Okay, I'm being forced to do this because of all the questions. What the well-dressed pastor or teacher is wearing this year, this summer, is the handmade shirt from Palau, handmade by the ladies in the Palauan Church. It was a gift to me when I was a speaker down at the 85th Gospel Conference. We just recently celebrated the anniversary of the Gospel coming to Palau in 1929. And I was just talking with someone about that. It's really interesting that the Palawan Church is the same age as my father-in-law, Dale Cundell. Both were born in 1929. Of course, we have to accessorize with the Pohnpei and handcrafted shell tie. And this, when I taught a hermeneutics class down in Pohnpei and the pastors gave this to me. They do some incredible shell work in Pohnpei. It's really beautiful stuff. I think one year we gave out Christmas tree stars with shells in the middle. Some of you may still have those. Those all came from Pohnpei. Our art teacher at PIU heads a group that makes those. But it's a real privilege for me to be able to do that kind of teaching. My life mission verse is Ezra 7.10, and I've adapted it a little bit for modern times. Ezra 7.10 says what Ezra was all about. It said, Ezra dedicated to himself. Literally, Ezra set his heart on the study of Torah. Of course, I expand that out to the full Old and New Testament. To the study of Torah, its observance, that means doing it. and then teaching its laws and statutes throughout all Israel, which of course now is expanded out to the entire world. And as we teach hermeneutics, one of the keys to hermeneutics that we talk about... I say that I'm the only person that does what I do, that's not true anymore. My son finished seminary and came back and he studied all the exact same things as I did. So I don't know, I may be superfluous now, but... My son can handle all of those classes. But one of the things we talk about in our hermeneutics class is that to properly exegete a text, to properly interpret a text, it's very important to take both a telescopic view from afar and a microscopic view from close up. Or another way of saying it is you always have to look at the text from both the bird's eye view and the worm's eye view. And tonight what we're going to do is we're going to do the bird's eye view. We're going to take a very telescopic view of the Bible and of mission. Because all the time that we're being asked as an accredited school to evaluate our mission. And based on my personal life mission, my concern is that our school reflect what the Bible says. We are an interdenominational school. We don't have any denominational background that we have to uphold. And what I want is for our school to reflect what the Bible says in a relevant way into the cultures that we're teaching it. As I said, we want to produce Micronesian theologians who apply eternal biblical principles to the issues of Micronesia. And so to do that, one of the big questions that I have to ask, and I'm going to ask you. I like to be interactive. I guess it comes from teaching in school all the time now. I like to be interactive, so I'm going to ask you this question. Who can tell me what the message of the entire Bible is in five to ten words? The message of the entire Bible in five to ten words. I love you, don't be stupid. That's an applicational message for sure. Jesus said that to Peter all the time, didn't he? Yes. We are sinners and we need a Savior. That'll cover a lot of it, not all of it. Anybody else want to give it a shot? God loves me. A lot about the character of God there, not a whole lot about what I'm supposed to be doing, but it's a good base. I don't, did you get it in under 10? That's pretty close. That's pretty good. Romans eight. Okay. Yeah. That, that covers again, most of it. Now, are there any literature teachers here? Basic literature? Oh yes, Melody, of course. Why did I even have to ask that? If you are trying to figure out the message of any book, and by any book I mean any good book, where is the first place, you don't want to read the whole book, you want to find out the message of the book, where are you going to look for the message? The back cover where somebody else found it for you. Or you go on wiki, right? Where are you going to read in the book? A good book I'm talking about here. Where do you find the basic message? In the beginning and? at the end. And it's very interesting. Now, the Bible is a very good book. It's a very well-written book. It's a very exciting book. And I remember when I was at Dallas Seminary, Howard Hendricks, he would say over and over again, he'd go, gentlemen, do you know what the worst possible sin you could do as a preacher? Make the Bible boring. The Bible is not a boring book. And when he taught it, it was never boring. I'll never forget when he came into class on a Harley to start the class. Right down the steps, and right to the front, and got off and started teaching. But anyway, the Bible. The Bible begins where God places human beings in a garden. And he gives them a job to do. Do you remember what the job to do is in the garden? Take care of the animals and the plants. By the way, I'm