 Wrestle with cultural issues and how to speak with people of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religions. Explore what God wants you to do in finishing the Great Commission. 

Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

<p> Wrestle with cultural issues and how to speak with people of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religions. Explore what God wants you to do in finishing the Great Commission. </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

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

Scott Griswold

01 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

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.

Father in heaven, thank you so much for your incredible love for us, that you were willing to send Jesus across the expanse of the universe to our world, to a very specific home and a place that was vulnerable and difficult, we thank you that you had a great love to come and be 1 of us, to share our suffering, our difficulties, and then to call us to your great mission of reaching out to those who are suffering, who are struggling, who are far from home and anything that's important to them, except for maybe a bit of their family.

We ask that you would come today by the power of your Holy Spirit and give us your heart for refugees, your heart for those who are the stranger in our midst.

And so we ask that you would take over this time, the things that we say, the things that we think about, and you would lead us into the mission field that is strategic at this end time to take the gospel to every corner of the earth.

We thank you and we pray that wherever this gospel goes, it will also reach to those who are marginalized, who are on the edges of society, who feel like a stranger and are longing, lonely for family, for connection, for safety.

My name is Pastor Scott Griswold And my wife Julie is joining me in this.

You'll hear more from her during this week as we share our involvement in refugee ministry.

But I want to give you just a little introduction to where it comes from in our hearts.

As we were at the seminary, we began to be more and more stirred for the needs of those who never had a chance to hear.

So I was not aware of it growing up, very isolated in my thinking and understanding as far as the gospel needing to go to the world, I had the sense that already the Adventist Church was everywhere, like mission spotlights seemed to show.

And as we became more and more aware of the thousands of unreached people groups in the world, we began to pray, Lord put a people group on our hearts.

And we didn't know where that would be, how God would lead, but as we began to pray, different things about Cambodia began to come across our mind and our lives.

As a child of 8, 9, 10 years old, I didn't know what was happening in Cambodia.

We didn't realize that 2 to 3000000 people were dying of starvation, were dying from being killed by child soldiers, by the genocide that was taking place in the country.

I watched the movie The Killing Fields, and my heart just broke for what people went through during that horrible time.

And then we decided to go and talk with Judy Akin, who was part of the AFM Refugee Projects that later became ASAP Ministries.

And we said, someday we would like to be missionaries and be able to serve God among some people that are in great need.

Someplace where it's extremely poor, someplace where they have no knowledge of Jesus.

And she said, let me tell you about Cambodia.

She described a country that had been just destroyed by war and now was rebirthing itself with many, many children, over 50% of the country being children, and that there were still many in the refugee camps and that quite a few thousands had become Seventh-day Adventist Christians during that time in the refugee camps.

So this picture is growing in our mind and it just seemed, you know, just such a great need.

And we wondered maybe someday we'll be out there and can help.

And at my wife's graduation, Judy Aiken walked up to us there on the steps of Pioneer Memorial Church where the statue of John Andrews and his 2 children are, and she said to us, we need somebody in the refugee camps now.

And we began to pray and God led us to go.

And we landed in Thailand and took the 4 or 5 hour journey out towards the refugee camps and we had a little house waiting for us and we began to go every day or every other day to the refugee camps, 2 different ones, where the last of the Cambodian refugees were waiting, hoping, still hoping, to join others who'd gone to America, Canada, Australia, France, and then realizing, no, nobody more is going, you're headed back to your country, which is supposedly now safe enough to have its first ever free election, but a huge contingency of United Nations soldiers are there to make sure it's so.

And we met people who were so frightened that they refused to get on the bus, and only at gunpoint were able, had to be made to get on as they went back to try to start their life again.

For 6 months we had the privilege of being beside them, preparing them, encouraging them, helping them to think about what their life would be back in their country, and helping many of them who become Seventh-day Adventist Christians have the idea of planting a church wherever they would go.

So this was our experience going to the markets, buying things like toilet paper and pens for their children who were eager to learn and study, but they couldn't get out of the camps.

