17, those who are gracious to the poor lend to the Lord, and the Lord will fully repay them." And all of this should be done for the purpose of glorifying God, right?

Matthew 5, 16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven." This point, I love this Bible verse because that's the point of what I want everything I do to be.

And I was reminded of this just recently because We've been in the UP for not quite 3 years, and COVID started not long after we got there.

And you all know, maybe you're from a church that had a lot of struggles through COVID.

There are a lot of different feelings, And we won't even go into that, but there were some people who were very disgruntled when the conference shut the church down.

And they started just sending some terrible texts and saying some terrible things and saying that my husband was bowing down to bail because we closed the church and whatnot.

So all of that aside, it was very straining, and a few families decided to have their own church.

For quite a while they did that, and this 1 man in particular, just a lot of anger built up inside that we could see and feel and They came to a point.

I don't know probably 7 or 8 months ago where they thought okay.

We're gonna go back to church Praise the Lord, but right before they did he had a stroke And so he ended up in the hospital, and it has changed his life forever.

He was a carpenter, and he did all sorts of work on houses and various places.

But we started, we had tried to reach out, but in those types of situations, sometimes you have to be careful because you don't want to push them further away.

So we would do various things, but not a lot.

But once they were at home and recovering and life was totally different, we really started to minister, to bring food.

All winter long, we would go over and scrape their driveway and sidewalks and things like that.

1 time, actually the Lord is so good, he worked it out so that my husband went over there for something else and the couple, they're elderly and she has health problems too, were waiting for a ride to take them to the hospital for some appointments, but they were 20 minutes late.

And so my husband shows up and was able to take them.

Just various ways that we were really able to serve and love them.

And then at this point in their lives, they're actually moving to Oregon, but they've had a lot of trouble, their son has, working things out to get their belongings there.

So actually my husband is driving all of their things out to Oregon for them, but we really believe that God has opened up all these opportunities, and they have mentioned that they just, they see Christ, and they're just so thankful for the love that they feel, and their son, who is not a Christian or an Adventist, said to David, now I know what a Christian is.

I mean that's the whole reason that we do any of this, because we want others to know about Jesus.

And so today we're going to talk about various groups that we can share Jesus with, and different ways that we can do that.

So we're going to start with our neighbors.

There's a quote in My Life Today, August 17.

It says, Visit those who live near you, and by sympathy and kindness try to reach their hearts.

Visit the sick and suffering and show a kindly interest in them.

If possible, do something to make them more comfortable.

Through this means you can reach their hearts and speak a word for Christ.

Eternity alone will reveal how far-reaching such a line of labor can be.

Sometimes in this life we will see the results, but sometimes we will not.

But that doesn't mean that we stop doing what the Lord has called us to do, because eternity alone will reveal how far-reaching such a line of labor can be.

So we can't worry about those results, we leave them to God.

So 1 of the things that we have enjoyed doing from time to time, this worked especially well in the last neighborhood that we lived in.

We lived in a neighborhood where there were quite a few houses and we loved to take walks, even in the winter.

But 3 seasons of the year, we would see a lot of houses go for sale and then the for sale sign come down and it was sold.

So when we would see that sold sign on there, we would take a loaf of bread and we would go knock on their door and just introduce ourselves, let them know that we were their neighbors, whether it was just across the street or around the corner or wherever, and We'd just take a few minutes to meet them.

There are some chairs on that side if you would like.

Anyway, so this gave us an opportunity to meet people.

You know, it's easy to get to know your neighbors that are right around you when you live in a situation like that, but sometimes not as far away.

We got to know a few of our neighbors that lived in various places away from us.

I didn't leave a glow track with it because this was just an introduction.

We wanted to say here's who we are, but on the back it had God bless you and it had our name and address and phone number should they ever need anything.

Whole wheat, this one's a raisin cinnamon, so it was a blend of whole wheat as well as unbleached.

But sometimes now I use white whole wheat.

People enjoy it, and you know, they just love that you came by.

Another thing that we've done in our neighborhood.

So you remember yesterday we talked about national holidays.

Well, October 1 is National Homemade Cookie Day and we moved into that neighborhood in September, so we're like, hey, let's celebrate this.

So we went to our neighbors and we said, hey, it's National Homemade Cookie Day and we just wanted to introduce ourselves.

And we met a lot of interesting people this way.

1 of the ladies says to my my kids, do you like stuffed animals?

Having no idea that her husband or her, 1 of them was a taxidermist.

And so yeah, So seriously, and they were from South Africa or something and they hunted game there.

They had this lioness in their living room.

She took us in and showed us all this stuff.

There was a lioness stuffed sitting there like bigger than my kids.

But anyways, it was fun and we never would have learned that had we not taken our cookies on National Homemade Cookie Day.

So we met a lot of interesting people that way.

Of course, probably many of you have been involved in this.

Kids are good workers, so we always help neighbors, friends, church members with yard work and things like that, help them with projects.

I found with a family of 5, you can get a lot done, and people appreciate that.

So during COVID, this is just a picture of a letter and 2 little glow tracks, Steps to Health and Hope for Troubled Times is what it was.

I believe it has just Bible verses in it and then, so what we did, COVID had just hit and we were trying to figure out how can we reach out to our neighbors because then you know they told us you can't even go visit people you can't even go into other people's property or whatever.

So we wrote this letter basically just letting people know that we were available if they needed us to go to the store to get something or if I mean anything We even put a friendly phone call if they needed prayer.

We did have 1 lady call us and ask us for prayer, actually.

It was a really great way to connect with her.

We just put our neighbor on all of them because we hadn't met them all and their address.

We went for a walk 1 night and I was having my somebody I think I gave 1 of my kids my phone and they were writing all the house numbers down as we went.

Hopefully we didn't look suspicious but you know it was fun.

Dear friends, anyways we just wanted to reach out.

Then this is also during COVID, and this was for Easter during that first COVID.

And we decided that we wanted to put together door hanger bags because we weren't supposed to talk to anybody then.

And so we, here's, let's go to the next page because it'll show you what's in there.

Series

Creative Outreach for Everyday Life

04 Called to Serve I

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Plenary

I Will Go

46m

Plenary

But the Lord Stood With Me

53m

Creating Joy in Everyday Life

03 Creating Joy in Everyday Life

46m

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

01 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

48m

Is It Time to Fast?

04 Is It Time to Fast

57m

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

02 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

58m

Plenary

The Two Roads

1h 4m

Health Ministries Workshop

07 The Nuts and Bolts of a Great Cooking Class, Part 01

52m

Plenary

Living a Great Life

1h 3m

Understanding Revelation 12-14

03 Revelation 13: The Two Beasts Part 1

1h 1m

Essentials for Salvation

02 Persisting in Prayer

45m

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

03 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

51m

Sound Doctrine