doing a little test here to see if all churches do the same thing. That's a good one. What else? What else are the man and the woman supposed to do? Okay, be fruitful and multiply. They remember that one always. Ah, that's the one they don't usually get. Fill the earth and subdue it. The idea of creation is God bringing things into order and placing things under His authority. And He says to the human beings, He says, I want you to take the earth and subdue it. God's job is now delegated to human beings to take the earth and subdue it. Now, how did the humans do on that job? They actually, well, from an environmental perspective, they may not have done so good, but how about from God's perspective? How did they do? They blew it. They blew it totally and completely. Human beings that were set in the garden as God's image, the ultimate part of God's creation, failed to accomplish the job that God called them to do. In fact, instead of subduing it, they were subdued by it. They were tempted and they fell into sin. So the job wasn't accomplished. But now we go to the end of the book. And what do we find at the end of the book? What is similar to what we found at the beginning that's at the end? New heavens and the new earth, and it's pictured in Revelation as a garden. We have a garden. We have the trees of life. We have the rivers. We have all these things that are talked about in the Garden of Eden. And who is ruling? Jesus was the job accomplished. Jesus, the God-man. As human beings failed, the God-man, Jesus Christ, 100% God and 100% man, He accomplished what God called human beings to do. And He has brought the entire earth under the order of God. Not just the nation of Israel. But the entire earth has been placed and it has become this perfect temple that God can dwell in. And the result of that is full blessing on the entire earth. And so the message of the Bible is that God desires to bring the earth into full order, delegated to human beings. I know that's more than 10 words. I think I can say it in less than 10, but it's gone. This happens. I'm officially on Guam now in Monomco. Anybody have any idea what that means? That means I get reduced prices at dinner and I get reduced prices at the movies because I'm over 55. In Guam, Monomco is 55. The life expectancy is much shorter in Guam. So I took my grandson to the movies the other day and we both got in for $5, but for the opposite reasons. God accomplishes it, but God finishes the job by becoming a man himself. And really the message of the Bible is what Jesus prays in the Lord's Prayer. You know which line I'm thinking of? May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It's all about the kingdom of God. God accomplishing what He's trying to do on this earth, which ultimately is to bring it into relationship with Him. It's all about God bringing the world into relationship under the kingship of Jesus. And the shorthand that Jesus, the way he expresses it is, the kingdom of God is near. It's about the kingdom of God. That's the beginning and the end. That's the basic message. Now, how does it get there? How does it get there? Because we're talking about mission. What is the basic mission of us as a church? What is the basic mission of us as the image of God? And I think again, there's two, they're not really parentheses, they're like rays. I didn't get very far in math, but isn't a ray something that starts in a point and goes on forward into infinity? Okay, well they don't go quite into infinity. What do you call one that gets chopped? This is why we need math teachers. Okay, a segment. Okay, the mission. And the mission starts from two verses. Genesis 12. and Matthew 28, 19, and 20. There's two missions in the Bible, and each mission encompasses about 2,000 years. Now, the second one may encompass a few more. We don't know how long it will be before Jesus comes back. But around 2,000 B.C., things had fallen all to pieces. The Tower of Babel, and it seemed that everyone had turned away from God. And God raised up this desert sheik named Abraham, and He gave him a mission. In this mission, God said He was going to bless him, but He gave him two things to do. Anybody know the two commands in Genesis 12, 1-4? What's the first one? That's the one everybody remembers. Two-letter word? Go. Thank you. I'm really expecting an answer. Go. He said go. And then the second command is go out and be a blessing. Go and be a blessing. And God says, when you do that, I will bless you. But through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And so Abraham was to go out kind of as a wandering worshiper. And the amazing thing is that Abraham accomplished so much. He had no church buildings. He had no choirs. He had no Bible. He had no Wednesday evening potluck spaghetti suppers. He had no Christmas programs or Easter programs. He was able to accomplish all of that with none of the accoutrements that we have today. I guess it's not condiments. Those go on your hot dogs. He was able to accomplish that. And how was he able to accomplish that? He went out and he collected people. It says at the end of chapter 12 that many