Interview with Scott Heitmann - 2304

Jesus worthy revelation twelve, verse eleven. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony and they did not love their lives to the death. Welcome to by the word of their testimony, and here is your host, Kaysie Vokurka. Hello and welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining in with us today. And we have a special guest here in the studio with us, Scott Heitmann. Thank you so much for coming here today to share your story. We're really looking forward to learning a bit more about you. And I had the privilege of meeting Scott just the other week. I was visiting South Australia and that's where you're currently living, isn't it, Scott? SPEAKER B Yeah, that's right. Thank you for having us join you on the show and yeah, we met at Big Camp in south. SPEAKER A We did. SPEAKER B You came along for big camp. Wonderful time there. Absolute blessing. SPEAKER A It was it was a tremendous to. SPEAKER B Be able to gather together again after a break from camp for a few years. SPEAKER A Indeed. Yeah. Because that was the first time since COVID and all of that for a. SPEAKER B Couple of years we've been able to come together and worship like we did. So that was really beautiful. SPEAKER A It was such a blessing. So important. And yes. I understand that you are a lay pastor in South Australia. Is that what you do? SPEAKER B Yeah, so I'm a part time pastoral ministry in South Australia. SPEAKER A Beautiful. SPEAKER B Yeah. So I've been doing that since 2016. I first started pastoral ministry down there and yeah, before that I was a Bible worker for a few years. SPEAKER A Yeah. Nice. And I believe you also have quite an interest in online search optimization. SPEAKER B Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER A Strategies and things. Yeah. SPEAKER B Look, digital evangelism, I mean, I think today we live in a digital world, right? SPEAKER A And absolutely. SPEAKER B I think if there's anything that we can take away from the last couple of years, it's the need for us to be in these other places, these digital avenues as well. There may come a time, for whatever reason, that we can't gather together, communicate in the ways that we traditionally have. And if we're not covering some of these other areas, then I think we've just seen that there's massive opportunities lost and even maybe even people falling away and people struggling to be able to connect with each other, with the gospel, with Christ. SPEAKER A Definitely. Yeah. SPEAKER B So it's important for us to try and cover these different areas. SPEAKER A We've seen that over the pandemic sometimes churches had contacts that kind of fell away because of not effective communication and yeah, you can certainly see the need for presence in that space. SPEAKER B Absolutely. SPEAKER A So it's a blessing that you are seeing that need and really working towards improving opportunities in that space. SPEAKER B It really excites me. I've noticed since all of this stuff happened, I think there's been an awake Adventism where people have realized that, hey, there's a need for us to tap into this space. And there's some people that have just really honed in on these skills and refined these skills, probably. I mean, I know for myself I was doing it before COVID and when all of these things hit and when things changed so rapidly, that was kind of, I guess, a recalibration in a sense of where I'm at and what I'm doing and saying, hey, this is where I need to focus. It was incredible, some of the things that happened during that time. I remember the particular year that I started going in this direction. The next four people that I baptized were all people who came in through the internet. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER B And these know, I believe in affirmations, in ministry. Right. That God. God. I heard a guy talking at the Digital Discipleship Conference over the weekend, who was he was doing gaming, he was doing Pastor Scar, S-K-A-R-I believe his name is, he's on Twitch. And when he first sent his live stream live and started live streaming his game playing, the first person that he spoke to was a young person who had left the church and who within minutes they were engaged in a spiritual conversation. And I see these things and experiencing them myself, I think, yeah, this is such an affirmation that sometimes we go into different areas or we test new areas out and God affirms that, hey, this is the direction that I want you to go. SPEAKER A It's so wonderful that he gives those little clues as a way to guide us, doesn't it? SPEAKER B Absolutely, yeah. SPEAKER A We got to just have the eye and ear for them tune in our. SPEAKER B Ears that we may listen to his voice. SPEAKER A So true. Yeah. So that's the space that you're really working in now. You haven't always been in that space or in your life. You've come from quite a different sort of life space and life journey and so we want to dive into that a bit more. Firstly, I wanted to ask you, where did you grow up? SPEAKER B Yeah, so I grew up in Queensland in not a little country town. I live in a little country town now in South Australia of 4000 people. But I spent most of my life in Bundaberg. There's about 70,000, 80,000 people there. So I shouldn't say a little country town. It's a reasonable sized country town named Bundaberg up in Queensland, where I'm sure we're familiar with the Bundaberg ginger beer and probably other things as well. SPEAKER A Yeah. Favorite in Australia? That one. SPEAKER B And internationally, I've found it interesting going to the Philippines. I've seen they've just started introducing Bundaberg Brewery drinks over there. SPEAKER A Is that right? There you go. It's got a name for itself. Yeah. So that's quite a different sort of area than South Australia, being up there, up in the more tropical space. SPEAKER B Yeah, it was beautiful, it was warm. You could go to the beach all year round, and now I'm lucky. I love the water, I love enjoying the outdoors, but I don't do as much of it now. It's often too cold. I like to be inside under the blankets a lot of the time, or rugged up somewhere. SPEAKER A Yeah. So when you were in Bundberg, what was your home life like? SPEAKER B Yes. Going back to when I was a child, I just grew up in a secular home, like a lot of Australian people. It probably wasn't too much different to the average secular Australian. My parents would drink and just do the usual smoke and the usual things. Probably not well, I guess still a bit now, but probably not as much as people used to. I mean, everyone used to not everybody, but a lot of people used to smoke cigarettes. So that was sort of just the environment. Auntie's, uncles coming over and occasionally friends coming over, and they'd drink together and just do the sorts of things that normal, I guess, secular people would do. Right? SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And then as I sort of grew a little bit older, by the time I was twelve years old, my parents became Christian. My mother, first of all, started volunteering for a few organizations and spent a little bit of time in the Uniting Church, then ended up my grandfather came and did some studies with her. And I remember the day that he came and sat down with them at the dinner table. I didn't sit at the table, I didn't catch the Bible study. But I remember the night that my family changed. Is that right? I remember my stepfather, back when CDs were the thing. