WYC 2010:  In His Image

Soul Thirst:  Going Deeper with God

Alan Parker

GYC West

Jump Start Your Devotional Life

Father God, we want to thank you for being with us, for your guidance and your blessing through WYC already.

We pray that you'll continue to lead us as we think about how to get our devotional lives back on track.

Too many of us, Lord, have experienced the frustration of not being able to connect, not being able to be consistent.

And so Lord, we pray that you will show us a way beyond that, help us to get through this valley of acorn to a door of hope.

Well, we're talking about how to jumpstart your devotional life.

So we're going to talk about some practical things.

And these are some of the things that I've heard, even experienced.

I just don't seem to get much out of my devotional time.

Have there ever been periods in your life when you said that?

I keep promising to get up earlier, but it doesn't happen.

Yeah, that may be more recent than some of the other ones.

And then I do well for a few days, but then I seem to slip back into a few rushed minutes before I get out the door.

You know what I'm talking about, those kinds of devotional experience that runs something like this.

All right, Lord, we've got to figure out what to do.

I'm sorry I can't spend much time with you today, but you know how rushed it is.

And I really would love to spend a little more time.

Maybe later in the day we could get back together, but you know how it is.

So there's a little verse I'd like to remember right now.

Not by my normal power, but by my spirit, says the Lord.

And I believe that your spirit will do it because I don't have the might or the power.

And then when you get down and the day is going miserably, Any of you had this?

And you get to the end of the day, and you kept promising yourself you'll have devotional time, but it just hasn't happened.

And then you do the loser's prayer at the end of the day.

10 o'clock at night, dear Lord, what a miserable day.

So those kinds of experiences tell me that something is going wrong in our devotional life.

And I want to suggest to you a number of things today that I believe will help us.

We've got to deal a little more philosophically at first, and then very practically right at the end.

First of all, is a devotional life important?

I had a friend who said to me, you know, in the Bible, I don't see a whole lot about a devotional life.

And so I don't think a devotional life's important.

Well, it obviously wasn't a good thing, because he eventually left the church.

Jealously, Your hours for, notice the 3 things.

Any of you ever had something on self-examination?

That means meditation, thinking about how it applies to your life.

A lot of us, we've got the prayer and Bible study down, but we don't know how to apply it to our lives.

God jealously, your minutes, oh wait, your hours, for prayer, Bible study, and self-examination, and set aside a portion of each week, is that what it says?

No, each day for a study of the scriptures and what?

Thus you will obtain spiritual strength and will grow in favor with God.

Bible study, prayer, self-examination are extremely important for having a strong relationship with God.

I want to suggest to you that there's 2 basic reasons.

And number 2, we use ineffective methods.

So very simply, that's what we're going to cover.

What's our motivation, and what methods are we using, and how could we use more effective methods than what we've used in the past?

So motivation, what drives you to have a devotional life?

It's written somewhere in the fundamental beliefs.

So you're like, how am I going to get to know God if I never spend time with him?

I've noticed that when I skip it all entirely, my day just goes pitiful versus days where I make that time, it just is so much better.

All right, so there's the practical, pragmatic reason.

I don't feel like you can show the image of Jesus and have a loving attitude towards others.

Like, sincerely, from the inmost part of my heart.

Lifestyle of the Last Generation

Nicole Parker

Grownups Playing Dress-up

Alright, let's start with a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we're just so grateful to you.

You've blessed us so much, Lord, with your word and knowledge of you, and I pray that you will bless us now as we're talking with 1 another that we will understand your word your plan for us and we will allow you into the deepest places in our lives thank you Lord amen today we are talking about grownups playing dress up.

And how many of you have ever played dress up?

Or as they would point out, 3 and a half, 4 and a half, and 6 and a half.

My daughter, especially, just loves dressing up.

She has her little friends come over and they like to dress alike or they'll dress up in her fanciest dresses and prints around the house or they put clips all over in their hair.

Not too long ago she and her best friend Ellie dressed up as Egyptian princesses.

They each probably had 20 hair clips in their hair.

And Ellie's mom overheard them talking to each other.

And she said, you need to clean up in the other room.

Saying, Why do we have to do all this work?

Yes, when you dress up, it's so easy to suddenly morph into feeling very different.

This is my son Seth dressing up as a fireman the other day.

And we sometimes kind of fall into the same habit.

We feel like a quick change on the outside makes us feel so different.

You know how it is when you get a new haircut or some new clothes and you suddenly feel so much more confident about yourself.