people began to follow Abraham. Well, why did they follow him? They followed him because Abraham was a man that was blessed by God. Even pagans would recognize that God was with Abraham. So all these people start attaching themselves to Abraham. And within two chapters from God's call of Abraham, by chapter 14, this guy has so many people that are attached to him, he actually has an army. Do any of you have a personal army? Abraham had a personal army of 318 men, 318 trained men, who could go out and rescue Lot. And Abraham's mission began to be basically twofold. I'm going to worship God, and I'm going to bless people. Wherever he went, he did those two things. He made altars, and he worshiped God, and he invited all those around him into the worship of God, so that by the time circumcision came along in chapter 17, Abraham and all his household, by the way, that doesn't just mean his kids, of which he only had one at the time, that means all these people that were following him were willing to go to that extreme step to be connected to Abraham and to Abraham's God. It was really a very simple thing that Abraham was supposed to do. He's supposed to connect to God in relationship with God, and then connect to the people around him. And he did this without a lot of doctrine. He had some. And he did this without a lot of tradition. He just took what God gave him and he gave it to others. And this really was the ministry that Israel was supposed to have. This Abrahamic covenant went on into the nation of Israel. This is what they were supposed to do. This is what they were supposed to learn as they went into slavery in Egypt. As they saw the amazing deliverance that God gave them through the ten plagues. God says in Jeremiah, ten times, I showed you. I showed you my power. I showed you my glory. I showed you how much I cared about you. And the nation never really truly followed me. Ten times, God says. And he delivers them. He gives them his law. He makes them a kingdom of priests. And they never understood why. Even in Deuteronomy, Moses is having to preach to them and say, look, It's not because you were so smart. It's not because you were so holy. It's not because you were so great. It's because of God's mercy and God's love that I called you. And they never got it. God blessed them with kings. And God blessed them with kings who went out and conquered other nations. And they took the money and they took these things and brought them together for themselves. And they never understood that God gave them all those things to attract people to God. They never understood that God gave them those things so that they could turn around and use them to bless others. And so by the time of Jeremiah, they have this wonderful, beautiful temple, that when the sun rose up, there was so much gold on that temple, according to historians, it would blind the eyes of the people that came near the temple, or came toward the temple. They would see it from afar. But as Jeremiah writes, I've been reading a lot of Jeremiah lately, Jeremiah writes, you don't get it. You keep saying the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. But in the verse that Jesus quoted, he said, It is not, the temple is not made, or actually Isaiah wrote, the temple was made to be a place of prayer for the Gentiles, a place of prayer for the nations. But as Jesus quoted from Jeremiah, you've made a den of thieves. They never understood that those blessings were to go out to other people. And this is all epitomized in the book of Jonah, where God calls Jonah to go out to the Assyrians. And Jonah refuses to go. And you remember, why does Jonah refuse to go out to the Assyrians? He's not afraid. Please don't say that. He's not afraid. He says, God, I did not want to go because I knew you were a God of compassion and mercy and grace. And if I went out and preached the gospel, you would forgive them. And I hate Assyrians. Jonah was an Old Testament racist. I hate Assyrians. And you can see it in his prayer in chapter 2. Lord, I come to you for forgiveness and you forgive me. But those idolaters, never. You will never forgive them. You see the hatred in Jonah. And Israel completely missed the boat. So by the time Jesus comes to the temple, not only did they miss the blessings that God has for them throughout their history. They miss the blessings of God in the flesh, the one that's expected, the great one that Haggai and Zechariah and Isaiah predicted. They totally miss Him. And so when Jesus comes and is presented to the people, They miss him, and in judgment on the temple, he throws the things around in symbolic judgment, condemning them because they missed the fact that all of this was so that the center of Israel, Jerusalem, the temple, would be a place of prayer for the nations. They used it for a scam to make themselves richer. That was the first plan, and it failed. So was God stymied, threw up his hands, gave up? No. Jesus started again. And we get a new covenant, a new plan, a new covenant as was predicted that God would write it on their hearts. And Jesus says it basically in the same way that God approached