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B He had hundreds of CDs in his ridiculously powerful stereo system that he paid $1800 for in the mean this thing was it was loud. Right? SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B And the police would often come over and tell him they're going to confiscate it off him and he'd turn it down and then he'd turn it back up once they'd leave. And it was this and he had all of these CDs, literally hundreds of CDs back when CDs were hot. And I remember it was a few days after this Bible study that all those CDs are getting snapped and put in the bin. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER B They sold the stereo system. And I remember I'm thinking, what are they doing? Wouldn't you take them and sell them at cash converters? But they didn't want to. And I agree, a lot of this music, I don't listen to it anymore because it puts my mind in a place where I don't want to be. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B Whether it agitates me and I become more short tempered, or whether it gets me thinking about the worldly. Things that I try not to allow my mind to delve into anymore. So for fair reason, they snapped all these CDs, they chucked them in the rubbish bin rather than taking them to the op shop or to the to the second hand store to get some money back for them. And I remember at that point as a young guy, I thought, my parents have gone crazy. SPEAKER A Wow. And I just was curious. You mentioned your grandfather, was he a Christian? SPEAKER B Yeah. So he had been a 7th day Adventist at that point in time, for a little while. I'm not exactly sure how long that had been going on, but yeah, okay. SPEAKER A And so he helped influence your parents. They became converted and you thought they're crazy. So then what happened with you? SPEAKER B Yeah, there was probably two years of being involved with the church as a young guy from sort of twelve to 14 years old. There was a couple of influential people that I met at that time. There was a beautiful man up in Queensland, in Bundaberg, called Winston, yeti a man I've got a lot of time for. Winston and his son Ezra. He would actually take us out on sort of hiking trips, or we'd go out mountain bike riding, or we'd go out into the bush and we'd go swimming at the dam. And he'd often winston was the kind of guy that he'd pick up all of Ezra's mates, and we'd have ten of us, and he was a bus driver. So we put all of our bikes on the bus and we'd go up into the hills and we'd go bike riding and doing all this great memories. SPEAKER A Bonding time. SPEAKER B Yeah. He was someone I guess that at that time, I had troubles in the home with my stepfather and different things at that point in my life, and he was just somebody who really took the time out to invest in us. And it's incredible because it was then, years later, I left the church. I left home at 14 years old. So by 14, I had started smoking marijuana and doing other things that I shouldn't be doing. And my mother, at that point, she had given me an ultimatum to if I want to live under her roof, then I need to sort my life out and I need to stop hanging out with my old friends and listening to the music I was listening to and going to the public school. And she wanted to try and help bring reform in my life before I got any older. And it got more out of hand. Right. At that point in time, she said, while you're living under my roof, you'll do these things. I said, well, then I'll move out. And I left home at 14 years old. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B And that was the start of, I guess, a spiral of life events that took place for the next ten years of just brokenness, really a lot of pain, a lot of unfortunately, a lot of years of cultivating bad tendencies. And from things like the way that I spoke to, just the things that I the more we do certain things, the easier it becomes to do those things we talk about, like desensitization. You think of someone who goes to war for an example, and the first time they have to pull that trigger of a gun when they've pointed at somebody would be a really difficult thing to do and often causes them all kinds of trauma. But after they've done it ten times, 20 times, it gets easier. Yeah, I know in my own life there was things that I was like, oh, that's bad, I shouldn't do that. But after you do certain things and you do them more and more, it becomes easier to do them. SPEAKER A It becomes probably even natural to do them. Like you're just in that zone. SPEAKER B The Bible talks about this idea of grieving the Holy Spirit, right. When that conviction is there and we reject it, those convictions that are there to protect us and to prevent us from doing those bad things or making those bad habits and creating those bad things in life, when we reject that prompting over time, that prompting gets weaker. To point that we no longer hear it. We don't even feel guilty for the things that we do. And it's not until we come to that place, when we invite Christ to come in and recreate our heart, and I'm so thankful that the Bible says that he'll give us a new heart and a new mind. Yeah, I can say that in my own experience that he has certainly done that he's helped to. There's times that I think back to my life the way that it was, and I hear stories even about things that I had done or particularly when I've been around some of the people that I was around back. Then. And some of them I've been able to influence, and they've come on the journey with me. And occasionally we've sat around and talking, and they've brought up some of the situations we found ourselves in during those years of my life. And a lot of them I haven't even remembered. Right. I had no recollection of what they were talking about until they really explained the situation where and when. And at first I'm thinking, that didn't happen. And as they've explained it, it's kind of jogged my memory back to you. But as I listened to them, I've thought, did I really do that? Was that really who I used to be? And I've struggled to think that I was like that in some of those cases. SPEAKER A There's been obviously such a huge shift in your life away from where you were to where you are now. SPEAKER B Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER A Interesting. You mentioned that you moved out of home and then you've gone into this different space for about ten years. Where did you go when you moved out of home? You're only 14. Did you go on the street or you had somewhere else? SPEAKER B I did spend a fair bit of time on the street during that time in my life. At first, I moved in with the people that I was getting my marijuana from. It just happened that the mother of or that the woman of this house passed away the same day. She had two sons. The oldest guy was 18, I was 14, and him and I became pretty close. We used to fight a lot, and obviously, me being 14 and him being 18, I would often come off second best. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B In fact, I think I always came off second best. I don't ever remember not so that was where I sort of ended up. In fact, when I went from there, and I say I did spend some time on the street was because me and him would fight, and there was times when he'd okay. It got really bad, and you needed I just decided I had to go and yeah. So I probably spent about a year of that time just living on the streets. Incredible experience. One night I was laying on a sail, so, in Bundaberg. It's a fairly flat town, and it's full of mosquitoes, and I was just getting eaten alive. I was trying to find somewhere that I could sleep that I wouldn't be getting eaten alive. And there was a car park in the main part of the town, across from the train station. There was a shopping center with a car park on the roof. And then there were sales on top of the car park that would protect your car from the sun a little bit. Right. So I would get up there and I would sleep up there, and the mosquitoes went up there. It was too high. And then there was on the colder nights, there was these fans that brought the hot air out of the building. Building. And I would climb up onto the roof part, and I'd lay my clothes across the grille between the fans and the hole in the roof, and it would suck all the hot air out of the building, and it would keep you warm. And I was staying there for a while. And I remember there was one night that I was sleeping on top of the sails, and I remember distinctly looking up to the sky, and I said, Lord, if you're up there, show me. From that point on that night, I jumped on a freight train. It was about 11:00 at night. I got on a freight train in Bundaberg at about 09:00 the next morning, I got to Lanspress Station, which is a three hour drive. SPEAKER A That's down near west of Brisbane, isn't it? SPEAKER B Yeah. North of Brisbane. And it's sort of sunshine coast. SPEAKER A Sunshine coast. Yeah. SPEAKER B And it had taken 10 hours to get from Bundaberg to there. And I remember I was actually I knew it was about 09:00, because as I was traveling along on the train, the school bus was going past, and all the kids saw me on the back of the train, and they're waving to me. And I was just in this sort of thing that was carrying rocks. It was like a half sort of container with sort of angled edges that had rocks and stuff in it. I just kind of made a little bed in there. And I got to Lanspress Station, and a guy came up to me at Lansboro Station, and he said to me we had been stopped there for a bit. He said, the police have been called. They know you're on the back of the train. He said, Hop off the train. He said, Climb over the fence. I'll pass your bag over to you, walk across the road. He said, Walk out to the highway and hitchhike, and someone will pick you up and take you any need to go. Right? SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B I jumped a fence. I took, like, three or four strides, and the cop car pulled into the train station, and I turned around to thank this guy, and he was gone. No, I thought nothing of it. I was like, that was bizarre. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B I then crossed the road, walked out to the highway. Now, I had a shaved head and was dressed like a little hoodlum kid. A lady picked me up. I'd been hitchhiking for two minutes. A lady picked me up, and she said, I've never, ever picked up a hitchhiker in my life, but a voice told me to stop and to pick you up again. I was like, that's weird. I then went into Brisbane. I was living in Brisbane. I run into a guy in Brisbane who I had met in those two years that I was in the church in the Pathfinder Club. We ended up back at his house. His mother let me come and stay there, and we were tattooing the bottom of our I made a homemade tattoo gun out of the motor of the tape deck and a broken piece of pen and melted the pen. And anyway, we were tattooing the bottom of our feet with the ink from the pen, and his mother walked in the room and freaked out. SPEAKER A Okay? SPEAKER B So then she decided that it probably wasn't best for me to be staying at her house, understandably? So. And then Pastor Muladen clerk, he's I believe he is now in Mildura Church. But Pastor Muladen clerk was the pastor at Ipswich Church at that time. And then he took me in for a little while, and then from Muladen's I was with Muladen for maybe a month. And then the Pathfinder director from those two years when I was in the church, we went to a camperee down in South Australia at Wakery, and the Bundaberg Club went with the Gimpy Club. And the Pathfinder director from the Gimpy Club was a man by the name of Peter Harrison. And Peter Harrison, he had a daughter who I had kept in touch with or had gotten in touch with at that point in time. And then Peter had invited me to come and do an apprenticeship with him doing floor mortailing. And it wasn't until I got to Peter's house this is now a journey of probably six months, right? SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And I got to Peter's house, and I was sitting down, and Alyssa asked me where I had been over the past few years. And I sat and I recounted the story of me on the sail on the roof when I cried out to God. And I said, Lord, if you're up there, show me. And then I remembered, it was like that was the point when I was like, Whoa, hang on a second. I said, Show me if you're up there. And then this happened. And then this happened. And that was like it was as I was telling her the story, you realized I was realizing that God had showed me that he was there. Right. SPEAKER A Amazing. SPEAKER B But yet in my ignorance during that time, I didn't see it. I was like, that was strange. I mean, why would somebody on the train who has called the police come and tell me that the police are coming? You better run. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B I mean, there's just no logic there and that's right. Yeah. I mean, for that lady to pick me up, who had never picked up a hitchhiker before, and she says a voice told me to pick you up. So that was at that point. I was maybe 16, 1516 years old. Unfortunately, I had continued smoking weed during that time, and I was getting weed from one of the guys who were working with Peter as well and ended up it's funny when I go through my life and I trace all of the times that things went bad. Yes, it was because of the bad choices that I had made. And not to say that when I've walked with Christ, life's always been easy. But I can say that even out of the bad times, god's brought good things. But I would have to say that when I had turned my back on God or when I had made decisions against the things that God had instructed me to do or that I knew that I should be doing I would say that every time I made those bad decisions that the result of that was worse, and it continued to spiral out of. You know, the Bible says that Satan's here to destroy and to kill. And I can certainly say that the times I've allowed him into my life because of the decisions that I was making, life was just a mess. And like I said, it's not to say that he doesn't still give us a hard time when we're in Christ, but I would say that in my journey with Christ, when he gives me a hard time, God uses those things to strengthen us and to correct things in our lives and to refine us and help us to become the people that he's called us to be. SPEAKER A Yeah. And during that phase, you're not alone, are you? You're going through a tough time, but you've got a supporter there for you. SPEAKER B And there's something really special when you're going through really rough times and you realize that God is there. SPEAKER A Oh, yeah. SPEAKER B Without going into too much detail, there was a particular time fairly recently in my life since I've been in pastoral ministry, when I went through a really hard time. And yeah. There was things that had come back into my life that shouldn't have been there. Right. And I remember at that point in time, I was thinking to myself, man, I think I need to resign. I don't think I should be doing pastoral ministry. And I was going to ring the conference president that same morning, and I got a phone call from a lady who I'd met in the conference twice. Right. She was the health director, Angie Thompson. Angie rang me up and she said, I don't know why, but I was praying this morning and God told me that I need to be praying for you. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER B And I just burst into tears. I thought how Why does God care? SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B Sometimes we're often so hard on ourselves when we fall short and when we make mistakes and we pull back from God. And we think, god wouldn't want anything to do with me right now because I'm a mess, because my life is a mess. But I can only say from my own experience that it's in those times when I've been the worst, the most messed up, I think of the story of the prodigal son. That's when I've experienced in my own journey the father wrapping his arms around me and kissing me on the neck and saying, I want you to know that I'm here. I want you to know that I love you. SPEAKER A The greatest mercy revealed. SPEAKER B Yeah. Absolutely. SPEAKER A Of God at that time. SPEAKER B So hence, obviously, at that time, after bursting into tears and I decided not to resign from and they say it's the goodness of God that leads us through repentance. And I can say that that was like a turning point in the struggles that I was going through at that time. That was like a real turning point for me at that point in time, because God had showed me his goodness. God had shown up. Even when I wasn't wanting to show up, god showed up and God showed me that he was there. SPEAKER A Yeah. And that would have been such an encouragement for you. SPEAKER B Absolutely. SPEAKER A You're feeling so bad about yourself right at that point. And God's saying, no, my grace is sufficient for you. As the Scripture says, perfect in your weakness. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Which is a tremendous promise. So you've had that experience in your mid to late teens where you've tasted of the reality of God in your life. He has shown you that he is real. Where did you go from there? What was your journey from there? SPEAKER B I'd love to say that at that point in my life, I devoted my life to Christ, and it was onwards and upwards from there, but it certainly wasn't the case. As I said, I had allowed things to come back into my life when I was there with Peter. And as a result of that life spiraled back out of control, I left his place. I was unable to stay there anymore because I was doing things I shouldn't have been doing. So then, as a result, my life just continued down the old track. I went and met people. That the same place that I had left some years before or a year before. I ended up back there. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B Around those same people in that same circle. And then I just continued on in life the way that I was living, and I continued to yeah, I used drugs and I was selling drugs, so I ended up by the time I was 17, I was convicted for a supply charge, went to prison in life just continued to they call it corrective services. Right. Unfortunately for me, at least, it wasn't a corrective service. I mean, I went in there and I knew a lot of people in there, and it became a place that I guess I sat and I networked with other people, and I thought more about how I could do things differently or do things better or do things bigger. And rather than getting out and sorting myself out, I went back down the path that I'd come from, only worse. And that continued for another five years, roughly from that point in time. And during that five years, I was was in and out of prison for small things. They were after me. The police were after me. They knew that I was doing things that I shouldn't have been doing. Thankfully, I had never been charged with any significant offenses after that point in time. So they were just charging me with anything that they could any little misdemeanors and things that they could get me for. And then they denied my bail, and I'd end up back in there for short periods of time or I'd breach my parole. So I'd be back in there and yeah, it sort of just continued on for a number of years. SPEAKER A And in all of that period where you're going in and out of prison and in this drug space and everything, did you have any thoughts in the back of your mind about God, like, from your previous life or previous experiences that you'd had in your teens? SPEAKER B For sure, I would say that I always knew that God was there. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B I mean, I had seen things in those younger years that I couldn't deny, but because I had made bad choices, and those bad choices resulted in a mess, as. A result of my decision making. Maybe I attributed that to the judgments of God or something mistakenly, right? I mean, being older, being wiser, knowing the Scripture, knowing God, I've come to realize that that wasn't God, but that was cause and effect consequences, right? We make bad decisions. We choose to live outside of the umbrella of God's goodness. Then Satan has free reign on us. He's here to kill and to destroy. And we ought to expect that if we turn our back on God. It's not that God turns his back on us. I mean, I love there in Isaiah where it says that the Lord's ear is not heavy, that it cannot hear, and his arms shortened, that it cannot save, but because of our sins, he cannot hear us. Right? It's. When I sin, I put myself away from God. It's not that God doesn't want to be there. God's still there. Jesus died for sinners. But it's because we turn our backs on God that it's like, well, if you don't want to live with me, then I can't help you. I want to help you, but I can't help you. You've chosen to turn your back on me and I'm going to respect your decision. It's not that I don't want you to be there. It was like when I left home as a 14 year old kid, my mother, she didn't want me to be out in the street. She didn't want me to be doing the things that I was doing, but she respected my free will. I chose to leave. And in the same way, I've come over the years to realize that it was never God that left me, but it was me that left God. And I don't know where as people are listening to us now, I don't know where they're at. But one thing I can say, that wherever you're at in your journey, if you're doing things in your life, if you've turned your back on God, god is calling us to come home. God wants us to come back. I think of that story of the prodigal son. It's one of my favorite stories to see. Jesus told that story to give us a revelation of who the father is. SPEAKER A Absolutely. SPEAKER B And you see the father in that story, and the minute that he sees that his son is coming towards him, what does he do? He runs to him. Yeah, he runs to him. He puts his robe upon him. His son has just come from the pig pen. He stinks. He's got pig dung on him, right. I mean, he's been laying with the pigs and his father runs out and hugs him and kisses him just as he is kisses him on his neck. His neck would have stunk a little bit, but yet the father still met him there. And so it is when we come to Christ, god embraces