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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Adam Ramdin: The Reformation’s Revolutionary Impact

Adam Ramdin

Prophetic Prediction of Change

Father in heaven, Lord, we pause to thank you for your goodness to us.

We thank you, Lord, for the privilege we have to worship in this place tonight.

I pray, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would be here in our midst.

May you speak through your word and illuminate our minds, we pray, in Jesus' name.

I'd like to invite you to open your Bibles to the book of Revelation.

In fact, no, before you go to Revelation, please go to 2 Peter.

2 Peter, just before Revelation, 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 19.

It's a familiar text to many of us, 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 19.

2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 19, the Bible says, We have also a more what?

A more sure word of prophecy, whereunto you do well to take heed, ask unto a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the day start arise in your heart.

This is a kind of a fundamental foundational text for Adventist Bible students when we're looking at Bible prophecy.

It assures us that we have a sure word of prophecy.

Now in Revelation, turn over a few pages to the book of Revelation, Revelation chapter 2 and chapter 3, they are the 2 chapters that deal with the 7 churches, Revelation 2 and Revelation 3.

Now in Revelation, the 7 churches of Revelation, there are 7 churches there, which were 7 literal cities in John's day.

On the screen there, you can see number 1 through to number 7.

It's almost like an upside down horseshoe shape of the 7 churches.

And Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos and so on, they go in that order.

Now John wrote the book of Revelation as chapter 1 points out and he wrote the book of Revelation as a letter to the 7 churches.

Now when you read, when we read the book of Revelation today, there's a couple of ways that we can read it.

Number 1, we can read the book of Revelation as a literal book, obviously that was written in that first century to the people that he was writing the book of Revelation to, those 7 churches.

The second way we can read Revelation and the way most often as Adventists we read it is the symbolic representation of the churches through time.

Where we look at the first century representing kind of Ephesus and so on.

We look at the characteristics of the churches and we see the experience of God's church through different pockets of history and we've kind of matched the 2 together.

The third way that we can read the book of Revelation, which is important for us to do as well, is personally, applying the personal spiritual lessons of 1 particular church to our experience And our experience with Christ may change from day to day and the admonition he gives from church to church over time.

Now when you look at each of the messages, they're structured a certain way.

We're not going to go through this in detail.

I'm just kind of doing this as a background framework.

There's always a promise, affirmation, review, counsel, and warning.

However, not every church gets every aspect of those messages.

Some of the churches get some, some of them don't, most of them get all of these 6 things to them.

So, when we look at a timeline, the church of Ephesus starts around about the year 31 AD.

And then it goes to, roughly, most Bible scholars will put it to the year 100 AD, the apostolic time period of the first century.

And the characteristics of the church in Ephesus are these.

Verse 2 of chapter 2 in Revelation, it says, Thou hast tried them which say they are apostles and are not.

A characteristic of the first century church was that they were strong in doctrine.

They were concerned about the purity of doctrine.

This church, the Ephesus church, was a pretty good church.

Verse 3, it says, you have born and have patience and for mine's namesake have laboured, have not fainted.

They were busy doing things for the sake of Christ.

But then you come to verse 4 and verse 4 says, nevertheless I have somewhat against you because you've lest your what?

Doctrinally pure, hardworking, but they have forgotten in a sense the reason why they're doing what they are doing.

When you read the book of Ephesians you can find many parallels between Ephesians and the message to Ephesus.

So Smyrna comes after that and Smyrna is roughly the year 100 to around about 331 A.D.

Now you've heard the Satan sees the early church, they're doctrinally pure, they're hardworking, they're doing well, so he wants to attack them.

His first mode of attack was to attack them front on, head on, to try and destroy the church.

The church in Smyrna doesn't receive any rebuke.

No rebuke to the Smyrna church, and they're persecuted.

There's no rebuke, and they're promised the crown of life.

It's during the time period of Smyrna that the church goes through some of its hardest times in the 100s, in the 200s, pagan Rome persecuting the Christians.