Abraham. Matthew 28, 19 and 20, Jesus says, All authority as the God-man who defeated death and arose from the dead and gives life to those who follow me, all authority is given to me in heaven and earth to squash the demonic powers, to bring God's order to the world. So what are we supposed to do? What's the next word that comes after all authority is given me heaven and earth? Go! Go! And make disciples. Baptizing and teaching them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. See, it's really the same command. with the extra added foundation of Jesus defeating death and sin and paying for the sins of all the world. It's with the extra added dimension of the Holy Spirit living inside us and empowering us to reach all the nations for Christ. Go and make disciples. And this command is just as simple. to fulfill, I mean, at least intellectually simple to fulfill as go and be a blessing. It really is the same thing. Do you have the Holy Spirit? Do you have the forgiveness of Jesus Christ? Make it accessible to the people around you. Do you have God's blessing on you? Do you have financial blessings? Do you have the blessings of church and tradition in your family? Make it accessible to those around you. Take what you have, take the excellent things of God, be God's image, and make these things accessible to those around you. And what you will see is God transforming people from the inside out. I work those three core values in again, excellence, accessibility, and transformation. I want to show a video. I'm going to come back and talk a little bit about how PIU is doing that and give you a little bit of a challenge on how you can do that. So we got a short video. By the way, the video was made by another missionary here, Samantha Owen, and you will hear her voice on it. Pacific Islands University was founded in 1976 as the Micronesian Institute of Biblical Studies on one of the tiny islands in the middle of Micronesia by Liebensalmission and the evangelical churches it planted there. The goal? To prepare Micronesian citizens for leadership in the church. It soon became apparent that this goal was too narrow and accessibility to its programs by the average Micronesian too difficult. While Micronesians valued the biblical training MIBS provided, they also wanted to know how to apply biblical knowledge for living successfully and for leading and influencing all areas of their society towards permanent solutions and not just in the church. Therefore, in 1991, led by its first president, Dr. Roland Ravels, school added a new campus on the island of Guam, a more western and accessible location, and MIBS became Pacific Islands Bible College. The campus formerly called MIBS on the island of Tole became a branch campus. PIBC began offering certificate and diploma programs in biblical studies, and thereafter the Associate of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees. Under the leadership of PIBC's second president, Dr. William Wood, the Guam campus moved from rented facilities onto its present campus in Manila, which was purchased in 1997 and began operations there in the spring of 1999. Current president, Dr. David Owen, assumed the leadership of the school in January of 2003. In 2004, PIBC received accreditation from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which is recognized by the United States Department of Education, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, and the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education. This opened up U.S. financial aid opportunities for Micronesian students and set established quality benchmarks for its degree programs PIBC opened teaching facilities on three other islands in Micronesia, Chuuk, Palau, and Yap. Some minors, including teaching English as a second language and elementary education, were added to the Biblical Studies program. Affordability, accessibility, and relevancy now became important watchwords governing the vision of PIBC. In February 2009, the Board of Trustees voted to change the name of the school to Pacific Islands University to better reflect growing emphasis on Christian liberal arts education and to acknowledge the graduate-level seminary program which was launched in the fall of 2008. Since then, there has been the addition of the Certificate of Basic English, new practical ministry minors including Bible translation, AA and BA programs in liberal studies, as well as a certificate in dive instruction. For 37 years, PIU has been the leader in providing biblical education to the people of Micronesia and now to an expanding circle of people in the Western Pacific. Today, in response to the changing needs of the island communities in which we serve, PIU is expanding its course offerings, its degree offerings, and its vision to be a leader throughout Guam, Micronesia, and the Pacific region in providing accessible, transformational, and quality higher education. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi from where? From Guam, from Tuuk, from Pompeii. From Pacific Island University. My name is Ignerson Cato. Where are you from? I'm from Ponte. And what year are you at PAO? This is my first year. My name is Steven. His name is Alfred. Her name is Grace. My name is Charlisha. This is Billy Michael. Hi, this is Davey Weller. Dave. My name is Jordan Charlie. Ann. Hi, my name is Ann. What's your name? My name is Ransom. Dave. My name is Joni. Hi, I'm Harnorks. Goodbye. And where are you from? I'm from West Papua. Okay, now you've got to say something about PIU. Like? Oh, start it out? Yeah, that's okay. PIU is fun. Oh, it's really awesome. I learned a lot. It's a beautiful place with beautiful people with a lot of love. The reason why we live is because of Christ and we have purpose. I have to cook. When I'm hungry, I have to cook my own food. We are all one in Christ. I learned how to speak English. I learned how to We want to have better leadership skills and to become a better person. You can just pray for us and if you can't pray for us, the second thing is you can support us financially. If you can't support us financially, and you can come here to contribute your life, to share your life with us. That gives you a little bit of an idea of what we're about. And I'll just close with a couple things about how we are trying to do this. I was really alarmed a few years ago as I began to kind of survey around our community, around our neighborhood, and around our island, and asking people what they thought about PIU. And the first thing that really alarmed me was they said, who? We don't know anything about you. We're very well known in the Outer Islands, but not within our own community. And those that knew what we were about, it was kind of alarming because they were talking about PIU was known by what it was against. We're against Catholics. We're against gays. We're against other things, some of which may have been deserved because I think we were misunderstood. But I think the main reason we deserved it is we were not following what I had just been talking about. We were kind of an insulated community, and we weren't taking the blessings that we were getting out to the community. So over the last five years, we've been very much focused on serving our community. And it's everything from painting bus stops around us as we paint them, they get tagged and we paint them again, you know, that kind of thing, to reaching out and really trying to make connections with the local community college, the local university. different types of churches, Joyce and I started doing some different things in the community, and we've begun to really see a change. One of the things we did to connect to the community is we hired for one of our administrators a local Guam senator, and she actually was the first person, she was the second person to be in our administration that was not a white missionary. That was the other thing we were known for, for having a lot of white people in charge of Micronesians. And God has really begun to bless us as we're looking for ways to bless our community. Just recently, you know, we've tried and tried and tried to connect to the local community college. And just recently, the community college came to us and said, we would like to do a project with you. We will supply the money. You supply the people, because we've noticed something about you guys. They said, your remedial program is reaching out to the very people that we want to reach, but we don't know how to do it. Over the last three years, our remedial program, and some of our students come with very poor English skills, very poor academic skills. Our remedial program has been raising students from remedial level to academic level. And the rate that we had the last three years was 100%. Every student that came into our remedial program moved on into our academic program. And Guam, yeah, Melody, it's true. Yeah. You designed a lot of that program. But it's so exciting. And so Guam Community College came to us and said, let's do this. And so the only part I had in it was I named it Jericho Project, breaking down walls that keep Micronesians from higher education. That's all I did, but we've had that happen. We've seen the local dean, the academic dean of the local college come and ask us if he can teach at our school to find out how we're doing things. We've just seen so many things like that open up. The Rotary Club invited me in to speak the other day and the Chamber of Commerce, and we're seeing the Guam community warm up to us. And I think really all it was, was a determination on our part to not see the outside world as opponents, but to see the outside world as people that we're ministering to. And I think this is one of the great applications of this. What God calls us to do is to reach out into the world. It's God's job to judge people. It's not our job to judge people. It's our job to go out and minister to people. Now, part of that, of course, means telling them the truth, telling them the truth about what God says. But we always offer Jesus forgiveness, as we remember that all of us were walking there. And what we have seen with our students is God working in some amazing ways. I could tell stories all night about our students. I'll just tell a couple of