They had to put up with whatever was delivered to them, placed in their hands.

We'd see big piles of turnips and big piles of greens and bags of rice that were brought and people standing in line waiting their turn.

We talked with individuals in the safe part of the camp.

You'd think the whole camp was safe, but thieves would come through the barbed wire fences and pass the landmines to steal.

Or maybe it was just someone else in the camp who felt they needed something.

So there we'd sit and talk and try to comfort church members who had everything that they had, little though it was, taken from them, and be able to pray with them, encourage their hearts, and then watch them go back on the bus and move to Cambodia, and we moved with them.

Only we got on a plane and went to Phnom Penh and began to learn the language and began to help as they came.

Some of them went to their own villages, others there was nothing for them where they were.

Their house was taken over by somebody else, now was living in their home, or maybe it had been destroyed.

And so we met them, tried to help them have jobs, and encouraged their hearts, and visit them to encourage them to start churches where they were.

And that's how the Cambodian church in Cambodia, Cambodia's Seventh Day Adventist Church began to be built, began to grow up as little pockets of returned refugees shared the gospel with their neighbors.

And that's also how we have Cambodian Seventh-day Adventist churches in places around the United States.

As Judy Aiken, back here in the United States, began to encourage others and other people saw the need and began to welcome the Cambodians into their churches, into their hearts, and into their lives.

So that gives you a little bit of our background.

Since then, At this time, we are serving in Texas, Houston, Texas, and we are reaching out to refugees.

Yes, Cambodians still, 30 years later, they are immigrants that have been here, many of them for that long, for 30 years since that time of crisis in Southeast Asia.

And it's not like it's gone from their heart and mind.

Chuck, who's my age, when I sit in his home, he's my close friend, it won't take long, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and he's talking about those days of the war that he went through as a young boy of 9, 10 years old, how it just hangs there with him.

So even though they wouldn't consider themselves refugees anymore, for they've raised children here who are now raising children, it's still there in their heart, the pain and the loss and the difficulty.

And today we want to enter into the heart of refugees.

We work now more with Afghan refugees who have been flooding in.

Just in the month between December and January of this year, we saw another 3, 000 come into Houston.

The numbers are increasing, increasing across the United States.

We have at least 76, 000 who have come in the last year.

That's about the normal amount of refugees who came into the United States each year for the last many years, except for maybe the last 3 or 4 years it's been very small.

But that all came at once from just Afghanistan, and now we have the Ukraine crisis.

So this wave of refugees is bringing it to the forefront of many people's minds.

And to God's people, they are rising up to it.

So that when we were at the GC session just this last week, meeting people from around the world, we heard many individuals who have begun to minister and to serve and to care.

Oh, I have an Afghan friend now, said a conference president from Northern California.

My wife and I are reaching out to your family and different ones.

It is something special that God is doing.

You can see up here the statistics from the UNHCR.

If you go and just type in the internet search refugee statistics, this will be the first 1 that comes up, because the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is the 1 that most oversees the problem in the world and sees the need.

84 million displaced people in the world.

That sounds like, oh, I displaced my watch.

No, these are people like you and me who love to live where they live with the friends and neighbors they have, going to the church they've always gone to, shopping at the market they're used to, and suddenly they cannot be there anymore.

Whether through war or through persecution, some reason they have to be up and moved.

So displaced is different from the word refugees.

As you can see there, it speaks of, it doesn't, 26.6 million people are refugees.

That means they crossed the border into another country.

So many who fled the country, more than 4000000 people left, but many more were just not able to live in their hometown.

They had to flee to a safer part of the country.

And of those 84 million that cannot live at home any longer, 35 million are children.

That means that 1 out of a hundred people in the world don't get to live at home, don't get to be safe in their own place and environment.

I almost hesitate to share statistics because we can kind of just blank out when we see the numbers.

But as we go through this experience today of feeling the heart of refugees, I believe it'll come very close.