us there. At that point, sometimes people think, I've heard people say, I couldn't walk into a church because the church would burn down around me. SPEAKER A Yes, you do hear that quite often. SPEAKER B But yet the picture that we get from Scripture is not that God. It's a God who says, come to me as you are and allow me to come into your life and to transform you. Allow me to start that journey with you and to transform you into the person that not only that God desires us to be, but Jesus said that, I've come to give life and give it to you in abundance. Right. This is not about God expecting, demanding as an exacting creditor, wanting to punish us for the things that we do wrong. And if we don't measure up to a certain mark, it's not like God's against us, but it's that God wants what's best for us. He knows that if we step outside of that umbrella of his love and his goodness and his grace, that that's a destructive path. And that when Satan is allowed into the life, that he'll wreak havoc. And God's saying, Come, come away from that. I want to give you life and life in abundance. SPEAKER A Yeah. It changes things hugely, doesn't it? Just to see that picture of God, because you suddenly realize that when you understand how much he wants your best good and also how good he is, you just want to come to Him more. Right. It's all of Satan's lies that really can keep us back. The false concepts of God that we get in our minds really are a stumbling block absolutely. Coming close to God. SPEAKER B Yeah. And I know there's even been times when I first became a Christian. I remember there was a time that I started drinking. I'd been a Christian. I wasn't yet baptized. Was I baptized? I can't remember. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B But I'd been a Christian for a fairly short period of time, and I went through some issues, and I started drinking for a little bit. And I remember it was maybe like a week where I was drinking each night, right. And I was actually going down into my study, and I'd be studying the Bible while drinking alcohol. SPEAKER A Right? Okay. SPEAKER B Which is interesting because sometimes I think of where we're at spiritually and sometimes we can be in the church, but not reading our Bible, not having a relationship with God, but not really feeling uncomfortable about it because I go to church, I pay tithe, I do the Sabbath school lesson each day or something of that nature. But do I actually have a relationship with God? Am I genuinely and earnestly seeking God? Right. And I know for me, at that point in time, I was drinking alcohol. I wasn't doing things that I ought to have been doing. But I could say that I was earnestly still seeking, and I was still young in the journey. I was young in that I know at that point in time for myself personally. I was beating myself up really bad. And I remember every day while I was studying, I knew that what I needed to do was get on my knees and pray. And I would go up into my room from downstairs, I'd go upstairs, I'd come into my bed, and instead of kneeling beside my I went there with the intent in my mind. I'm going to go upstairs, I'm going to get in my room, I'm going to kneel down beside my bed, and I'm going to pray. And this happened maybe three or four days where I went upstairs, I went into the room, and just the shame and guilt that I allowed Satan to heap upon me, I couldn't even get onto my that distance from standing to kneeling beside my belt felt like such an impossible distance to cover. SPEAKER A Golf. Yeah. SPEAKER B Right between and instead, I just laid on the bed and went to sleep. And I did this for a number of days until I come to that point where I was able to overcome that and just kneel before God and say, lord, I need you. I need your help. And I think for us, as seekers, as Christians, wherever we are in that journey, to realize when we're in trouble right. To run to God and not to run from God. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B God is longing for us to run to Him. He says, as we said before, come to my throne of grace, boldly in your hour of need. At the time that we need Jesus, the times that we need Him most is when we ought to run to Him, not run away from Him. But yet so often what we do is we run from God because of the shame and the guilt. And we spoke before about the goodness of God and the grace of God and his love and these being things that draw us closer to Him. The Bible says that it's the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. We love Him because he first loved us, all these types of things, and then we see that it's shame, it's guilt that holds us in sin. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B Right. And these are the things that pull us away from God. And as Christians, we need to I love where the Bible says in Romans that there's no condemnation for those that are in that, you know, when we come to Christ that we ought not to allow the shame and the guilt of sin to be something that keeps us away from God. Satan wants it to be, but we've got to say, no, I've accepted Jesus as my Savior. He paid the penalty for my sin, and I want to invite Him to come in and change my life. SPEAKER A Yeah, that's quite such a huge lesson, really, because I think everybody, whether you're Christian or not, but even if you are Christian, we experience that same phenomenon where even it can be sometimes so subtle, where we are just a little bit distanced from God because we think, oh, yeah, I'm not quite right there, or I've got this problem, or, Nah, I won't worry about talking to God about that, or these thoughts can come to mind. And sometimes you don't even register that. Hang on a minute. No, I need to go to Christ. I need to go right there. SPEAKER B Absolutely. And I know for myself the reason. There was times in my life where I remember one particular occasion where I was sitting in the backyard with a guy that I was doing a lot of things I shouldn't have been doing with, and the topic came up about religion. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B And I remember saying to him at that point in time, let's not even talk about this. We're both going to hell, let's just forget about it and let's just enjoy life while we've got it. And my understanding, my perception of God at that point in time was one that God would never accept me as I am. Right? SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And rather than running to Him, I just cut it off and said, no, let's just continue to live life the way that we are, continue to do the things that we're doing, and just forget about God. Let's just distance ourselves from Him. And yeah. I continued on for some time in that same path that I was on until I game found myself in prison. This time I was in Grafton in New South Wales, and it was the old Grafton prison. It was like built in the 18 hundreds. They still had the bars on the windows with no glass in the windows. It was like they had the gallows on the top landing where they used to hang people and stuff back in the day. SPEAKER A You're like stepping back in time almost a little bit. SPEAKER B The other ones up in Queensland are like super comfortable. I mean, you can understand why people go back there, right? But this one, it was rough. It was not a nice environment because the prison was rough. The people weren't happy, everyone was kind of just angry. It wasn't a nice experience and