Christian Berdahl grew up in a dysfunctional home that led him to suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically. In an effort to numb his pain and thoughts of suicide, he immersed himself in theatre arts. He soon earned a spot in TV production, but in the midst of it all he was still a hurt person who hadn’t healed. After years of chasing after the wind, he found Jesus Christ, and realized that in Him was true peace.

ASI 2009: By Knowing Him

<p>Christian Berdahl grew up in a dysfunctional home that led him to suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically. In an effort to numb his pain and thoughts of suicide, he immersed himself in theatre arts. He soon earned a spot in TV production, but in the midst of it all he was still a hurt person who hadn’t healed. After years of chasing after the wind, he found Jesus Christ, and realized that in Him was true peace.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

ASI 2009 Plenary Meetings

Justin McNeilus

Did They Miss Her?

Jim Ayer

Footsteps of an Approaching God

ASI Members in Action

Christian Berdahl

A Bad Actor

Justin Kim

ASI Youth Department & Youth for Jesus Report with worship by Justin Kim

David Asscherick

Walking in the Light: Rejecting Antichrists

Michael Ryan

Nevertheless

ASI Presents “Spotlight on Supporting Ministries”

Art Chadwick

Creation


When you come to ASI, you expect to be thrilled and challenged and stimulated and go home remembering experiences where lives were changed, where God is using people just like you and me to reach this dead and dying world. Today you're not going to be disappointed at all. Christian Berdahl, over 10 years ago, founded the Shepherds Call Ministry. Christian came from a background of abuse and hardship and heartache, but God used him in a remarkable way now in a ministry of music and the spoken word in both secular settings as well as in spiritual settings. He's invited around the world to minister in cross denominations, in secular events and all kinds of opportunities.

Christian, how in the world did you end up becoming a Christian? I was raised in a non-Christian home, and my mother was a non-Christian, and she gave me the name Christian. I don't know how. I've asked her that. She said, I don't know, I just like the name.

She says now it was providential, praise the Lord. But I was raised in an abusive home. My mother was a 17-year-old young girl when she had me. My father was 19 years old. He was a drug user and an alcoholic and an adulterer.

Finally, my mother, after having 2 different children, decided to divorce him. And she was a single mother taking care of 3 of us boys and sent off to babysitters. The babysitters... Unfortunately the babysitter's son stole my innocence as a young boy. And then from there, my mother remarried.

And she remarried to a man who became our worst nightmare, actually. And he was extremely abusive, very violent. I've been whipped. I've been tied up. I've been tortured.

I've had open wounds from the top of my neck to my heels. And so it was a tough life as a child. I learned that you put on a face, even though your life is absolutely horrible and terrible, and you act like everything is okay. And that was my existence as a young child. It seems that when we look at people, we don't know anything about their background, we don't know what's in their backpack, but even through this heartache and tough time you had growing up, God still has chosen to use you.

Which amazes me because how he got a hold of my life is an absolute miracle because growing up when you have father figures abuse you and then my biological father molested all 3 of us boys and so we just had so much baggage and so much weight and so much hurt and pain that I honestly couldn't believe that there was a God in heaven that wanted to do anything good to me because everyone I had ever trusted had always hurt me so for God to take me from that to singing and preaching for Him is a miracle. Well, just think how many kids are out there that are going through the same kind of heartache that you did. I mean, it's not that uncommon. And here we just look at people all cleaned up and smiling and saying, good morning, and how are you today, as though nothing was wrong. And yet there are people that are hurting everywhere.

And you must have had terrible pain as you went through this experience. It was true, you know, there were no answers. Nobody ever shared Jesus with me. In fact, as I graduate, actually what happened was, I kept crying out and kept crying out and there was no answer. I cried out to God and there was no answer.

And I said, well, if there's a devil out there and you can help me, get me out of this. And of course, God said, he doesn't know what he's saying, amen. So God has protected me somehow, some way. I was violent as a child. I tried to take my life a number of times.

I was suicidal, but it never went through. God had always protected me, even though I didn't know him or acknowledge him. I was still his child. And then, as this abuse went on until I was a sophomore in high school, when I went to Child Protective Services, and I started telling them a story, what if something like this was happening? What if this was happening?

