By Abbi Cleveland
My name is Abbi, and I am a seventh grader at H.M.S. Richards Adventist School. In the spring of 2025, our principal told those who would be seventh and eighth graders during the next school year that they would be participating in the Pentecost 2025 evangelistic outreach* in November. At first, I was fine with it—until I found out that I was going to be either a preacher or an understudy!
At school, I started researching and completing Bible studies on my topic, which was “The Sabbath: God’s Amazing Day.” It’s not easy to write a sermon when you have never written one before. Almost every morning at school, we spent one to two hours researching, writing, and practicing our sermons.
Prior to the Pentecost 2025 outreach, I had presented only book reports and other presentations in front of my class of about 20 people. All summer I was dreading the fall so much that I did not want to talk about it, see my sermon, or even think about it.
November rolled around, and we invited the neighbors of the school to our “God Is” sermon series. The day that I was speaking I was so nervous! I was afraid I was going to freeze in front of all those people. Attendance at the meeting that night was approximately 100 people. I kept reminding myself that I had practiced hard and that I could do this. The verse that came to mind many times during this experience was Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
As I walked onto the platform, I used a trick that one of my classmates who had preached the night before had used. I told a joke. After that, I relaxed and presented my sermon on the Sabbath; I had basically memorized it. Afterward people told me how well I did and that it blessed them. Someone even told me that they had learned something new!
A few weeks after the Pentecost 2025 outreach, our principal gave the preachers a commemorative Bible and a jar of salt from the Dead Sea, with a note stating that we are the “salt of the earth” and that we have a message to share with those around us. In the end this whole experience was a blessing to me! When you have a chance to share God with others, grab it!
You can watch Abi’s sermon here:
* Pentecost 2025 was a major evangelistic outreach imitative for the North American Division in 2025, resulting in thousands of outreach projects across the division. Schools and young people were encouraged to participate.
—Abbi Cleveland is a student at HMS Richards Adventist School. Republished with permission from the Adventist Review Witnessing article, August 31, 2026, article. Photos supplied.
