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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Martin Kim

Expect Great Things from God

I feel so blessed to be here with my wife.

I feel that I'm at home and amongst friends.

I want to thank the ladies who gave us that beautiful special music and I want to thank our dear sister who led out in the song service.

At the church where I served in Seattle, we had 2 members who used to attend Advent Hope, and they are some of our most committed, active members.

And often as I think about their service to the Lord, I often think of Advent hope.

I know that God is doing something very special here, and I praise God for giving me this opportunity this morning to share from this church.

The morning, The morning sermon title is the message I'll be giving in the afternoon, and the afternoon message is the 1 I'll have in the morning.

There are 2 subjects that I am very passionate about, And those subjects are prayer and missions.

And with Operation Global Rain right behind us, I thought I'd share a mission story with you this morning that highlights the importance of prayer.

Dear God, I thank you, Lord, for your faithfulness, for your goodness.

I thank you for being a prayer hearing and a prayer answering God.

Lord, I pray that you would touch our hearts, you'd speak to us this morning, and I pray that you'd help me to be careful to give you all the praise.

At the church where I was serving up in Seattle, we wanted to get the church involved in fulfilling the Great Commission.

We wanted to get the church excited about foreign missions.

And there were a number of reasons that we wanted to do this.

First of all, the Bible tells us, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.

We didn't want to do just a local mission, reach out to the people in the Seattle area, but we wanted to be a part of taking the gospel to all nations.

Ellen White says, God's people are not to cease their labors until they shall encircle the world.

A second reason for wanting to do this is because Ellen White says to show a liberal, self-denying spirit for the success of foreign missions is a sure way to advance home missionary work, for the prosperity of the homework depends largely under God upon the reflex influence of the evangelical work done in countries afar off.

And we wanted God to just bless our church.

And we knew that if we got involved in foreign missions, that God would pour out His Spirit and bless our work in the local mission field.

The third reason is because we had a concern for our members.

We realized that our members were not making good investments.

A lot of our members like to invest in very expensive firewood, stuff that's all gonna burn in the future.

And we were concerned about our young kids growing up in such a materialistic culture, and they had very small dreams.

All wanted to be, they all wanted to come to Loma Linda, All wanted to be doctors, make lots of money and buy big homes and nice cars and we said your dreams are too little.

We wanted them to become missionary doctors.

By the way, do you have to go overseas to be a missionary doctor?

We have a few missionary doctors in our church.

And we wanted our young people to grow up.

We wanted them to make lots of money so they could pour it into the Lord's work.

And we wanted them to think of all eternity, to think of saving lives for all eternity, and not be so focused on this short life.

And for those reasons, we really wanted to emphasize foreign missions.

In the fall of 2005, We began praying seriously about how we could do this.

We had in the summer, previous to this, we had a mission rally.

But we didn't want to make missions just an event.

We wanted to make missions an ongoing thing.

So we prayed about this and we finally decided that we would set aside the loose offering from every third Sabbath, which the local church can't keep, we're going to send that overseas to people who are poor, who are in great need.

We finally decided to choose Adventist Southeast Asia Projects as the mission organization that would send our funds over.

Now the loose offering we would collect on average on a Sabbath comes out to about $200, $300.

It's a little bit to us, but overseas, it makes a world of difference.

So we chose this organization, and we started in December of 2005.

We collected 200, 300, some amount, sent it over, and then our second offering was sent to Vietnam.

For $20, you could feed a family for a week.

Shortly after collecting this offering, I was listening to a message by missionary pilot David Gates.

And as 1 person put it, I got bit by the David Gates bug.

He was sharing story after story and I'm like inspired, I'm like, whoa, whoa.

And then he says, and I'll paraphrase, he says, we'll never have enough money to finish the work.

He says, we'll never have enough money to finish the work.

We need to move forward in faith and trust the God of infinite resources to provide.

You see the rate at which the population is exploding.

You see the rate at which we're winning converts into the Adventist Church.

We're never gonna make it unless we step forward in faith as David Gates has been doing.

And so I said, Lord, I wanna do something.

And I refuse to believe that you have to be a missionary out in a third world country getting sick, getting malaria in order to see God do great things.

You're either reaching out or you're passing out.

Ellen White says, Every true disciple is born into the kingdom of God as a missionary.

And our members need to understand that we are all missionaries.

Within our sphere of influence, we need to be reaching out.

We need to reach out in our mission fields.

And then I thought about our once a month Sabbath mission offerings for ASAP.

And I thought, maybe I'll challenge my members to pray for a $400 offering.

But then I'm like, you know, I could easily put in an extra $200, and we could say we did it.

And then I thought about a $600 offering.

I'm like, maybe that requires a little bit more faith.

I finally said, it's gonna take faith to pray for a thousand dollar offering.

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Expect Great Things from God

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