It wasn't an easy time to be a Christian.

It wasn't a popular time to be a Christian.

The Colosseums and different places in Europe, they stand as monuments of the persecution of the Christian during these time periods of history.

You've heard the phrase, if you can't beat them, then you're what?

You know, there's quotations in great controversy where they're quoted from other places where it says, the blood of Christians was seed to the gospel.

The more often we are mown down, the more we spring up.

So he tried to kill the Christian church, but killing the Christian church didn't work.

So he says, okay, I can't kill the Christian church off, instead I will join them.

And you see the same strategy today in broader principles.

So Pergamos, what happens in Pergamos, 31 AD?

A key figure at the beginning of this time period was a man by the name of Constantine.

If you've never studied him or haven't heard about him, he was a key figure that did a lot of damage in the name of Christianity.

He blends the pagan and the Christian sides of his empire together.

These guys are the Christians, these guys are the pagans.

He tells the Christians he's now a Christian, he tells the pagan, hey, I'm now a Christian, but let's keep doing basically what we've always been doing and we'll just change the name for what we're doing.

Very simplistic way of looking at history, but that kind of understands what happened.

That's where many practices crept into Christianity that had no place in Christianity.

Jupiter, Easter, Ishtar, all these types of things start creeping into Christianity that had no basis in Christianity and Christianity starts to get watered down.

Rome shifts from being pagan to Christian.

Constantine believes he saw a cross in the sky and by this sign you shall conquer.

This is also this time period when Saturday becomes Sunday.

So this was a time period of strong compromise in the Christian Church.

The Anatomy of Change

I'd like to invite you to bow your heads for a word of prayer as we begin our message today.

Father in heaven, we pause to thank you for the privilege we have to worship together as believers on this Sabbath day.

We pray, Lord, that you impress our hearts with where we are in our walk with you and where we need to be.

Speak through me, I pray in Christ's name.

The message for today is entitled, The Anatomy of Change.

As I mentioned earlier in the Something Is Happening time, we are here in America at the moment doing some filming for what will be season 2 of Lineage.

We went to Philadelphia for the Liberty Bell.

And from there, we went around different places in New England to Washington, New Hampshire, William Miller's Farm, and up to Ellen White's birthplace.

We went as well to 1 small little town, very picturesque, in about an hour and a half north of the city of Portland.

Before I go into that in more detail, though, you're all familiar with this magazine that you will see here on the screen, the Adventist Review, the flagship journal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the official journal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church that's printed and published and goes worldwide.

It's something that we see regularly in churches up and down this country, around the world.

It's a familiar site for many of us, the words Adventist Review, and its legacy goes back over a hundred years.

It goes back over a hundred years to the town of Paris Hill, Maine.

Paris Hill, Maine, there was 3 Adventist, oh it's not 3, not Adventist, there was 3 families.

The tract came, this is the home today you can go, this is the home of Cyprian Stevens.

Cyprian Stevens, though, I mean, that's pretty impressive when your daughter's married such significant men.

So he's a significant character there in Paris Hill, Maine.

You can go there and play golf if you should so desire.

Or you can go there and take a photo and remember that this was where J.N.

The other family, though, of note in the town of Paris Hill was the Stowell family, and the Stowell family received a tract in the post.

The tract in the post that they received was on the Sabbath.

Now we'll come back to the story more a little bit later.

This is the site here, just across the road from J.N.

Andrews' home, of where the Adventist Review began.

Today, it's probably somewhere on this grass here where there was a building where they published the first ever copy of what was then called the Adventist Review and Sabbath Herald.

From such small beginnings all the way up in northerly Maine to now being this huge journal that circles the world.

God has blessed his church and his people.

Now, this morning our message is entitled The Anatomy of Change.

What are some of the aspects as to what change looks like?

See, sometimes growing up in church or sometimes being a young person, we have these ideas that we wanna do something great.