it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be a nice experience. Right. But I found myself there on this particular occasion and I got a letter from that guy that I spoke about earlier because just backing up just a little bit. About twelve months before, there was an incident that happened. When I found myself in the church again, an miraculous thing, I believe the Holy Spirit, people were praying for me. The spirit of God spoke through me. I told Mum that I was going to come to church. Didn't want to go to church. It was just something that come out of my mouth. On a Wednesday she came to see me. I said, I'm coming to church with you on the Saturday. And sure enough, Saturday morning she was there knocking on the door wanted to pick me up and take me to church. So I went along to church and there was a guy that was speaking there. And halfway through, remember, he's sharing his story, how he had come from a life at least in the same circle of the things that I was doing. And I remember I looked at my mother halfway through, I said, you knew this guy was coming, that's why you brought me here. And it was there she started crying and said, you asked me to come. And it was like at that point I realized that when I said to Mum that I was coming to church, that was a God thing, right? This was something that God had brought me there for that very moment. And yeah, I made a decision that day, but unfortunately that lasted three or four weeks and an incident happened and I left again. And then about twelve months later, here I am in Grafton and that guy who from when I was a kid would take us on the bus and he would take us up and we'd go riding on the on the bikes and things. He sent me a letter. He knew that I'd come back to church, that for those three weeks or four weeks after ten years of being away. And he heard that I was in prison again. So he wrote me a letter and just said something like, we just want you to know that we love you and we're praying for you, or something of that nature. And that was enough to make me stop and think. It was enough to make me think, maybe I need to give God another go. SPEAKER A And it was such a simple message. SPEAKER B Such a simple message. SPEAKER A Wow, God used that. SPEAKER B And I guess for me it was like, well, I knew why he was the way that he was and that was because he was one of the most Christian people that I'd met in my life. And just seeing the love and the care and the tenderness of his words was enough to make me think, well, if that's what a follower of Jesus looks like, then maybe Jesus is better than I thought he was. And that was sort of the catalyst, I guess, for me. Then going up to the chapel and in the Grafton chapel there was 20 books on the shelf and one of the columns of the book said, 7th Day Adventists Believe. I took that book back to my cell and I read the chapter on Jesus where it says that Jesus is the Judge one, corinthians it says, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. Revelation, chapter one refers to Jesus as being the faithful witness. And then you've got in One John, chapter two, and verse one where it says that if we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ. So I'm picturing this courtroom setting. I'm picturing Jesus's, judge, jesus is the witness, jesus is the legal representation. And then the Bible says in Revelation chapter twelve, the Satan is the accuser. Right. So he's the prosecution, if you like. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B So I'm picturing this courtroom setting and I've realized this is a rigged court. Right. I mean, this is a court that's stacked in your favor. Yeah, I can go into that court and I can put my hand up and I can say I'm guilty. I'm just going to take the responsibility for these things and I'm going to be guilty and I'm going to take the consequences of my actions. If I was to walk into the courtroom and reject Christ and what he's willing to do for me, then yes, I'm condemned in my sin. But if I come into that courtroom and I see the things that Jesus is willing to do for me, that he's there as the judge, that he's there as the witness. And what is he the witness of? He's the witness of the fact that I've confessed my sins upon the lamb, Jesus himself, who is the lamb. I've confessed my sins upon Christ and I've said, Lord, I want you to forgive me my sin. And he says, yes, not only has he confessed his sins, but I've paid the price for those sins as well. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And then as our mediator, as our advocate, he stands in on our behalf and he says that I gave up my life for him. His sins have been cleansed, he's been redeemed. Right. And at that point I realized in my life that I could be saved. Prior to that, like I said, there was times when I was talking with my friend and I said, man, we're just going to hell. Like, forget about it. God. I honestly believed at that point in my life that I could never be saved. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER B I believed in God. I did believe in God. I believed in a God, but I didn't believe there was any way that God could save me. SPEAKER A Yeah. So you felt your case was hopeless? More or less. SPEAKER B Without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt. Why would God want anything to do with me? Yeah, right, you talk about rolling in the pig pen? SPEAKER A Yeah. You felt it? SPEAKER B I'd been bathing in that pig pen. I rubbed that stuff all over me. It was like, why would he want to come and kiss and hug and hold me? And yet that's the picture that we see in scripture. That's who God is. And at that point in time, as I realized these things, I remember crying out to God, I said, Lord, I want to invite you to come in. I don't know how you're going to do it, but I want to invite you to come in and change my life. And that was the beginning of a radical transformation that took place then over the course of the last ten years? Almost, yeah, a bit over ten years now. SPEAKER A Amazing. SPEAKER B From when I first accepted Christ. SPEAKER A And that picture that you saw that day with the courtroom, but with Jesus in those different places, that would have had very special meaning for you because of where you'd been through in and out of prisons. Like, you knew that courtroom very well in terms of how it works here on Earth. SPEAKER B I'd never been in one that was stacked in my favor. SPEAKER A That's it. So this is a mind blowing concept that you're facing here with Christ and what he has done for you. SPEAKER B And this is a biblical concept. This is the truth. What we need to realize as human beings, it doesn't matter where we are in that journey. It doesn't matter who we are or what we've done. Our case is never hopeless. The only reason our case is hopeless is if I walk into that courtroom and I say, I'm guilty, I reject everything that Jesus wants to do for me. I'm going to take responsibility for this myself. I'm going to take this in my own hands. If we do that, what can God do? Then there's nothing he can do. Right, but if we walk in there and we say, I'm not guilty, and the witness says he's not guilty because that's already been paid know, I love the concept. When you think of the legal status, it's like once someone's been convicted of a crime, someone else can't be charged with that same crime that someone else has already been convicted of. SPEAKER A Interesting, right? Yeah. SPEAKER B When Jesus paid the penalty for my sin, if I allow him to take that sin from me and he's paid the penalty from it, I'm not guilty of it anymore. Right. SPEAKER A That's very powerful thought. SPEAKER B So often what we do is we'll say, Lord, please forgive me for my sin. