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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Sebastien Braxton

The Foundation

Heavenly Father, once again, not much time in between your last visit with us through your word, but we're grateful Father because we believe that your spirit was speaking to us.

And because you are here, Father, we come in a spirit of reverence, recognizing our great need of Christ in everything.

And we pray right now that you would show us 1 more time a picture of our Savior that we've never seen.

Renew that first love Lord that we had when we first saw his loveliness and we were drawn by his willing to accept us and to embrace us and to make us fishers of men.

We knew that commitment to follow him, speak through your manservant father and open thou our eyes as we open your word.

That we may behold wondrous things is my prayer In Christ's name, amen.

If you still have your Bibles open, Matthew 6, we're going to go to Matthew 7.

And the title of our message this afternoon is The Foundation.

And as we can, as we look at this situation, in Matthew chapter 7, I just want to build something to say this morning the title of our sermon was what?

Justice 1 time okay, and then we just talked about what?

Let's be real well this sermon is the foundation The foundation you know in our church.

We use this word foundation a lot, don't we?

And the foundations of our faith and the pillars of our faith.

We use different terms but we're typically referring to the same concept.

And I want to talk to you this afternoon about something that I actually have been thinking about writing a book.

Because I was talking to, I do a lot of ministry on secular campuses obviously, and in meeting unbelievers of all kinds, colors, shades, and different backgrounds and perspectives, You find that when people get to that stark kind of, you know, polemic attitude towards God and about the existence of God and about the Word of God, I find that they always bring up this cry for this supernatural evidence.

They always want to say, well, if God is there, how come he doesn't appear to me And there's this whole movement called the the atheist Association or something like this and they started this project called the blasphemy project have you heard of this?

I don't know if you've heard of this, but it started something called the blasphemy challenge And what they do is if you go on YouTube, they have these people all over America.

Who record themselves repeating the phrase that's talked about in the unpardonable sin.

And they say on camera, they say, look Jesus, I blaspheme you, I blaspheme the Holy Spirit, I blaspheme the Father.

I guess I've committed the unpardonable sin my name is such and such and I'm willing to take the blasphemy challenge hundreds of videos.

They started this project, Atheist Association.

I forget, it's Atheist Association or something of this kind.

And 1 of the things that they were saying, because there was this guy, Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort, they have this ministry called the way of the master and I could not believe Kirk Cameron I'm like what?

So I'm sitting there visiting my mother for Mother's Day in Virginia Beach And a friend of mine sends me a text message, he said, hey, you have to turn on the TV.

There's a debate on the existence of God.

Debating the existence of God on national news?

So I turn it on, and sure enough, Kirk Cameron Ray Comfort, representing the Way of the Master, and they have this ministry where they go around with the camera and Telling people like hey, so do you think it's gonna be comfortable like burning in hell?

And the person's like what and they've been like punched and they've been like attacked and like on camera They just go up to people.

Do you know that if you don't believe in Jesus you're going to burn in hell?

They're like, this is the way of the master.

So they get on TV, the Atheist Society, and you have the Way of the Master, and they're going to debate the existence of God on ABC.

So the Atheist Association is just tearing these brothers apart.

And I thought, Lord, of all the people you could have on here to debate your existence Kirk Cameron And comfort and I was so angry.

I was up till 2 in the morning writing comments to ABC then I was writing comments to their ministry, Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort, thinking how come you didn't bring up this point, have you ever heard of this philosophical argument, you should read, you should read Pascal's Pensies, you should read about All these different things that I'm talking about.

How come you overlook these things and you come on TV embarrassing Christianity And 1 of the things that they could not respond to was the atheist Society will come and they would say look if God exists where you see if you if you say that, okay, China, yeah, I've never been to China.

Philosophically, it's untenable, they will say, because I can go to China.

I can actually go there and see that China really exists.

So even though I've never had a particular drink or I've never been to a particular place, or I've never met your boyfriend or your wife or whoever, I can trust that they exist because you have pictures, you have evidence, and I can meet them.

But God, can you take me to his universe factory, where he produced the universe?

And You know, it's very, very irreverent.

And so, as they could not respond to this, I was praying and I was so, so angry.

And I remember going back to my Bible, And I said, Lord, you know, what in the world?

And 1 of the things that I found on campus, coming from this argument and watching this debate, someone raised the very same question on campus.

They said, Sebastian, why can't I go to God's universe factory?

And they said, if you show me God, if you lead me to God, then I will believe in him, is what they said.

Automatic the Lord said, Sebastian I want you to say this.

I know this has not come from my own mind.

So I looked at the person and I said, in order for you to make that statement in all honesty, You have to have a lifestyle that follows what you know to be true.

You tell me that, hey, if you live this certain kind of promiscuous lifestyle, you're more prone to catching HIV and AIDS, but you still live a promiscuous lifestyle, but you don't want AIDS.

Okay, you're a nurse or you're a doctor, and I see what you're eating at lunchtime.

You just told a patient, if you don't put down those burgers, it's over for you.

Yet the nurse and the doctor will go down double-decker extra cheese If anyone knows what that's doing to your heart, it's the doctor and the nurse So you have this situation that your lifestyle tells me that if you heard the truth You would not follow it you pick and choose about what's comfortable for you So for you to say if you show me God's existence if you take me to where he is If you work some sort of miracle everything in your life in your past tells me that you will not follow God You will decide hey, what's is this comfortable for me to follow Jesus or not?

So this whole concept of application arose as an idea to say this We live in a society that prides itself on information not application And They challenge God on the basis of information and we should challenge them on the basis of application Show me something in your life.

That's true that you actually follow You know, it's true and you believe it to be true.

So the thing friends is that information is designed and created to be applied.

Can you think of a situation in your life where information must be applied right away?

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