I'm not saying it is, because I couldn't trust anybody. My mother had mentally and emotionally checked out and my life was just a mess. So my mother finally woke up, divorced my stepfather, praise God, and we left actually with the police standby the day we were moving out. We had police standing there with their patrol cars in case he went crazy because he was pretty much crazy anyway. So what happened was I got involved in theater.

I started finding escape in the theater arts as a young person. I went to a Christian retreat as a young person, and all it was was, if you don't worship God, you don't love God, you're gonna burn forever. And I thought, well, there you go. It's just like the rest of the father figures I've had in my life, and so I wasn't interested. This was high school?

This was in high school. And then right out of high school, beginning year of college, I got involved in television and video production. And there I found another escape. I stopped doing theater. I started 2 businesses, which grew into 3.

We were successful as young people. I was 21, 19 to 22 years old and I was making lots of money. My career was expanding in audio and video production and I was, my business partner had embezzled from us and totally ruined our companies and I couldn't recover them and so I was taking any job I could to try to put my financial life back together and I was called by a producer 1 day and he asked me if I would like to go and direct this thing called a camp meeting. I had no idea what a camp meeting was, and I grew up camping and enjoying camping, so I thought, sure, I like camping. I'll take the job.

So I took the job, and I show up on location looking for the man who was running the camp meeting, and I said, I understand this is a camp meeting, and we'll set up our establishing shot and our audience reaction shots. Do we need a handheld remote for shooting like the tent and cooking demonstrations? And he's like, tent demonstration? What are you talking about? I said, well, this is a camp meeting, right?

And he said, yes. And I said, I assume you're going to be demonstrating camping equipment, right? And he says, oh, no, no, no. Camp meeting. He goes, I've never heard that.

That's good. And so I said, what's a camp meeting? And you know, there's a bunch of RVs out there and tents and people walking around in hiking boots, so I'm thinking, you know, it's a camp meeting. And he goes, no, no, no, this is a religious meeting that people camp at. And I went, oh, great.

I'm going to learn about the God that never did anything for me. So where did it go from there? I mean, here you are in a camp meeting, and you're expecting to be putting up tents and have a bunch of Boy Scouts making fires. Exactly. There were no fires, there were no Boy Scouts, there were a lot of strange people.

And they were, I learned they were called Seventh-day Adventists. And they talked different and they walked different and they dressed different and their music was different. But what happened as I sat there in the control, we had a portable van and as I sat there in that production van and I was switching, I was being drawn in to what was being presented. I had seen now someone present Jesus in a way I had never heard before. Isn't that neat how God works?

Amen. So here I am, the technical guy, which is where I'm very comfortable. I'm petrified to be right here, right this moment. I'm not the front guy. I'm much more accustomed to being behind the scenes.

I like it back there with all the crew. So I'm being drawn in. I'm hearing America was foretold in prophecy and I'm hearing about the health message and this guy is up there eating weeds off the side of the road saying, God has provided Daniel's diet. And I'm like, who's Daniel? I knew nothing.

And I'm thinking these people are so weird, but I like them. This is really different. Be encouraged, dear ones. Yeah. I'm just a heathen that knew nothing, you know?

So Here I am listening to all of this and by the end of the meeting, the man that was running it, he and I became friends and I was having some serious health issues. He helped me through those. I became a vegetarian. I became a vegan vegetarian. My strength returned.

I'm stronger now at 40 than I was at 25 or whatever it was, 24. And so what happened over time was God let my life just spiral out of control. And I couldn't find a job in production. By this time I had amassed wonderful skills. I was directing and editing and shooting and writing.

I had been working with ESPN and PBS and Nickelodeon and a lot of high-end corporate work, and my career was really taking off. And when we moved, actually, here to Chandler, Arizona, in the record heat, You think it's hot today? No, it was hot a number of years ago record days over 115 The hottest day was 127 and I was selling cars without air conditioning. My life had went all the way down. So what happened was I just decided I'm going to take a trip, went back to California, and I had a desire to go see that guy that ran that camp meeting.