Now what does that look like and what does that feel like if we wanna be an agent of change or we wanna change where we are, where we study, or where we do.

Well, it's important for us, I believe, today to cast our minds back into the past, see where we have come from, and see some lessons that we can learn from these men and women who have gone before us.

What was their experience and circumstances of their lives like?

To see what lessons we can learn for us today.

The first point, and I mentioned it briefly last night, but The first point, when we look at the Reformation, and even Adventist history as well, is that none of these men or women thought or planned their life that they wanted to be a great reformer.

They never set out to be an agent of change.

The first principle is the principle of faithfulness.

Martin Luther did not wake up and want to, you know, take on the church.

Martin Luther's primary motive was to be faithful.

See sometimes we get this the other way around and we just want to change.

We just want to change and we haven't first accepted it in our life the principle that we need to be faithful to duty, faithful to God's word, faithful to him in our relationship and every aspect of it.

That's the first and most important thing.

Today, you can go to John Wycliffe's church, as I mentioned yesterday, it still stands.

It's quite an impressive place to go there and think that this is where the Bible was translated into the English language for the first time, for the first time.

But Ellen White says about John Wycliffe on Great Controversy, page 81, she says, "'Like after reformers, Wycliffe did not, "'at the opening of his work, foresee what?' "'Where it would lead him.' "'He had no idea.

"'He did not set himself deliberately "'in opposition to Rome.'" You see this theme come over and over again with the reformers.

They never said, I wanna be in opposition to Rome.

But devotion to truth could not but bring him in conflict with falsehood.

The more clearly he discerned the errors of the papacy, the more earnestly he presented the what?

He said I just want to present what's in God's Word.

If that brings me in conflict with where I am, let me be faithful to God's Word.

In our lives today as well, as Adventists, wherever we may be, whether it's in the context of your workplace, whether it's in the context of whatever campus or university or school you may attend, let us make God's Word first in our life.

That that is the principle that we live by, that we earnestly follow God's word.

If that brings us in conflict with other people or entities, then so be it.

But it's not our purpose to be in conflict.

Our purpose is to be faithful to God's word.

He didn't set himself to be in conflict with the church that he was kind of part of, it just kind of happened.

Martin Luther as well, as I mentioned yesterday, going up the pilot staircase, these ones here, as he was making his way up pilot staircase, he heard the verse in his mind, "'The just shall live by faith.'" And hearing that word of God in his mind is what caused him to kind of change his life and change where he was going.

He went back to Wittenberg and as he was there as a professor in Wittenberg, He wrote a document that he never knew the impact it would have.

The document was called the 95, has been known as the 95 Theses.

He wrote out these doctrinal statements and he nailed them to this door.

The door would have been wooden and would have stood right there.

Today the door is brass and they've engraved the 95 theses in the door, which is quite impressive.

But the door, obviously, the old door 500 years ago is not there, now you have This pretty cool landmark of history.

Ellen White says in Great Controversy, page 143, she says, it was not without a terrible struggle with himself that Luther decided upon a what?

Swaying the Future

Father in heaven, Lord, we pause to thank you for your goodness.

We thank you, Lord, for this Sabbath day and that we can just worship together in freedom, in peace, in safety, and in comfort.

Bless us, Lord, as we meditate upon spiritual themes.

We pray, Lord, that you would illuminate our minds, that you would speak through me and speak through your word.

In the Seventh-day Adventist hymnal, 1 of my favorite hymns, if not my favorite hymn, not so much necessarily for the tune, but for the words.

You know, sometimes there's certain hymns where the words just speak to you and they're just profound.

And the song that I like the most, I would say, is hymn number 606.

We sung it this morning, I believe during the song service before the message this morning at 10 o'clock.

And I love the words of that song, very, very profound.

It was actually written in 1812, part of the 1812 war, I believe, with America and Britain, and the words go like this.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide in the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side.

Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, and the choice goes by forever, tweaks the darkness and the light." Very deep and meaningful words.

The second verse reads, Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust.

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and tis prosperous to be just, then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Then going on it says in verse 3, by the light of burning martyrs Christ, the Iphedic, sorry, Christ by bleeding feet we track, toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.

They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth?" And the fourth verse is my favorite.

As I believe often is, you know, in the hymns it kind of culminates in the fourth verse or the final verse.

And the fourth verse reads, though the cause of evil prosper, yet his truth alone is strong.'" Does that not ring to our day today?

Though the portion of truth is the scaffold.

And as the songwriter is writing that imagery of the scaffold, what's he meaning when he's saying the scaffold?

Not the scaffold that we put on the buildings as we're building new buildings today, that scaffold, the imagery, that word he's using there in that context, the scaffold there would be the scaffold that people would be hung on or the apparatus that people would be executed on in the past.

Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold, he says, sways the what?

He's saying that scaffold, or where the burning martyrs, where they lived or where they died, that scaffold, it sways the future.

Like we live today and the freedoms we have is because those who died or gave their life on the scaffold of the past.

Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows keeping watch over his own.

You know, sometimes we feel like we're going through that valley of that shadow of death or we feel like we're going through that scaffold experience.

We feel like we're going through this experience and we cannot see where God is.

The song says, yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown stands God within the shadows.

There are times in our life where God is standing there very vividly, very present, almost like he's face to face with us.

And yet there's other times when God is standing in the shadows.

And it's at those times when he's standing in the shadows when We need to be encouraged and remember the times when he stood face to face.

Both times he's there close, but it's not always that we can see him.

When we think back to the lives of many of these reformers, there were times in their lives when they knew They were working on a divine mission.

And there were other times when it would have felt like they were standing, and where's God?

He's in the shadows, but he's still keeping watch over his own.

But the story of the reformers is not all a rose-petaled story, where they set about to be heroes.

They get a chapter named after them in books.

We remember them well, but I'm sure when they were actually living their life, they did not feel that they were so heroic.

I mentioned this morning, and you may have watched the video in like the Mayflower.

When those people were coming across on the Mayflower, they weren't thinking, yeah, we're charting freedom, we're charting liberty, we're charting justice, we're going to lay the foundation to a great...

It didn't feel heroic at the time what they were doing.

They were just sailing on a ship and had barely enough food to eat and who knows what else.

It didn't feel heroic at the time, what they were doing.

Because the legacy of their life was 1 that wanted to be Remembered and is told over and over again.

I shared this quotation the other night if I have seen further than us It's by standing on the shoulders of Giants It's well for us in a sense to stand on the shoulders of Giants to glance back that we can glance forward Isaac Newton said these words that there is reportedly 1 of the trees that he saw the apple drop from.

However, there are apparently 5 trees in England all claiming to be the tree of Isaac Newton.

So we're not really sure which tree it was.

However, this tree gets at least 20% of the credit.

I want to take your minds back to a village called North Nibali.

If you go on a Reformation tour of Europe, most people on a Reformation tour of Europe don't actually make it to England, which I think is a crying shame.

Like, we had some of the best reformers, but they just stay on continental Europe because it's easier to take 1 bus and go home.

However, if you do go to Europe, make your way to England, because there's some great reformers there, John Wycliffe, and there's another 1 who gets even less press.

I mentioned him this morning, and it goes to this village here of North Lindby.

And On the hill, if you're familiar with English geography, this is what they called the Bristol Channel, that strip of water there.

Beyond that strip is Wales, and there's a huge monument here.

It stands there, it overlooks the motorway if you're driving down south on the M5, the M motorway, and there this monument stands.

The reason why it's erected was because of who was born in the village.

And the man who was born in the village around about the year 14, I think it's 1494, The man's name was William Tyndale.

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Adam Ramdin: The Reformation’s Revolutionary Impact

Prophetic Prediction of Change

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