You're going out there and you feel like you look good.

But that is not exactly how God wants us to base our sense of how we feel about ourselves, is it?

A quick change on the outside, and now I feel like I am an Egyptian princess, right?

And when we fall into that trap, God wants us to come up to something so much higher.

God is not interested in a quick fix of decorating the outside.

Now, you know when God changes a heart, He changes it so that change comes to the outside, right?

You know, when I was trying to figure out what I would talk about here, I thought, you know, I know what I want to do.

I want to just Go over there and start out by putting up this long quotation about the length of skirts.

And then when everybody goes, oh, no, is that what it is?

But then I thought, some people are going to listen to that on audio verse.

And when I start droning about the length of skirts, they're just going to turn it off.

Because I don't think that's really where we should be focusing.

I think God wants to do something deeper.

This isn't an actual picture of that tree, but it was this massive tree in the backyard of the place that we were living.

I mean, this tree was so big, I would put my arms around it like this, and I could only get halfway around the tree.

Some of the branches were dying, and they were falling down.

We had a couple of windstorms when a big branch fell down.

My little kids play underneath this tree outside.

If something falls on them, they could be killed.

So we called up our landlords and they agreed to get rid of the tree.

So the first thing they did was hire somebody to come in and take scissors and cut off all the leaves of the tree.

All right, just want to see if you guys were awake.

In fact, these guys came in with their massive saws.

And it was really pretty impressive watching them.

And then they start going down this trunk in sections, I mean, this massive trunk.

And then they took their root grinder and they ground out all the roots down underneath, even down under the ground.

They ground all down in there to get rid of everything from this tree.

That's the way that I always process stuff.

And I thought, wow, what a good illustration.

When you weed the garden, do you do it with a lawnmower?

We know that if we weed with a lawnmower 2 weeks later, it's going to look just like it did before, right?

And yet, in dress, we've often tried to weed with a lawnmower.

Be sure you don't wear any jewelry or anything that looks like jewelry.

No glittery stuff around your neck, because that could make it look like you're wearing jewelry, even if it's not actual jewelry.

And while that's important, it's much more important that we get to the root.

These guys who were cutting down the tree, they knew they needed to get rid of the branches, because otherwise the tree wasn't going to come down right.

Sometimes we need to have some guidelines of this is where we need to dress.

And especially when you've got an institution or a school or something like that, you've got to have some basic minimum guidelines.

But God wants to do so much better, right?

ASI 2010: Inspired to Finish Strong

ASI 2010 Seminar: Nonprofits

Steven Grabiner

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Okay, well this seminar for nonprofits is about decisions, decision-making, both in your personal life but more focused on decision-making in your organizations.

My name is Stephen Grabner and I'm currently vice president with an organization called OCI, Outpost Centers International.

We have around 75 ministries around the world that we work with.

I sit on a lot of boards, I do a lot of helping with leaders, consulting with leaders.

For 10 years I was a missionary in Africa, a place called Riverside Farm, and for 11 years before that I was a pastor in southern New England.

And leadership's been a special study of mine for the past number of years.

Because as Ellen White makes a comment in the testimonies, you know, the level of a church only gets really as far as the spirituality of the leadership in that church.

And I think we can look at different organizations and see how leadership decisions, board decisions, individual leadership decisions, have either contributed toward this success or the failures of those organizations.

So that's what we're going to talk about this morning is decision making, the process of decision making.

You should have a handout with you as well.

And I may be good in leadership, but I'm really technologically challenged.

So what we're going to talk about, I found this on the internet.

I thought it was a great illustration for the complexity of decision making.

We're not really going to talk about that chart and fill your mind with all that.

I really want to kind of hone things down.

And just as we begin, I want to ask you a question.

Have you been involved in an organization, either a ministry or a church, a non-profit, something like that, in which you can look back and think bad decisions have been made?

So just do me a favor and just jot that down on the top of your paper.

I'm going to come back to that hopefully later as we go through this.

And think of a specific incident where you were with an organization and some decisions went the wrong direction.

And the reason I want you to do that is because as we go through this process together, I'm hoping that you'll be able to reflect on that situation and be able to pull some of the things we talk about and say, you know, I think that contributed to our poor decision.

Because our whole purpose this morning is not just to find out about bad decisions.

It's really to learn how to make better decisions, just to make good decisions.

I think they're on your handout, I believe they are.

First is, sorry that's a little light, to identify key decision making saboteurs.

