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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

It's Time Someone Finally Told You the Truth About...

Mark Howard

The Last Generation

Revisionist Adventist History

The Human Nature of Christ - Part 1

The Human Nature of Christ - Part 2

In Michigan Conference, actually in our Union, the Lake Union, we are about to kick off a union-wide evangelistic campaign in March, March 28, actually, called Unlock Revelation.

And prior to doing that, now we're in Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Most of our churches, I'm a pastor, most of our churches aren't in Los Angeles.

And pastors, Adventist pastors, pastor of 3 and 4 church districts of 20 people apiece.

And so we're in Cedar Lake, but we have this series coming up.

In fact, 1 of our local pastors, a young man named Taylor Hinkle, some of you may know Taylor.

Anyway, we decided we're gonna do this thing in our little area.

It's not gonna be a 3 day, it's gonna be a 1 day.

And you know, I hear Some of you guys are like, oh, Los Angeles, that's a long way away.

1 of our challenges was finding the dentists and the doctors.

You guys, I don't know where you'd find them here in Loma Linda, right?

But at any rate, look, the Lord Jesus is coming.

And we wanna let people know, we wanna minister to them just like Jesus did.

And so pray for us with our pathway to health that we're doing in Cedar Lake, Michigan.

I'm glad to be with you here this morning.

And before I get into the message itself, I'd like to have a word of prayer.

So I'm going to kneel and ask God to bless our time together.

If you bow your heads with me at this time, please.

Father in heaven, I thank you for the Sabbath day.

Father, the Sabbath is a time where you've cleared your calendar for us, and we thank you.

You invited us into your presence to reveal to us your love and your purpose for each of our lives.

We aren't some random biological accident, but there's a loving God who has a holy purpose for each 1 here.

I pray, Lord, that you will help us to sense more of that purpose as we're in your presence this morning.

We ask and pray it in the name of Jesus and for his sake, amen.

Now I tossed around this, I tell my students at Emanuel Institute that the first qualification of ministry is adaptability.

How many of you here are in some sort of ministry?

You know how ministry always goes exactly as planned, right?

And so things always happen and I've been wrestling with the different messages, you know, what I was going to be presenting and the Lord laid something, it's not totally different, but it's a little different on my heart this morning.

And the series that I'm addressing this weekend is it's time someone finally told you the truth about.

And this afternoon we're going to be talking about, it's time someone finally told you the truth about the nature, the human nature of Christ.

That's 1 of those things in the Adventist church that we get in these big debates about.

We're not going to be debating this afternoon, this is going to be a study.

It's for the purpose of enrichment, not debate.

And then the last message we're going to be looking at is the...

It's time someone finally told you the truth about faith and works.

This is another 1 of those things that Christians try to figure out where do we, where does, where do, do, does faith begin and works end or works begin and how's the whole thing in there and when do your works become legalistic and all of this kind of thing.

Well it's an important question because you just can't, you know, we talk about pew warming.

Well, when does getting up and getting active become legalistic?

And these are questions, practical questions, questions I get a lot of, so we're gonna be addressing those a little bit.

This morning's message is it's time someone finally told you the truth about revisionist Adventist history.

Some people say, well, this is, we're gonna be talking about Adventist history.

Really, not a whole lot, but a little bit.

And you'll see what I mean in just a moment.

You see, I grew up in the Adventist church, I shared this last night, until I was about 14 years old.

At that time, my family left the Adventist church, well, my mom did, I lived with my mom and my stepdad, left the Adventist church for about 11 years or so, and then I came back into the church later on.

The Lord is so good and merciful and he pursued me like he pursues each 1 of us, to draw us back to himself.

But growing up in the church and especially coming back into the church, it's interesting, I'll talk about 2 different aspects of Adventist history.

And I've read some great histories on, I love religious history.

And 1 of the biggest, what I want to say, Eras in our church, the most influential was the 1888 era.

I don't know how many of you studied history on that.

There's a fantastic book by a man named Ron Duffield called The Return of the Latter Rain, a phenomenal book on Adventist history.

What I discovered, well I didn't discover it in that book, I already knew it, but that book confirmed it, is there are a lot of accounts of what happened in the past that really didn't happen the way they say they happened.

And, you know, that could be my say versus your say, but we have plenty of historical documents to do it, and that particular book documents that very well.

So there are sometimes there are histories that we say, oh, this happened and that happened, and you go back and you find out, well, that's not exactly what happened.

And so when we use the term revisionist history, that just means it's a history that really didn't happen just the way they said.

Now there's that type of church history, and there's also personal history.

And ever since I've been back in the Adventist church, I always hear these stories, they're unending stories about the grinding legalism of Adventism, when you had to do this and do that and do the other.

And all these things so you could be saved.

And I'm so glad we're past that and that kind of thing.

What's interesting to me from my personal experience is, now I've been back in the church now 22 years, is what I hear described in stories is something I've never experienced in 22 years in the church.

So whatever, if it happened, it didn't happen just like that and it certainly didn't happen in 22 years.

Now you're gonna say, oh wait a minute, I experienced that.

So I want to suggest something to you this morning, you're going to have to bear with me, as we look at another perspective.

Now how many of you are familiar in the invisible gorilla experiment was they had a group of young people passing basketballs around.

I believe there were 3 in black shirts and 3 in white shirts.

So they're passing, the 3 are passing here, and the other group, the 3 are passing there.

They played the video to their subjects in the experiment, and they said, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to watch carefully and count how many times those in white shirts pass the basketball.

How many times the basketball changes hands.

Now you have to be careful, watch closely because sometimes they'll fake a pass and it won't change hands.

Now that was what they were supposed to do.

Now what happens is they begin passing the ball around.

In the middle of this, and it's about, I don't know, maybe a minute, maybe 2 minutes most, this little video.

But in the midst of them passing the ball around somebody walks out.

So here you have the frame, say the frame of the screen is right here, they're passing the ball around.

Somebody walks out in a gorilla suit, stops in the middle, goes like this, walks out of the frame on the other side.

They ask the people afterwards, how many of you saw the gorilla?

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Series

It's Time Someone Finally Told You the Truth About...

Revisionist Adventist History

Transcript

Parent Series

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