Something inside of me was changing. My girl and I had separated. We had decided God or pregnant. We lost the baby at 5 and a half months and it was a traumatic event for us and we decided that we shouldn't be intimate together as worldly heathen people because there were consequences for that and we weren't ready for marriage. And so we were taking steps backwards in the eyes of the world, but we didn't realize that we were taking steps forward in God's eyes.

And So he separated the 2 of us. I went and saw my friend, and I was telling him how my life was falling apart. He just started laughing. And I said, what are you laughing at? This is not funny.

He said, yes, I told you a long time ago God has a calling for your life. And I said, I don't know what that means, but maybe you're right. So at the end of that conversation, he said to me, you know I could really use a man like you in my ministry and doing video and graphic design and all this type of work. And friends I want to tell you this, I tell you this very seriously. I knew right then when he said to me, I could really use a man like you.

God put a picture like a movie in front of my eyes and I saw, he showed me right then, I think it happened in a split second. I don't know how he has this technology, but it's fascinating. And he played this movie in front of my eyes, and I saw where Jesus had been there from my birth. He had been there. I never took my life.

He had been there, and he protected me when I prayed the prayer even to the devil, and he showed me all of these things through my life. How he had trained me up, how he allowed me to be trained up to be used for him in a later day. And I just thought, I just went right through my, and how he separated me from my fiancé, and all these things because he had to do something to me that I needed more than anything and that was to deliver me from my baggage, to deliver me from my sin. And when I said, I'll take the job. It sounds like the shepherd's call.

It was the shepherd's call. That's the name of our ministry. I heard the shepherd calling, amen? And he said, Christian, I want you to come, all broken and messed up like you are I need you I want you I love you, and I thought to myself what and I friends I kind of joke about this but I think a guardian angel grabbed my guardian angel grabbed my jaw and Imitated my voice and said I'll take the job because there's no way that I was going to go and leave Arizona where my girl was, who I was still in love with, and go work for a ministry. I mean, everything was not fitting.

So He said, really, you'll take the job? And right then, I knew I was making a decision that would change my whole life. I said, yes, I'll take the job. And I didn't know what that meant. Eventually, I stayed there and I worked for that ministry for 2 and a half years and we studied out the Sabbath that next day.

He said, if you're gonna work here you got to understand why I go to church on Saturday. He presented it to me right from the Word of God and I went, wow is everything that clear in the Bible? He said yes and I said, well I guess I'll be a Sabbath keeper And we started studying over and over everything, every doctrine, and I fell in love with the Bible. I fell in love with the spirit of prophecy. Praise God for both.

Amen. Amen. Where'd it go from there, Christian? From there, we went to my, Actually, where it went from there was a really good thing. God brought Kobe back into my life.

Praise the Lord. And that was a miracle. I don't have time to get into all of that, but God through a series of miracles brought her back into my life as a prayer to 1 of my fleeces. And by God's grace, I was this brand new Christian, and God had done something for me that I will be forever grateful. He took away all of that baggage.

He took away all of the pain and all the molestation and all the anger and all the rage. He just did, he performed some sort of surgery that it no longer holds me back. And she saw that. She said, what's going on with you? And I didn't even know it was happening.

What's going on with you? I said, I don't know. She says, but I like it. And I said, well, praise God. And she says, the good parts of you are gooder.

That's not a good word, but are better. And the bad parts of you are, where are they? And I said, I don't know. And she said, what's going on? I said, it's Jesus.

It's Jesus Christ. I said, you haven't heard the Jesus that I've learned about now. You and I were not taught about Jesus when we were growing up. She was raised in an atheist home. And so she just started breaking and crying.

And I had the privilege over the next couple of weeks to bring her to Jesus Christ. Amen, amen. Amen. And now you're actually being called. How did the ministry get started, and you're being called into remarkable places around the country?

And I really am anxious to know how he made a difference in the various places you're being invited to. Well, we'll leave out a large chunk of us getting married and her believing everything and my children being born, which we were told would never happen. And then God said, Christian, I want you to go out, and I want you to start singing and preaching. Now, friends, I knew like, I don't know, 10 songs that were Christian songs, and I would do special musics. I'm not a trained vocalist.