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B But then we want to hold on to it with both hands. Forgive me for my sin, but let me keep the shame and the guilt. I want to hold on to the shame and the guilt, but I want you to forgive me for doing that wrong deed. And God is saying, let it go. I've paid the price for it's, done, it's finished. That's not to say that the record I loved when we were at camp and hearing the things that were shared with us at camp by Pastor Jeff. Yeah. There's still a record of those things, but the record says that the price was paid for those things. Yes. I confess those sins upon the record is kept in the Lamb's Book of Life that those sins have been confessed and they've been put on Christ. SPEAKER A Yeah. Which is such a message of hope, isn't it, that we can face today. SPEAKER B It's one that I don't understand, to be honest. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B I mean, I think of this and I think I still today find myself at times asking why, like, why is God so good to us? I really don't get it. And I often find myself breaking down in tears because I just think, like, why? Who is this God of ours? I love one of my favorite authors, Helen White. She says that we'll be learning of the matchless love of Christ for the ceaseless ages of eternity. Why does he love us the way that he does that to me? I know how I feel when people upset me, right? You do the wrong thing by me. I've got to try really hard to reconcile that stuff in my mind. You asked my wife if that's like, don't talk to Him about it, just leave him be. Because I've got to try and find a way to reconcile these things in my mind so that I can let that go. Yes, but to think that God in his love for us, that he's chasing after us at those times, I mean, that to me is mind boggling. And I guess that's why I struggle to comprehend it, is because I see where I'm at. I see in my flesh. If I allow Scott to live, I know how I feel in those situations. Praise God every single day. It's not about me living, but it's about Christ living in me. And he helps me to work through those situations and to forgive others the way that he has forgiven me. But I still have a sense of who I am and how I feel. Was it not for Christ? Yes. Was it not for me understanding God's redemptive love for me? I could guarantee you that I wouldn't be able to forgive others the way that I do when they wrong me if I hadn't known of the love of God and the way that he's forgiven me. SPEAKER A Yeah, that makes a huge difference, doesn't it? How you experience Christ's love and how that actually changes you and then how you interacting with others, which is a huge thing. And we're just going to hold your story right there. It's been a very interesting journey coming to where we are at this point in your story, where you've actually come to this huge realization of the amazing love of God for you. And we're just going to take a break to give you our contact details, listeners, if you would like to contact us here at Three ABN Australia Radio, you can do so through the following details. Thank you for joining us on. By the word of their testimony, if you would like more information about today's program or if you have any questions, please contact Three ABN Australia Radio by Phoning 024-97-3456. Or you can send an email to [email protected]. You can also contact us on our three ABN Australia radio Facebook page. We look forward to hearing from you. Welcome back to by the word of their testimony I'm Kaysie Vokurka, and we've been talking today with Scott Heitmann about his personal journey in coming to know Christ and where we were talking before we sort of left off, where he had just been in prison and had read a book on the 27 fundamentals of the 7th Adventist Church. And he was touched by the picture of God that was presented there of Christ as both our advocate, as our judge, our defense, and our substitute, who paid the penalty of our sin. And this was such a mind blowing and life transforming thing for you to be able to grasp and just want you to lead us into where this took you next in your journey. SPEAKER B Yeah. From that point in time, I should never have gotten out of prison. When I did, in terms of previous sentencing, the offenses, I was on parole in Queensland. A number of things happened at that point in time that didn't make sense. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B Historically, from my past experiences, this stuff didn't make sense. And yet things just went in my favor in ways that I'd never seen before. Impossible things happened. I know my urine was dirty. I had done a UT, a urine test, and it came back clean. After my mother praying for me, the fact that I got out when I did, I remember there was a certain friend who was one of my best mates in my life before Christ, and he used to come and see me. And I remember there was a point in time that I had been studying the power of the blood of Christ and looking at Israel when they were told to anoint their homes with the blood of the Lamb. And I remember praying that the blood of Christ would cover the four corners of my property and that God would protect us from the powers of darkness, that they wouldn't have any power and any authority in our home. And I remember the most incredible thing. That same friend who kept coming over to see me and try and encourage me to go back into a life as living the life that we're living before. Up until that point, he would just walk in. Right? I mean, we were great friends and we could do that. It was at that moment, I remember after we prayed that prayer, that the next day he came around, he stood at the gate. SPEAKER A Is that right? SPEAKER B He didn't walk in the house. That's fascinating, seeing these things happen, seeing the way God was working. I mean, I'm at a place in my life where I could never deny the existence of God. Right. I could reject God if I was to so choose, but I could never deny the goodness and the existence of God. SPEAKER A You've experienced so much of it. SPEAKER B Of course. Yeah. From that point on, I think back then, literally, I had the first job I had in ten years, like the first legal job that I'd had in ten years. I was working in a factory. I started listening to sermons every single day. At first, for the first month or so, I wasn't I was just working with the other guys, and I was working in a factory. Some of the guys would talk to me in ways that I struggled to deal with. The old man was still being worked on, right. And these guys would talk to me in a certain way. The supervisor, he kind of had a bit of a complex because he was the supervisor, and I said to the boss, who, funnily enough, his mother, he grew up in the Adventist church as well. He was aware of the transition in my life, and he gave me the job to work in the factory. And he actually grew up with Chopper Reed. He was, like, best mates with Chopper Reed in Sydney, because Chopper Reed was an he was an Adventist as well, right, when he was a kid. So this guy Terry beautiful man, Terry, had given me a job, and I went into his office one day. I said, Terry, I can't handle working with these guys. I said, do you mind if I just put some, like, the Bible in some headphones? And I just listen to the Bible or some sermons and stuff while I'm working. So I started then listening to sermons and just allowing filling myself constantly with the word of God. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B Praying every single day. I'd be sometimes just weeping as I'm working and just inviting God to change my life, continually surrendering the old self. And as I'd realized things in my life that I was still wrestling with, just laying them at his feet and saying, lord, I need you to help me with this. And as I look back on that time, if you would have told me then that I would have ended up getting I got a scholarship and was able to go to the Arise program. I did a three month Bible working training program and then ended up coordinating a team of I had a private donor and use that money to pay for the rent in a house and put the food on the table rather than taking a wage. And instead of just me Bible working, we had a team of us that were all there as volunteers and just had the most radical experience living the gospel. Right. And I still talked to the guys that lived in that house with us back then, and they'll tell you that was one of the most awesome experiences of their entire life. Right? Like, it was just so it was like Acts Chapter 21, you know? SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B It was just living living the gospel out. So then from that point in time, I then got a call to South Australia. I started doing pastoral ministry down in, you know, today I find myself sitting on the communications advisory. One thing I've found incredible is as God continues to teach us things, as God continues to give us. Little gifts. What do we do with those as he continues to open up opportunities? How do we use those opportunities? Do we use them in a way that best benefits me? Or do we use them in a way that most advances the gospel when he gives us different gifts of different sorts? Do we use them in a way that satisfies the selfish nature of man? Or do we use them in a way that effectively reaches out and connects others with the gospel? SPEAKER A Right. SPEAKER B That's in everything that we whether it be financial blessings that we receive or whether that be in gifts and skills that God gives us at different times. And the things that I've learned since I've been a Christian, the opportunities that God has given me, the way that God has led, and there's things that I do now that I would never have imagined that I could have done back then. SPEAKER A Yeah. Wow. SPEAKER B And I see just the advancement, the rapid advancement, the rapid transformation that takes place and just seeing the way that God works when we fully surrender our life to Him. And that's not to say that I haven't had struggles throughout that period. In fact, I would say that I've been attacked more. The times that I've surrendered myself the most to God is probably the times when I've experienced some of the greatest hardships in terms of just some of the personal experiences and the things that I've gone through. But then I look at some of the blessings that have come as well. And yes, there's been difficult times, but in the past when there was difficult times, those difficult times would lead to destruction, whereas now I go through difficult times and somehow out of those difficult times. The Bible says that all things work together for those who love and serve the Lord good. And it doesn't say some things, right? It doesn't say on some occasions it said all things, everything works for good. And when we're going through hardships, it's hard for us to comprehend that that is true. But I've learned that, at least in my experience to date, I can say that I've experienced that to be absolutely true. When I get on the other side of those things, more beautiful things come. SPEAKER A You can see absolutely. SPEAKER B And I see where my life is now and I never would have imagined that God would have me given me the opportunity to serve Him in the way that I serve Him today. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And I don't know where it leads from here. But one thing I would say is to any of those who are listening, I don't know where you are in your journey, whether you're at that place that you are just at the start of the journey and you're still thinking that if you walk into the church that it's going to burn down around you. Or maybe you're in the place that you've been walking with God a little while and it seems to get a little bit stagnant. Or maybe you've been walking with God for a little while, but you feel like you're not good enough in that journey. Wherever you are, I want you to know that you can continue to draw closer to God today, that God's power will be made perfect in your weakness, that if you surrender yourself to Him, that he will take your life and transform it in ways that are beyond anything that you could have imagined. And I can only say in my own experience, and I'm sure he could say the same, that when you continually surrender yourself to Him, the way that God leads and the way that he blesses is beyond anything that I could have imagined. And even during that's not to say that there's times recently that we were living off our credit card, right? It's not to say that there's not hardships through that process, but then I see we went through that hardship and just at that time that somehow God takes that hardship and he turns it into something beautiful. And as we continue to trust in Him and learn to put our trust in our confidence and I find often there's tests in those those periods, there was opportunities for us to take secular work and to do digital marketing stuff that we're doing now for the Church in a secular direction. And I had to choose. The same day that I started racking up my credit card, I get this phone call from a guy who wanted me to take on a heap of work for him. But I knew that if I had have started doing that work, I wouldn't have been able to continue doing the work for God ministry. SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER B And I chose to continue racking up to start racking up the credit card. And then God's opened up the opportunities over the last few months, this is just recent stuff that's happened. So I just want to encourage you, wherever you are in that journey, to test God, to surrender yourself to God and allow Him to come in and to do the radical and powerful things in your life that only he can do. SPEAKER A Yeah. Amen. And the Bible talks about God being not far from every one of us. And I think I really resonate with your appeal there in that wherever we are, we just have to call out to God and he will take us on an incredible journey to places we never dreamed of. And it's such a wonderful journey to be on. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Scott. And it's been a real pleasure to hear your story and the amazing things God has done in your life. And to our listeners you've been listening to by the word of their you know, a person's testimony is evidence that God is real and that he cares about us, which is a huge thing. And so if any of you have a testimony that you want to share of what God has done in your life, do share it today. It will bless others, and you will be blessed, too. So I'm your host, Kaysie Vokurka. And until next time, God bless. SPEAKER B You'Ve. Been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio. SPEAKER C