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Muskegon SDA Church

Jason Sliger

The Heart of Adventism

Father in heaven, we are thankful that we can come before your presence with rejoicing in our hearts because we serve a risen savior.

We thank you, Father, for the gift that you have given to us in your word, and we pray this morning that you would speak to us through it.

It's 2008 and I found myself in Paducah, Kentucky.

I was holding a Bible Prophecy Seminar there.

We had just started the meetings and things were going well.

1 day I found myself aimlessly wandering through a Barnes and Noble store.

We like books, and so every now and then we would frequent the bookstore.

That was back before we had kids and we had more time to do that kind of stuff.

And as I was pacing through the bookstore and walking up and down the aisles, looking at different books.

Somebody tapped me on my shoulder and I turned around and it was a young guy and he said, I recognize you.

Your face was on that thing that came out in the mail.

Yeah, that's right, the Revelation Seminar, That's me.

Hey, can we sit down and chat for a few minutes?

Now, this is like a dream come true for an evangelist.

So we, you know, inside Barnes and Nobles, they have this little cafe there, and we pulled up a chair and we sat down and we proceeded to have a conversation.

We got to know each other and we were just talking about our love for the word of God and various things.

And then he asked me the question that usually people ask, and that is, what church is sponsoring this seminar?

Well, we're not ashamed as Seventh-day Adventists, amen?

So I told him, I said, you know, I'm a Seventh-day Adventist, but this is a seminar for people of all different denominations, you know, it's just for everybody in our community.

Well, as soon as I told him I was a Seventh-day Adventist, the first thing that people usually ask is, why do you go to church on Saturday?

In fact, you just hear at the seminar, a couple nights ago I met 1 of our dear guests that had come into the meetings, And she asked me, what does Seventh-day Adventist mean?

That just thrills my heart when somebody asks me that question.

Because we have a name for our church that actually means something.

When you explain the name of our church, you're giving somebody a Bible study whether you like it or not.

And so I was telling him and he asked this question and so we were talking and he had some questions about the Sabbath as most people do and each question I tried to present him the word of God to answer those objections.

I gave him passage after passage after passage because we know the Bible is full of evidence that supports the Seventh-day Sabbath, from Genesis to Revelation.

But with each Bible passage that I gave him, whether it was the Old Testament, whether it was the New Testament, whether it was Jesus, whether it was Paul, whoever it was, whatever passage I gave him, somehow he reasoned away that passage's application in his own life and its application to keeping the Sabbath day Sabbath.

We got to the end of the conversation and he was no more informed about the Sabbath than he was when we first started because he chose not to be.

In fact, in the course of our conversation, I would share with them some of the passages in Acts.

Acts is a great book of the Bible to go to to prove that the Sabbath was still observed by both Jew and Gentile after Jesus died on the cross.

And even those passages in Acts, he said, oh, hang on a second, I need to call my friend up who's studying Greek and understand the Greek a little bit on that passage.

Listen, Greek and Hebrew is wonderful, but we can look at the plain reading of God's word and know what he's saying, amen?

Now, as I left that conversation, as I mentioned, he was no more informed about the Sabbath than when we started.

And as I already mentioned, it was because he chose to not be, not because the word of God failed him in any way.

You know, as Seventh-day Adventists, we get asked questions about our faith and we have the opportunity to respond.

And so we've gone through this before where people have rejected various things that we have presented to them.

But I've oftentimes wondered to myself, are we as Adventists exempt from the same way of thinking that this young man had that I met in the cafe at Barnes and Noble's?

We don't reject the reality of Christ's second coming.

But are there places in scripture where we might try to harmonize or reason away, rather, that passage's application in our lives?

When we do that, we are treading on very thin ice.

I would submit to you this morning that as Seventh-day Adventists, we are not exempt from that.

By God's grace, it doesn't happen within the 4 walls of this church.

But I'm not naive enough to think that perhaps it isn't.

God is looking for people who live as Jesus lived by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Do you think it was easy for Jesus to do that?

Do you think it will be easy for us to do that?

Popular theology in the world is going in 1 direction and God's people are going in the other and the devil is constantly trying to pull the Seventh-day Adventist church in the current that the world is trying to go.

We must constantly and daily and moment by moment resist that urge to go along with what the world would have us do.

I wanna share with you a couple of examples of this from the Bible.

Go with me in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis chapter 2, verses 16 and 17, The Lord is speaking here to Adam.

And the Lord commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Are God's commands complicated?

This is the thing I love about God, and it's the thing I love about his word.

If somebody comes to a Bible prophecy seminar without any preconceived notions, and they hear the message on the seventh day Sabbath, they will accept it because it makes sense.

If somebody comes to the Bible prophecy seminar without any preconceived ideas about the state of the dead, they will accept it because it makes sense.

It is clear, it is easy to see from the word of God.

But it's when we add our human reasoning to the word of God that things become complicated and difficult to understand.

And that's exactly what Eve did in the garden.

Genesis chapter 3, verse 2, the Bible says this, and the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the tree of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is, but the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, you shall not surely die.

He always goes directly contrary to the word of God.

God has a seventh day, he has a first day.

Bible says you sleep, he says you go to heaven or hell.

You know, Bible says God's gonna come climatically, he says no, it's gonna be a two-faced coming in, it's gonna be secretly at first.

The devil always has something that counterfeits the Lord and he goes directly contrary.

You shall not surely die, verse 5, for God doth know that in the day you eat thereof, Your eyes shall be opened.

And he says, and you shall be as gods knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw the tree, that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eye, and a tree to be desired to make 1 wise.

She took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat.

Isn't it interesting how the devil tries to make sin look attractive?

If you eat from this fruit, you'll become wise.

God is trying to keep something good away from you.

He does the same thing today with every sin that we struggle with, he has to make it look attractive, like it's going to benefit us in some way.

But we have to remind ourselves that what the devil is telling us is not a truth, but it will only bring pain and suffering as it did to Adam and Eve.

But Notice again what the Bible says there in verse 6.

The Bible says, and when the woman, what?

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The Heart of Adventism

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