them. One of them is deals with a student that his name is Mac. He's from Yap When he came to our school, he's a little bit. It was a little bit shy very talented kid but didn't know what God wanted him to do. He went through four years at our school. He gained experience and ability in leading worship. He gained some ability in teaching. He took our teaching program, went back to Yap, started as a public school teacher in Yap, was able to share his faith there, became the worship leader for the youth in the Palawan Church of Yap. He then did such a good job as a teacher, they gave him training and made him the counselor. So we have a Christian and he says, all I know about counseling is biblical counseling that I learned in Bible class. And so he uses biblical counseling in the high school and the middle school there in Yap. And they're all very happy with how he's doing. This last time where I got this shirt in the Palauan gospel days, Mac was ordained as a pastor in the Yappies church, in the Palauan church in Yap. So we were very excited for him. And just one more, it was really kind of a funny thing. We went down to Palau Community College. Five years ago, I had to twist political arms to get Palau Community College to work with us. This time, Palau Community College said, we need to have a connection with you. They invited us in, and we began to sign the agreement. And the Palau Community College president said, hey, I don't have my academic dean here. I need to bring him in here. And the guy walked in, and I looked at him, and I said, he really looks familiar. I can't figure, I was just about to ask him if he knew certain people in the family name that I knew, and the Palau president says, you should like this guy, he was one of your students. And I looked at him, I said, Robert! You know, some of these guys look different after being away for 20 years. They go from 18 to 38, they look a little different, I don't know why. Anyway, it was just a blessing to me. And I'll never forget what he said. He came up to me and he said, Dave, he said, I want to let you know that you've been a real tremendous influence on my life. He said, I don't know if I would be where I am today. He had gone and got his master's degree and got a job as the academic dean at Palau Community College. And he said, I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for you. And I wanted to ask him, well, how did that happen? What Bible class really got to him? And he said, you know the funny thing, Dave, it wasn't your classes. He said, I don't really remember anything you taught in Bible. But he said, the thing that most impressed me about you was you went out and played football with us. And you talked to us about God and we saw what you were talking about in Bible class, we saw it in your life. And it's what Ezra was talking about. He learned it, he observed it. He taught it. And that's what we're about. I could go on and on. The state of Chuuk, the government of Chuuk is asking us to train their public school teachers. And the reason they said is because we know you will come here, you will develop a relationship with the teachers, and you really care about us. And that's what it's all about. And I'm going to talk a little bit about application. But before I talk about application, I need to know if you listened. I have a few shirts from our Bible run. OK, I'm going to test to see if you listen. You can't apply if you didn't listen, right? So the first question I want to ask, and this is a really critical question, OK? Tim Plaxton is not allowed to answer this question because he already knows it. What insignia was on my coffee cup on my desk in the video? There's a man. He wins a shirt. We do a lot of discipleship early Monday morning during 49er games. OK. What year was PIU started as a Bible Institute? What year? You saw it several times in the video, and I mentioned it. Raise your hand. Raise your hand. You don't get a shirt. Nope, not 84. In the back? 1976. Swish. OK, the last one and the most important one. What are the three core values of Pacific Islands University? OK. Transformation, a guy that takes notes. OK, you got it. And the bottom line is, folks, go out and be a blessing. Church is not about what you do here. Ministering to each other is good. This is where you get trained to be the church. Where we really are the church is when we go out there and be the image of God, minister the Spirit, and minister Christ to those that are around us. That's what it's all about. That's when we're really being the church. In fact, we say at our church, we never go to church. We are the church. So be the church. So let me pray, and then I think we're going to do some songs and some question and answer. Okay, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We know that your word and spirit are powerful because they direct us to you. You are the God who made the universe. We worship you, and we thank you that you give us meaningful work to do. Lord, you've included us in your plan to bring about your kingdom here on earth, and we thank you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.