And perhaps some of you have met individuals, and as you hear their stories, it becomes much, much more real.

Of course, there's nothing like going through it yourself.

And as we connect, I find individuals, perhaps some who've come across the border from the South who have been through similar experiences, but are therefore able to relate to those who've actually fled war-torn countries.

Being able to understand where they're from and what they've gone through is crucial as we seek to enter into their heart.

But before we talk any more about that, I want to just visit a couple places in scripture so that we can feel the heart of God towards refugees.

In reality, the Bible is a story of migration from beginning to end.

You think about it, Adam and Eve made a choice, a horrible choice against the goodness, the gracious, the loving protection of their father, and through that, had to leave where they were.

As they left that garden of Eden, that beautiful place, a flaming sword was there to keep them from perpetuating sin forever by taking hold of the tree of life.

But even though they were sent away from their home of safety, God had a heart to care for them.

And he clothed those first refugees with skins from animals that he must have somehow taken the life of and made that first sacrifice, demonstrating that 1 day Jesus would come as a Messiah and would be willing to give his life.

In fact, when Jesus does come, he becomes a migrant who moves from heaven to earth in order to help and to save us.

02 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

Father in heaven, as we begin this morning, we ask you to take our minds and to place them where your mind is right now.

On the millions, over 80 million people that are not in their homes anymore, that cannot go to their schools and their places of work, that have lost their network and lost their families, some of their family members, and lost their life as they knew it.

We ask that our heart would unite with your heart, and that it would move us beyond simply compassion in our feelings to compassion in our action, that we would know how to tangibly care for them, and that we would be able to not only care for their physical needs, but recognize their deep mental and emotional needs that are yours to minister to, that you've promised to heal and comfort the brokenhearted, and to 1 day wipe away all their tears.

More than that, we ask for that ability to share salvation with them, to lead them to the ministering of their greatest need, which is eternal life, a remedy from sin and death.

And so, Father, we ask that you would put it together in a package that we can see and feel today and live.

Please take my words, Julie's words as we share, and may the Spirit of God be upon us all.

May we all have something that moves us and helps us to live out your work for us today.

We lift up the many unreached groups in Michigan and ask that you would just take your church and revive them, awaken them, and throw them out into the harvest field as Jesus promised you would do if we prayed and asked you.

Well, my name is Pastor Scott Griswold and my wife, Julie, and we shared in the previous seminar a little bit about our first exposure to refugees and the work that was going on all around Thailand.

Thailand was like this 1 safe place that refugees from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam kept pouring in.

And so that was our first exposure just shortly after we were married, partway through seminary, God picked us up and threw us out over there, and we ended up spending the next 6 years in Cambodia working with the church, which was basically a refugee church come back to its own country, scattered, and encouraging the work around there.

Later, God brought us back to America, then back again to Thailand, working with the Buddhist Study Center, helping to equip the church in reaching out to Buddhist people wherever they are.

And then about the time that our parents were getting to the place where we felt we needed to be around, and our children were ready for college and academy, he brought us back and we were asking the question, why are we here?

We should be over there in the mission field.

And he opened our eyes to see in Houston and many other cities that God has brought the world here.

And as Ellen White says, we should be able to see in the multiplying opportunities to reach many foreigners in America and divinely appointed means of rapidly extending the third angel's message into all the nations of earth.

That's in the book Evangelism, page 570, and it's inside the booklet Praying for the World Next Door, which you can find at ReachTheWorldNextDoor.com.

And let me just mention that site as a place you can go now to find out about Michigan.

We've researched that just in the last week and have placed that.

If you go to reachtheworldnextdoor.com forward slash Michigan, you'll be able to see that.

We'll look at that some more as we get into what we're doing so you know the resources that are there.

And also a resource called mylanguagemylife.com, which has more than 180 languages, biblical materials, Seventh-day Adventist materials, the Jesus film, Adventist World Radio, Hope Channel, anything we can find in their language that they can share.