Things that will derail the decision making process.

And most of us, when we go through a decision process, and if we're to talk about, you know, what went wrong, It's easy to say, well hindsight is always 20-20.

Boy, look back, you know, I really wouldn't have done that.

But too often we use that as a kind of a cloak for not learning from our mistakes.

And it's like, okay, well, hindsight's 20-20.

But maybe we were tripped up by some sabotage, some certain things that happen in the decision making process.

And then secondly, I hope that we can identify some ways to improve our decision making.

So again, identifying areas that will trip us up and then looking forward to ways that can improve.

Now on your handout there's a couple of Bible verses I wanted to share with you.

And it's interesting to me that in Proverbs in 2 places we get almost the exact same quote, and certainly the key emphasis, where now counsel is, what happens?

People fall, people perish, hang on, translation.

But in the multitude of counselors, there is safety.

Without counsel, purposes are disappointed.

But in the multitude of counselors, they are established.

That there's a value, that there's a power in teams.

Now, you're probably familiar, maybe you're not, you're probably familiar with the TV show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Well, I've never seen it, I've only heard about it.

But as far as I understand, question and answer.

And when you're being asked the question, 1 of the things you can do to get a right answer is what?

What are the different ways, if you have any idea?

And the audience is right an astounding 95% of the time.

Here you get this group of people and if you were to ask them as a group, the audience is right about 95% of the time.

At the GC, those of you who were there, there was a ministry that talked about God as the elephant in the church.

I forgot the name of it exactly, but they had a jar of peanuts, about that high.

And the whole thing was they wanted people to guess how many peanuts were in there, and then they were giving a prize.

Most times, the aggregate, the average of all the answers, all the guesses, will be the closest.

So I had this idea, I was going to stand there and I was going to ask a hundred people how many peanuts they thought were in that jar.

And statistically the average would have been closest to the right answer.

And that is that there are certain dynamics that come to play that shortcut the power the teams can bring to things.

And that's why if we think of our boards, we think of our organizations, you know, here we're together, we have this different things, but there are certain processes that impact the potential of teams, of groups, of boards, of different clusters of people.

So the scripture reference is, hey, in a multitude of counselors there's safety, great.

But how do I get that group of counselors to really fulfill their potential?

What is it that negatively impacts that group of counselors?

A couple of other quotations here, just look at them briefly as well, from Second Selected Messages 198.

In making important decisions, we should study every side of the question.

We are ever to remember that we are given a place in the work of God to act as responsible agencies.

I love that phrase, study How many sides of the question?

And we'll see how difficult that really is for us as we go through this time together.

To really hear 1 another, to have good, enthusiastic discussion.

Let me do a little test with you if I can, a little word association.

So if I say, for example, red, what's the first word that comes to your mind?

ASI 2010 Seminar: Spiritual Growth

Subodh Pandit

Come Search with Me: Let’s Look for God

I'd like to begin just a minute or 2 before so that at the time we begin.

I'm from originally from India, a physician, so I'm not a pastor or a philosopher or a historian.

What I'm going to describe to you is the results of a 20-year search that I went through.

At the end of those 20 years, I had a lot of information in my hands.

So I spent the next 5 years in trying to put them together.

And when I put them together, I realized that there was a way in which you could logically think this through.

And when I finished that, I realized it was not only an answer to my prayer, but it could possibly help somebody else.

The seminar runs about 7 and a half to 8 hours.

So what I will do is give you just snippets and examples of how I went through that search.

So we have, like I said, just about 1 hour.

15 minutes, well I hope I don't take all those 15 minutes.

I'd like to leave some period for questions, if we can.

It takes a little something to put it together.

The hardest thing when you're putting something like this together is what shall I leave out, not what to include.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Jump Start Your Devotional Life

53m

Grownups Playing Dress-up

1h

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

1h 13m

Come Search with Me: Let’s Look for God

1h 32m

Reaching Hearts in Secular Nations

1h 7m

For Such a Time As This: A Business Plan that You Can Live With!

1h 14m

Fundraising Basics for Ministries: Understanding boards, direct mail, and how to raise funds for just about anything!

1h 31m

Leadership in the New Millennium: Getting to the Bottom of Leadership When You’re at the Top

1h 13m

Creating Value, Making a Difference

1h 13m

The Transforming Power of our Health Message: Good News about Re-engineering Genetic Health Risk

1h 13m

Growing Faith

1h 12m

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

1h 58m

Sound Doctrine