Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The Joy of Giving

Amy Austin

01 The Generous Life

03 Fill Your Toolbox

04 What Can I Do?

05 Delivering the Message

02 Intentionally Prepared

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your love.

Thank you for your creativity and the way that you work in our lives.

Lord, we want more of you because we want to share more of you.

And so we just pray for your spirit to be here with us today.

All right, so what I was gonna say is my love for this started because I wanted my kids to love Jesus, to share Jesus, to serve others.

And so we started doing this in our family, but then I became involved in a Bible Labs program at our local Adventist school.

Even though the kids didn't go there, we were just very involved in a lot of things.

When it comes to the glow track packs, we read some quotes about how literature was supposed to be spread everywhere, and we thought, well, how can we do that with Bible labs?

And so the Lord gave me the idea of attaching these little objects to it, and it made it so easy for the kids to give, and the adults, and it made it so easy for people to receive it.

And so eventually I thought, you know, I need to start writing down these ideas and I'm going to share a blog with you that I started a while back, many years ago.

And then I remember 1 point in my life, it was 2015, I think the end, I said, Lord, if you'll just keep giving me ideas, I'll keep sharing them.

And in my head, I was thinking, I'll just take my churches out, my Pathfinders, my Avengers, my family, my whoever.

Well, a few months later, somebody asked me.

Gail Mitchell called me and asked me if I'd speak, because she had seen my blog.

So I spoke for the first time at camp meeting just 1 day and since then I've spoken a lot of different places, seminars and camp meetings and churches and all sorts of different places.

So it's amazing how the Lord leads you when you're just willing and available.

I just think, wow, Lord, it's pretty amazing.

He prepares me before I even need something.

So today we are going to talk about literature.

It can be a fun thing and it's definitely a tool that we can use to witness for the Lord.

So it's always played an important part in the role of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Even before we were formally established, literature was important.

And the more that I've prepared for this seminar, and I have done this seminar 1 other time, the Empower Workshop for the conference a month ago, I just, the more I read and study about it, the more excited and convicted I become about how important it is to share literature.

So I hope that you will gain just a little ounce of that excitement and conviction today as well.

Back in 1848, Ellen White had a vision and God gave a message to her for her husband.

He said, You must begin to print a little paper and send it out to the people.

Let it be small at first, but as the people read, they will send you means with which to print, and it will be a success from the first.

From the small beginning, it was shown to me to be like streams of light that went clear around the world.

And I love it, that's where streams of light came from.

I didn't actually realize that until a couple of months ago when I read this.

And then just 55 years later in 1903, the Adventist Church had reached 70 countries in the world, and in many of those places the church was established because of the presence of a literature evangelist in the area.

Since then we know that the publishing ministry has just boomed, it has grown by leaps and bounds, and it can have just as much success today as it did back in the early days of the Adventist Church.

Literature is still changing lives and introducing people to Jesus.

I want to share a story with you about a literature evangelist who handed the Great Controversy to a lady at the door.

He began to share his canvas, and the woman took the book in her hands and She looked at the cover while the student started to say their little opening line.

At that very moment as they began, she sees the cover, she smiles and she starts shouting, this is the book!

And the student was stunned, stopped what he was doing, canvassing, and the woman shared her story.

She said, a year ago, another student came by, and I bought this very book from them.

And she began to read the book, she began to realize that Jesus really was coming soon, and he began to change her life completely.

So as she grew closer to God, though, she had this nagging question in her mind, and it was, if I love God and I want to serve God with all my heart, why does he allow my husband to abuse me and to beat me?

He just, she didn't understand why he would allow that.

So she ruminated over this question incessantly, but then she started to realize that if God had changed her life, God could somehow also change her husband's life.

And so she thought, okay, I'm gonna leave this book on the coffee table and I'm gonna pray that he picks it up.

Well, she did that and she did that and for months nothing happened.

But 1 day she came home from the grocery store and her husband was sitting in a chair holding the Great Controversy and he had tears in his eyes.

And he looked at her, he said, you will never believe what just happened.

And he said, I was reading The Great Controversy.

I picked it up from the coffee table, started reading it, but the more I read it, the angrier I got.

And the reason was, is because he was a Catholic.

And so he took immediate offense to the historical accounts of the Catholic church.

So he got so angry, there was a fire going in the fireplace and he takes a book and he throws it into the fire that's going, that's burning.

But he looks back over there after that and he looked and he saw that the book was not burning.

He said to himself, wow, this book must be from God.

He took it out with a pair of tongs and he had the book in his hand and he was reading it.

Just like King Nebuchadnezzar, that man found that fire had no power over something that God does not permit to burn.

So he began to read that book and he eventually gave his life to Christ as well.

So the student, as you can imagine, was stunned and shocked by the woman's story.

The book that she carried really, or he carried, really had power.

It had refused to burn, and it had transformed a family's life in less than 1 year.

We can see that literature really can have an impact on people's beliefs, on their thinking, and it can change their hearts.

But the key is, and this is the key, before literature can have an influence on people, it has to be shared.

It won't do any good sitting on the shelf or in our homes or in our purse.

Ellen White points out that publications must be multiplied and scattered like the leaves of autumn.

These silent messengers are enlightening and molding the minds of thousands in every country and in every climate.

Now in order for this to become a reality, every member is needed.

But the beauty of this ministry, of literature itself, is that sharing literature is within the ability of every single church member.

It doesn't matter what your talents or skills are.

See, I have to tell people that literature is not a talent.

Literature is a tool that God gives us no matter who we are to share with others.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about turning the sharing of books and other literature into a habit.

We're going to talk about 5 different points that will help us develop a literature lifestyle, which goes hand-in-hand with developing a lifestyle of service as well.

So the first 1 you're gonna think that's so simple, that's so silly, But it is important.

So I always found, I canvassed for a few years as well, and I always found that the books that I sold the most were the books that I read.

The books that I had some sort of experience with, I knew a quote from it, or I could turn to this page, or even a picture, you know, you could point out something to them because I had an experience with the book.

It was easier to sell the cookbooks if I had tasted the recipes, even better if I had cooked 1 of the recipes.

Because experience with something often helps to sell it.

And when I say sell it, I don't mean you want money for it.

It's just when you're sharing something with someone, when you have an experience with it, you get more excited about it, right?

Literature goes with added power if you have a testimony to share about it.

Now, I'm not saying don't share literature if you haven't read it, because sometimes you're just not gonna be able to read everything.

But if you can pick up a glow track every once in a while, or if you can read a chapter in the Great Controversy, or Steps to Christ, or whatever it may be, it will have added power in your life and in others' lives.

So what we're gonna do just for 3 or 4 minutes is that you're gonna pick 1 glow track that you have never read, and you're gonna read it.

Just pick something that you haven't read.

Series

The Joy of Giving

02 Intentionally Prepared

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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