And again, we'll look at that more as we go along.

I'm gonna share, Julie, just for a few minutes on from the word of God, and then we'll go into sharing a little bit of our experience in tangibly reaching out to the physical needs of refugees.

And so we'll look at that, that'll be more of our focus today is, is what are their needs?

If you have a Bible with you, turn to Isaiah chapter 58.

I find this chapter to be so inspiring, so encouraging, that I go back to it again and again.

We find ourselves as a Seventh-day Adventist church in this passage.

It has been our mandate from the early history of our church and I believe God has given it to his people to help them to realize the fullness of what he wants us to be at the end of time.

We don't have time to go through the whole thing.

Ellen White wrote that we should memorize this chapter, and I believe it's the most referred to chapter in the entire Bible in her writings.

So if that stirs your heart to read it and study more, it sure does mine.

But as God addresses through Isaiah the religious nature of his people without the heart of love, He challenges them to wake up.

They're fasting, they're praying, they're approaching God.

He says, let me show you the kind of fast I really want you to be about.

Verse 6 he says, is not this the fast that I've chosen?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry?

And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out?

When you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself in your own flesh.

I never saw the refugee there before, before the last few years, but he specifically says the poor who are cast out.

And I have found out that in the scriptures, the most oft-repeated command after the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart is the command to love and care for widows, orphans, and refugees, as we mentioned yesterday.

When God puts it as that high of priority, that high of importance, we have to ask not only, okay, where shall I go, what shall I do, but why, why is it so important to Him?

And the next verse helps us to understand.

Verse 8, it says, "'Then your light shall break forth like the morning, "'your healing shall spring forth speedily, "'and your righteousness shall go before you, "'the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

It goes on, it gets into the places that we've often quoted as Seventh-day Adventists.

We are the repairers of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.

This is the work of God's people to raise up truth, to restore truth that's been lost through the centuries.

And it ends by talking about the Sabbath truth, which has been forgotten, though God said, remember the Sabbath day.

But often, because of our focus on truth and the importance of taking the 3 angels' messages to the entire world, we have neglected the first part of it.

We've forgotten that he balanced the 2, that he said, truth is spoken and lived.

Truth is best understood when it's seen, lived out by a people who care.

And even right into the heart of the Sabbath commandment, God has put the stranger that dwells in your gates.

Why was God so insistently speaking to them about caring for the stranger among you?

Who would leave their own tribe to come join the tribe of Israel, unless they were persecuted, unless they were in the middle of war, unless there was famine that drove them across their own borders into the borders of the Jews.

And so God says to them, remember you were strangers in Egypt.

Please take care of the stranger in your midst.

Part of your mission as a Seventh-day Adventist church as you're lifting up truth is to lift up the truth that God loves those who are in heartache, those who are struggling, those who are hurting, and invites us to do so.

And the phrases that we find here, your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard, are words that are directly tied to 2 chapters over in Isaiah chapter 6.

We love this passage because it inspires us about the end of time.

Isaiah 60, that It's not just gonna be a time of persecution and time of trouble such as we've never seen before.

It's gonna be a time of incredible glory, incredible beauty as the world beholds God.

Verse 1, it says, "'Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.

Not just glory somewhere in the sky, not just glory in a special message about Jesus, but his actual glory seen through his church.

Verse 2, Behold the darkness shall cover the earth and deep darkness the people.

As we see Ukraine torn apart, as we see Afghanistan dissolve again and again and again into misery and war, as we see the pain and suffering across the world and the knowledge of God being wiped out from an entire generation in North America, the young generation, losing it through media and through the education, the public school systems and so many things, but the Lord will rise over you and his glory will be seen upon you.

The Gentiles shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising." And it goes on to describe how the nations will turn to God's people.

It shows that the righteousness of God is something very real and tangible.

Something that can be seen in his people.

So that in our message of righteousness by faith while we loudly proclaim the beautiful truth that through Christ and Christ alone our sins are covered and his righteousness is placed on our account, nothing of our own, not a single thread of our own in that garment of Christ's righteousness.

