Darlye Innocent shares eight inspired principles of health and how a student can incorperate them into his/her routine so that he/she can live fully, thrive academically, and glorify God.

ACF Institute 2017: Never Alone

<p>Darlye Innocent shares eight inspired principles of health and how a student can incorperate them into his/her routine so that he/she can live fully, thrive academically, and glorify God.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF)

Darlye Innocent

Principles of Health for Students

And the Lord said, I have surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.

So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land to land flowing with milk and honey to the place of the Canaanites and Hittites and Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.

He was intimately acquainted with their sorrows.

And he was resolved to take them out of this untold situation and place them in a tov, or good, large land that he talks about in verse 8.

So here we can see that God is really intensely interested in quality of life.

But the problem is we don't believe that.

We read it again and again in scripture, but we don't often see God in that light.

We see him more as restricting our fun, restricting our freedom, and we see serving him as doing time, as serving a lifelong sentence on earth, and then we'll be rewarded when we get to heaven.

And we share the gospel often using language that relays that kind of understanding about God.

So sometimes we convey an understanding of God in the way we reach out to our fellow colleagues and classmates in a way that where we have the sentiment of God is strict, he has principles to follow, rather than sharing with them that experiencing a close relationship with God who desires to gift us real love, deep joy, and immovable peace is really what we're offering through campus ministries.

So let me give you an example of what I mean by that.

Picture with me Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.

He's got these 2 tablets of stone with God's words on them.

Those 2 tablets of stone, if we were to read them out loud, how do they begin?

Now, in some Bibles, you'll have the quotation marks and where the quotation marks begin, that's actually what's on the tablets.

And this is why I'm sharing these words with you.

Because when you start with the you shall not, you're like, 1, who are you?

So was being in the land of Egypt tovah untov?

OK, so everything after God's introduction of himself and what he did for them, he's sharing with them, now this is how you live a tov lifestyle.

They were just slaves, where they have no freedom, they have no wills of their own, they're not able to make decisions, they're really seen as objects and property, not people, and certainly not made in the image of God.

And so he's taking them and he has to re-educate them.

This is what living in a told situation, having told relationships with others and with myself looks like.

Then he explains the do's and the don'ts that are the principles by which we are able to live really enriching lives.

So, I heard this sermon by Ty Gibson where he was explaining some of the ways in which we can really understand the 10 Commandments.

And I'm going to share that with you this morning because I think it's so powerful.

So essentially in verse 2 where he God says I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage and then he goes into the commandment so essentially he's saying so now in the freedom that comes from no longer being slaves, the first commandment is you are free from superstitions and demonic spiritual oppression.

In the Egyptian culture, they have hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of different gods.

And at any given time you're giving you're needing to give a sacrifice to this 1, pay homage to this 1, do whatever to that 1.

Demonic spirits are coming and oppressing you in whatever form or fashion.

Anything bad happens you ascribe it to the spirits so now you have to do something different, so they don't bother you anymore.

And you can imagine that in addition to be physically enslaved, you're mentally enslaved.

And so when God says, you have no other gods before me, I'm all that there is, and here's what I've already done for you, then you are free now to not think of entities or beings that are bigger and more powerful than you as an oppressive force.

And in looking at the second commandment of not making any graven images, God is essentially saying, you know that I'm the template, right?

So if you model anything or anyone that's not me, you will have a false sense of self, and by extension, a false sense of purpose.

So if I am creating an image of stone and I worship that stone, that stone is not able to show me what it's like to be human.

And so I'm gonna be stony in terms of my character, my personality, how I engage with people, because how we live life is a direct manifestation of who we think God to be.

So when you see really miserable Christians and really happy atheists, believe it or not, the atheists have a better idea of who God is, although they don't believe in a God.

But when we're miserable, then that means, wait, so is God miserable?

Like, what's happening with that relationship?

So God is saying, no stones, no carved images, nothing of wood or dirt Or whatever you could come up with because that's not the image you were made in you were made in my image I'm the template.

Let me show you how to do relationships, right?

When we're looking at commandment number 3 God is saying you are now free to experience what's sacred really is.

You can now learn how to interact with the divine in holiness.

Again, their understanding of the divine was everything that they were learning in Egypt.

And all of it had to do with it was a works-based kind of relationship with divine entities, if you will.

They had tons of priests, et cetera, raised temples.

And they're giving sacrifices to things and beings that really are not serving them well.

So God is saying, no, no, no, let me show you what the sacred really is.

And having a relationship with the holy, again, is just uplifting our understanding of God, which by extension, uplifts our understanding of ourselves.

So in commandment 4, you're free to take a day off.

To a slave, that's a big deal, because they just go and go and go.

And when they die, their masters are just excited that they have other children to replace them, because they're not beings.

So when God says, I'm giving you a day off, and if we really look at the Sabbath commandment, God is saying not just you, because in Egypt their masters would take days off, but then have people working for them.

God is saying not just you, but the people that work for you, even your cattle gets a day off.

Again, God is intensely interested in quality of life and that extends past the person in power down to the people with less power and even to the animals that God has created.

And let's do number 5 and then I will continue.

Just to give you an idea of looking at the untold situation they were in and how God is bringing them to a total situation now in Canaan.

So in commandment 5 when he says to honor mother and father, in a society where, again, you're just property, you can't value old age.

Because old age means you're not useful in society anymore.

And therefore, you didn't have much value to begin with.

So here, God is reinstating what it's like to love people not based on what they can do, but purely on who they are and our identities in Christ, not in what we produce, including grades.

And so in our society where we value just youth and strength and not our elderly and the wisdom that they have, God is saying, no, I want you to particularly honor your parents.

And that's the first commandment with promise.

So God is really trying to get them to understand.

Although you're getting older, that doesn't mean you're less in value or worth in my sight.

And I want your community to relay that through their relationship with you.

So I encourage you on your own or with friends to go through the last 5 commandments, looking at it from what is the situation Israel was in before and the quality of life that God is trying to give them afterwards and understand the commandments through that angle.

So what's beautiful is God is engaging with us throughout scripture where he is saying you're in an untold situation.

I want to give you a situation that's good, that's beautiful, and that's working in the way it's supposed to.

So again and again Israel gets in trouble and God's like, that's not what I want for you.

I want you in a place that's good, that's beautiful, and that's working in the way that it's supposed to.

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Principles of Health for Students

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