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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Mark Ferrell

The Three Greatest Questions

Working in San Francisco has its challenges, as I'm sure that you can imagine.

But tonight I'm going to share with you a little bit about another job that I have.

And so I'd like to invite all of you to come at 7.30.

Who knows where we're going to meet at 7.30 tonight?

And so I know we're going to attract a lot of students, but if any of the other people that may be of not so close to your student years, you're welcome to come as well.

Dear God in heaven, we want to thank you for giving us the scriptures.

We want to thank you for giving us Sabbath, a time to stop and spend time with you.

But we also want to thank you for the Holy Spirit.

Right now I pray for the Holy Spirit to come and be our unseen guest, be our unseen instructor.

May we learn things today that will stick with us the rest of our lives.

I pray that you would help me to be able to rightly divide the words of truth So that each 1 of us will learn things and help us to have more faith in Jesus name.

Amen You know working in San Francisco Bay Area It's 1 of the least evangelized areas in the United States when you look at the comparison to Seventh-day Adventist to non-seventh-day Adventist We have the lowest ratio Seattle is right behind us, but San Francisco Bay Area, we top the charts there.

And working with the secular mind, I find that there's 3 questions that come up a lot.

And these 3 questions aren't just something that I've experienced.

And what they have found is that these are the top 3 questions that people have that kind of are the main reason that people don't even want to explore Christianity.

And so, as I was talking to the directors here at Advent Hope and trying to come up with a title for our talk, I thought about these 3 questions because many of you here are here to learn maybe medicine or nursing or physical therapy, but someday you're going to be out in the real world where you get away from Loma Linda.

When you're out there, you might have somebody ask you these questions.

The thing that really impresses me as I've been away from my Advent home where I grew up in Tennessee, I was homeschooled there in Tennessee, is Seventh-day Adventist has answers.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a lot of good answers.

And I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist and there was a time in my life where I was a badvenist.

And as a badvenist, you know, you're kind of like shying away from the Adventist Church and you're kind of embarrassed about our heritage.

But 1 thing I found is that the Seventh-day Adventist Church has answers for some of these questions.

For example, the first question that I hear a lot, 1 of the top questions is, if God is such a God of love and God is a God of choice, why is he going to burn and torture people that don't choose him?

I mean, that really doesn't sound like a choice, does it?

I mean, if I were to give you a choice, we would like to invite you to come hiking with us this afternoon, Sabbath afternoon walk, but if you don't, that's fine.

We don't want to pressure you or anything, but if you come walking with us, it's gonna be a nice hike.

So you can come walk and hang out with our dogs, Kimchi and Kimbop, but if you choose not to, then we're going to lock you in a car and we're going to beat you and flog you and burn you for the next 5000000 years.

And the neat thing is, is the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been given a message, And 1 of our messages is that there is a God of love and there is a God of choice.

And he is not a God that's gonna torture you forever and ever and ever.

I think of a close friend of mine and we go paragliding on a regular basis.

And this is 1 of the reasons he had a real problem with Christianity, is because the whole idea that you're telling me that your God wants me to come and spend eternity with him, but if not, then he's going to torture me.

And when you find the Seventh-day Adventist Church is 1 of the few churches that's around right now that's helping people to understand exactly what the Bible truth is about hell.

Another 1 of the difficult questions you're gonna hear is if God is a God of love, if God is so powerful, why is there so much suffering on this planet?

And if you know, if you've been in the healthcare profession, you'll see some things that just really turn your stomach.

You'll see some things that just, if you could stop it, why doesn't God stop it?

And I believe the Seventh-day Adventist Church has an answer to that, and it's known as the Great Controversy.

How many of you have ever read the book Great Controversy?

I would encourage you, if you have not read the book Great Controversy, I challenge you today, go and read that book Great Controversy because the book Great Controversy helps us to clearly see that there's a big fight going on behind the scenes.

And this fight goes way back, a long time before this world was even created.

And this fight is between Christ and who?

And this angel really hates God, and he hates anything to do with God, and anything that God has his fingerprints on.

And so when you see the great controversy and you see the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is the 1 that really brought this to light.

And now a lot of other churches are starting to catch on, you could say.

He wants to be a pastor and he's going to an evangelical seminary and he says it's amazing how they have the concept of the great controversy down so well.

And I just have to say praise the Lord because God has given that message to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, I believe, to share with other people.

Now the third question that I hear a lot about, and I'm going to spend the most time today, is the question that why are Christians so exclusive?

I mean, you say, as Christians, that if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your savior, and if you don't believe Jesus Christ died for your sins, then you're gonna be lost.

I think of David Bevan, an atheist that I've worked with for about 21 years there in the Bay Area.

He grew up as a Christian in England, he grew up going to church on a regular basis, he went to Bible Academy and he went to a Bible summer camp like we would call, you know, summer camp and he worked with the young people and now he's an atheist.

And The reason he became an atheist, he told me, is because he says, when I grew up into my 20s and I saw there was thousands and thousands and thousands of people around the world that had never even heard of Christ, and they're going to be burning forever and ever and ever, That has a big flaw with that mentality.

If a person does not accept Jesus Christ, are they going to be lost?

They did a study recently, and they asked, they said if a person is sincerely seeking God, he or she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity, and they found that 77% of Protestant pastors strongly disagreed with that.

I was talking to a young lady 1 time, and you know, this is not just the evangelical pastors, I find this creeps into the Adventist church as well.

And this person was saying, you know what, I just have a real problem.

I mean, the Adventist church is growing, but there's people dying that have not become Seventh-day Adventists.

A person came to me 1 time and he says, Mark, they were completely unchurched.

I read it the other day and it's a Seventh-day Adventist joke.

I know I'm a Seventh-day Adventist and so they had to share with me a Seventh-day Adventist joke.

The Seventh-day Adventist joke goes something like this.

There's a man that went to heaven, and as he's going around heaven, the angel, whoever you want to say, Gabriel.

Gabriel's showing him around heaven, and they're looking around, and he sees everything.

He sees all these people in heaven, and it's beautiful and everything, and then he sees this big wall and on the other side of that wall he hears all this laughing, he goes, what's that?

And the angel goes, and the angel takes him over to this place in the wall where there's a one-way glass and he looks through and he sees all these people on the other side and these people are eating haystacks, these people are playing, these people are just having a good time.

He goes, those are Seventh-day Adventists.

And the person thought, I found an Adventist joke for Mark, but it just made my heart just sad.

Is that what people think Seventh-day Adventists believe, is we're the only ones going to heaven?

Just a few months ago, the Southern Baptist Convention invited Ben Carson to come and speak for them.

Then they uninvited him because their young pastors has a problem with his theology.

Because they felt that we're a cult And they're the ones that are going to be saved.

And when you work with Jehovah's Witnesses, what do they think?

And you work with the Mormons, and what do they think?

And you work with the Muslims, and what do they say?

And so this isn't just where we're saying that only Christians are going to be saved.

It's easy for us to think that we're the only ones gonna be saved.

But again, I think that the Seventh Adventist Church, if we go back to what our church actually thinks and not what we sometimes believe, I think it's gonna really open our eyes to what God's will is for all of us.

And so I would like to share with you some verses.

You're welcome to pull out your iPhones or your Android devices, or if some of you actually have the paper, you know, that's kind of in lines like this called a book.

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The Three Greatest Questions

Transcript

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