I don't have any training. I don't know how to sing professionally. And so he said, go and sing. And I said, but brother, father, me? You're at the bottom of the barrel.

Come on, there's other people surely that can do this. And he says, and go out and preach. I said, preach? I had done 1 sermon on the dangers of television and it got out there somehow. You know, that's how God is.

He takes your little humble efforts and says, vroom, and he just sheds them out there. And all of a sudden, I'm invited to a camp meeting. We want you to come, we want you to sing, we want you to do a sermon. And when I got to my location, I went to my room, I went to pull out my notes because I was petrified as I am right this moment, and he says, I went to find him and guess what had happened? I had left all of my notes in the seat back pocket of the airplane.

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. You see, you're much more senior in the faith, my brother. I was like, help! Lord, you called the wrong person.

And so I went to the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy as my custom had become, and I found Sister White's first vision. I had never heard it before. I had heard about it. And you know, the vision of heaven, where she's talking about the tree and the river of life and all the things. And as I was reading it, God said, put that song there, put that song there.

And in 35 minutes, a program entitled A Vision of Heaven was born. And that program, we have done all around this country and internationally. And so he impressed my heart, go out and do this. And the people were blessed, and they were blessed, and I was blessed, and God showed me, I will give you a way that you can go out and sing and preach, and it will not be about you, it will be about me and my spirit of prophecy. Amen, amen.

So you give this kind of message even in evangelical churches? Correct, yes. We're really running long here, but I'm gonna have to cut our program short. Not only, what happened is God put me, I came in to the truth through the independent movement. And God did something to me.

And what he did was he put me in almost exclusively in Seventh-day Adventist churches when our ministry was started. I said, Lord, if this is what you want me to do, you need to make the phone ring, because I'm not going to call up and go, hi, I can come sing at your church. I didn't want to do that. And so the phone started ringing. And they came, I don't know how anybody knew about me, but the word spread.

I think the angels went around and said, bring Christian, because they needed to, you people, needed to teach me something. And that was everywhere that God's people are, no matter where they are, no matter what church they're in, there is a certain group of people that has a flame of Jesus Christ burning, and God told me, look, these are my people, and I want you to be among them. And not only that, I want you to be with them. And ultimately, God led me to become, by profession of faith, to join the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Praise the Lord.

And now I'm an ordained elder in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and this is God's church, my friends. And we can play games and say, oh, this is problems here, problems there, friends. There are problems everywhere. If there's a perfect church, I've decided I won't join it because I'll ruin it. Do you even get to go to Pentecostal churches?

Yes. In fact, what happened was a friend of mine said, hey, we want to invite you into a Sunday church. My uncle runs a Sunday church. Would you do that? I had only done it in my mother's Baptist church, and I said, sure, I'd love to do this program for any of God's people, and it opened up my mind to the fact that not only in the Seventh-day Adventist churches, but in all the churches across the land, there are the same people that have the same flame burning, my friends.

And Jesus said, go and fan the flame. And so, yes, we go and we do these programs in public venues, at Salvation Armies, we do them at food kitchens, we do these programs in Pentecostal churches, in Church of Christ and God, and all these different churches, they invite me and I don't go to do a special music and support their service, they give me the pulpit and I do the service. So I introduce them to the spirit of prophecy right in their own churches And they can't believe how beautiful heaven is and they say where did you get this? Let me say this I've got plenty of more material you can read if you like and so Praise God for that and so they get introduced to desire of ages steps to Christ that to write in their own churches and they invite us back. Praise the Lord.

And industries. If you would like to learn more about ASI, please visit www.asiaministries.org. Or if you would like to listen to more free online sermons, please visit www.audioverse.org.

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Series

ASI 2009 Plenary Meetings

A Bad Actor

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

Did They Miss Her?

1h 58m

Footsteps of an Approaching God

1h 28m

ASI Members in Action

1h 58m

A Bad Actor

20m

ASI Youth Department & Youth for Jesus Report with worship by Justin Kim

1h 58m

Walking in the Light: Rejecting Antichrists

1h 27m

Nevertheless

1h 43m

ASI Presents “Spotlight on Supporting Ministries”

1h 58m

Creation

58m

Sound Doctrine