But the Bible also makes clear that he also comes and dwells in our heart with his very real righteousness, so that when Jesus finally stands in judgment, He can say, I was a stranger and you took me in.

And it divides the people between the goat and the sheep, those who come in and those who do not.

And while we always struggle and say, wait a minute, why is there a judgment when we're saved by faith?

We understand clearly, Jesus says, here is my righteousness that I give to you.

03 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

Father in heaven, we come before you thanking you for just calling us your children and us being able to know you as our Heavenly Father.

And we long for the rest of the world to get to know you as their Heavenly Father as well.

And we've had this wonderful opportunity to be able to see many people come to America and we want to reach out and befriend them and find ways to introduce them to how good You are.

And so today I pray that Your Holy Spirit will be with us and that You will teach us new insights, Your insights, Lord.

Just hide us behind the cross of Jesus and that You would be seen in what You want to have shared.

Help us to all learn from each other today, and we're so grateful that we can be here in your precious name.

Julie and I work with ASAP Ministries with a project called Reach the World Next Door.

And for those who are listening online who may be hearing for the first time and for those who just came this morning, there are 2 websites we'd like you to know about and we'll share about a third 1 later.

1 is ASAPministries.org which has projects around the world, specifically in Southeast Asia, but also among the persecuted elsewhere.

And those projects involve church planting, medical missionary work, and a lot of schools that are supported among refugees as well as others.

So many on the Karen-Thai border, I should say Burma and Thai border there.

And then reachtheworldnextdoor.com has our information on reaching out cross-culturally.

And there are a lot of resources there that you can find.

I want to open our time with thoughts from the Scripture as we have been, and I invite you to go to Mark chapter 8.

Mark chapter 8 is a story that used to just blip over in my mind and I would think what's that doing there?

And because it's the feeding of the 4, 000.

In fact some scholars as they're looking they just assume that this was a mistake, that this was some later edition.

Someone got it wrong and it got stuck in.

As we look at it, it's there for a very specific and amazing reason that connects directly to reaching the world next door that God has sent.

And so it says there in chapter 8 of Mark, it says, in those days the multitude being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to him and said to them, I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with me 3 days and have nothing to eat.

And if I send them away hungry to their own houses, they will faint on the way, for some of them have come from afar." Now is your mind going back to the feeding of the 5, 000 at all?

Think about, okay, we have a difference in numbers, obviously 5, 000 and 4, 000.

It's focused on men, so we don't know women and children but Jesus in the feeding of the 5, 000 goes all day long full speed teaching and healing and the people are soaking it up and nobody's thinking about food except the disciples who are getting hungry and who are concerned about what should they do with all these people.

And so they asked Jesus to send them home.

And they find the 5 loaves and the 2 fish.

And everybody's so excited, they want to make Jesus king.

How long are they teaching and listening and learning?

And do the disciples come and ask for the people to be fed or to be sent home?

It's Jesus that has to turn to them and say, they've been with me 3 days with nothing to eat.

Has the feeding of the 5, 000 happened already?

In fact, when Jesus says to that, says something about it, verse 4, it says, his disciples answered him, how can 1 satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness?

Series

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

03 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

02 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

58m

Plenary

Living a Great Life

1h 3m

Plenary

I Will Go

46m

Religious Liberty Under Pressure

Eyes on Adventism

1h

Essentials for Salvation

02 Persisting in Prayer

45m

Is It Time to Fast?

04 Is It Time to Fast

57m

Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

01 Effective Wholistic Witnessing Among Refugees

48m

Plenary

But the Lord Stood With Me

53m

Plenary

The Two Roads

1h 4m

Creating Joy in Everyday Life

03 Creating Joy in Everyday Life

46m

Creative Outreach for Everyday Life

04 Called to Serve I

55m

1 Peter Ch. 3 Part 2

56m

Sound Doctrine