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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

Purpose and Calling In Life

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would be with us, that as we share that you would guide, that Jesus would be uplifted, that you would convict us to a higher calling.

I'm going to begin by sharing with you a man who believed he had a calling in life.

This man has been called 1 of the most underrated people in American history.

He was friends with Benjamin Franklin He was a what they call a lexicographer He made dictionaries Guess what his last name was Noah Webster, right?

Noah Webster And I'm gonna read to you a little bit about him from a website specifically devoted to him.

Webster's Dictionary 1828.com and you can you can download it like if you have the you know iPhone you can you can download I mean, I'm sure you can find it too on the Android I you just have to figure that out yourself because I don't know what it is.

But But pocket sword, there's a there's a Bible app.

It's free I'm not trying to sell something on Sabbath here, but it's free free app with a bunch of different Bibles But also you can download the 1828 dictionary of Noah Webster the original 1, but note it's interesting this man He's been called the father of American scholarship and education in his lifetime He was a lawyer school schoolmaster author newspaper editor and outspoken politician He was learned and devout and his ideas about language in his long introductory to his dictionary make for some interesting reading.

The front piece gives us a wonderful portrait of Webster.

He presented as a man with a strong will and determination, this is on the website, qualities he would have to need to push his great project to a conclusion.

So what he set out to do was actually unify the American language, not the English language because the Brits have the British English.

And he's the 1 who changed some of the spelling that we have, like the word center, instead of R-E, it's now E-R.

He's the man who actually kind of brought the English language together as we have it today in the American English.

And It's interesting because to set out to actually make this dictionary, it's not like today where you have a bunch of dictionaries, you can just look at them and notice the words they've used, and then make up definitions.

He was building upon basically his own ideas.

So to make this dictionary, it took him 28 years.

And in order to do it, he wanted to understand the derivation, the etymology of the words that he was looking at.

And so you'd have to learn some languages, right?

So he learned 26 languages to make this dictionary because he wanted a Bible, not a Bible, he actually, by the way, he did translate the Bible too because he learned Greek and Hebrew, by the way, but He wanted a dictionary that its foundation was actually the Bible.

And he wanted this to shape the future of America.

And when you read it, what's so powerful is that within this dictionary, it will literally give a definition which is kind of from a worldview of the Bible, and then it will also give you biblical texts in which the word is used.

And 1 of the things that even on the website, they said, 1 of the fascinating things, because it's 1 of the only dictionaries ever to be made that uses the Bible as the example of the text.

You know how normally you'll have a dictionary and it will give you the definition and then it will give you some sentence, right, to try to give you an idea of the usage of it.

And so he does that by giving Bible verses.

I believe it's the greatest dictionary in the English language.

And so this man went through all the work to do this.

Noel Webster was a Christian and famously said, education is useless without the Bible.

His dictionary contains 70, 000 words over 6, 000 Bible references and remains 1 of the only mainstream dictionaries to use the Bible references to demonstrate the meaning of the words.

His dictionary is an essential tool for anyone studying the Bible.

This is a quotation from the website talking about it.

Christian readers will find it rewarding to compare his definitions to such words as marriage.

Go look what he says about marriage, go see what it says today, right?

With those given in any modern dictionary.

There is no doubt you'll be surprised with the great differences and may come away with a renewed respect for American, the language we speak, right?

And so, Noah Webster, thinking about this man, He believed he had a calling and his his writing has been influencing lives from his day And it's still influencing my life today His definitions are very powerful and we're talking see he believed he believed he had a purpose So he set out with all that he had.

I mean, learning 26 languages, translating the Bible so that we would have a Bible that he thought would maybe fit better with the modern times or what have you.

And it's interesting, So he believed he had a purpose and he set out to accomplish it But I want you to notice his definition of the word purpose he said purpose is that which a person a person sets before himself as an object to be reached or accomplished.

The end or aim to which the view is directed in any plan, measure, or exertion.

He says, we believe the Supreme Being created intelligent beings for some benevolent and glorious purpose.

And if so, how glorious and benevolent must be His purpose in the plan of redemption.

I mean, he's looking at it with this massive worldview of the Bible.

But then he goes on to quote different verses.

He goes on to quote specifically from Ephesians chapter 1, where it says, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things that are after the counsel of his own will.

So he gives us this picture that God predestinated us.

Now, I'll tell you I was raised a Calvinist What does that mean?

Now, I'm not here to try to give you some, you know ideas from my former life But this is the thing God did predestinate us.

So it says it, but the question is, what does it mean?

Well, I'm not here to talk about what it means because that would be a whole sermon in and of itself.

But God predestinated us, according to Ephesians 1, to be conformed to His will, that He had a purpose in our lives, Ephesians chapter 1 says.

Meaning, God has a purpose, He has a plan for your life, but the interesting thing about God is that He does not force His plan and will on your life Meaning he foreordained that you would do certain things and then allows you to either follow the conviction that he places upon your heart by the Holy Spirit or to To set it aside He has given us this opportunity to fulfill His will, His plan in our lives, His purpose.

He wants His purpose to be your purpose and my purpose.

And so we're gonna talk a little bit about purpose this morning.

Well, before we do that, I want you to think with me.

The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 7, verse 8, "'Better is the end of a thing "'than the beginning thereof.

"'And the patient in spirit "'is better than the proud in spirit.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

Now, I talk with medical students or people in school here, and I ask them, so how's school going?

I get the same, I said it last night, but somebody just said it to me, because I said, oh, how's it going?

But the text says the end of a thing is better than the beginning.

So meaning that the long distance that when you finally get, we talked about this last night, when you finally get the reward at the end, when you finally get the diploma, it's better than all the trials that it took to get the diploma, right?

Meaning the trials are difficult, But getting to that end, there's a blessing in that, and you have a purpose, you have a goal.

And talking about a young man who had a purpose in scriptures, the Bible says of Daniel in Daniel chapter 1, verse 8, that Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat nor with the wine which he drank.

Therefore, he requested of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself, right?

So Daniel had a purpose in life, and his purpose was to be faithful to God, to do God's will, to walk in God's plans, that knowing that God has a plan for his life and Daniel wanted to unify his life with God's plan and purpose.

And so he was willing to sacrifice whatever it took, whatever it took, meaning Daniel had an opportunity to have a high position, but he was gonna be strange and eat a certain way that might preclude him from a high position in Babylon.

Now we know the end of the story, like no Chad that's not what happened.

His faithfulness actually led him to a higher place, but listen in the context do you think that was, did Daniel think that was what was going to happen?

Do you think he thought, oh man, if I eat a vegan diet, I'm going to become 1 of the leaders in Babylon?

But yet it enhanced his intellect, right?

I mean, that's what it tells us, later on in verse 20 where it tells us, it says, in all manner of wisdom, in all matters of wisdom, that Daniel and his friends were found 10 times better than all the magicians and the astrologers that were in all the realm.

What went on with his eating actually affected his intellect.

We're gonna talk about a scientific study that has now been done replicating something similar to this in a school setting, and it changed the intellect of the students today.

This afternoon, we're gonna talk about the science of the gut-brain connection.

In the context of the first place that I know of on the planet that talks about the gut-brain connection, that's in the Bible, it's enumerated on in the spirit of prophecy, and right now it's cutting-edge science.

But Daniel didn't know all the science behind it, yet it affected him, and his life was changed by it, and he changed the future of the world as a result of being faithful to the purpose that God had for Daniel in his life.

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Purpose and Calling In Life

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