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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Homer Trecartin

Jesus Didn’t Die for Me

She was a Kurdish refugee from Syria, trying to survive in a nearby country.

I won't give her name, and this is not her picture, because I don't want to cause her or her family or the work any problems there.

I don't know much about her experience, what she had gone through in leaving Syria and the troubles that she had seen there.

But I do know that when she had arrived in the country nearby, that she was determined that her children were going to go to a little school that we had started for Syrian refugee children.

Every day She showed up on the steps of that little school and begged the director to let her send her children to that school.

They had packed every corner with kids, and these are kids that hadn't been able to go to school, many of them for a couple of years.

They had seen horrors in the last few years of war, and there just wasn't room.

They wanted to help more, but there wasn't room.

But then, yeah, and Adrian is sitting over here, the other Adrian is sitting over here smiling because he knows a little about that school.

You can ask him later how he knows about it.

He didn't go to it, but someone else that he loves very much did work at that school.

Adrian, that school has so many needs and opportunities, but so little space to work with.

And finally, after months of begging daily to be able to send her kids there, The director found some room and made room for these little kids and the mother was thrilled.

Well, soon she heard that there were some Bible study groups meeting among the Syrian refugees in the evening.

The staff of the school had been visiting the families regularly, just making friends, but those friendships had developed into some Bible studies that had been going on, some of them for months.

These were people that were already in love with Jesus and in love with the Bible at that point.

But they would keep bringing in new friends as well and so it was a constant change in the mix.

And This lady somehow learned that those studies were going on, and she showed up at 1 of those studies 1 evening.

Now that night, the topic was the crucifixion of Jesus.

That is not the topic that we would usually choose, Jim, to talk with a Muslim about the first time.

Okay, they've been taught all their lives that they just accepted as true.

They didn't know anybody questioned it really, but they've been taught that Jesus didn't die on the cross.

God worked a miracle and took Jesus off the cross and took him to heaven and put somebody else on the cross in his place.

So if you're studying the very first conversation you have with them, you're studying about the crucifixion of Jesus.

You're just gonna have an argument It's not what we would normally choose to start with but she was there and everybody kind of glanced at each other I imagine I wasn't there but I imagine they glanced at each other and are thinking What should we do And they finally decided to go ahead with the study.

At the end of the study, this lady had heard things that she had never heard before.

And she sat there in stunned silence at the end of the Bible study, tears starting to trickle down her cheeks, and finally she choked out the words, then there's hope for me.

We think we have to have all this certain training and all this experience and it's good, it's wonderful, we should get all the training we can get.

But God sometimes upends our plans and our way of doing things.

He knew that study that night was what that Syrian mother needed.

In our text that we've been looking at today, we talked about reconciling the world to himself, all of it, every person, no group left behind, no group that's beyond his reach.

A few minutes ago we talked about how we are Christ's ambassadors and have been sent to dwell among them in the same way that Jesus came and dwelt among us.

And now I want to look at the last verse.

And this time I'm going to read it from the New King James version.

I think I'll back up a little bit to verse 19 and read the whole section again.

That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us, we implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God, for he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him." that's a message that we talk about theoretically sometimes, but I hope this afternoon it will come alive in our hearts as we think about Jesus becoming sin for us.

The hope that that Syrian woman finally realized she had, and maybe we'll talk a little more about why she realized she had that hope.

But I want to start with another story about a, this is not his picture, but it's a wild, young, Turkish Muslim that I know very well, who a number of years ago, he's not so young anymore, but a number of years ago, He was wild, he was young, he was working in a bar.

Muslims don't normally work in bars, but he was working in a bar.

He said Christians would come into his bar, often wearing a big crucifix, and dancing and flirting and carousing with the girls and drinking and everything like everybody else.

They act like they're religious in 1 part of their life, and in other parts, they're just like everybody else.

But 1 day a German tourist came into his hotel and this guy was, he was different.

He didn't drink, he didn't carouse, he didn't dance in the bar, he was always friendly with everybody, he was never hung over and grumpy in the morning.

This young man had never seen anybody like him before.

I think Jim and Joyce know who it is, but after his, I would probably share with you who it was and more of the things except this is being recorded and put on audio verse and I'm just not wanting to share some of those details for everybody else.

But after this German tourist had been there for 2 weeks, he left and went back home.

And that was Part of the way that job went for this young, wild Turkish Muslim, he said people would come into his hotel, be there a few days, and gone, and he'd never see them again.

But the next year, the guy showed up again for his two-week vacation.

The young man started making conversation with him.

He couldn't understand why he was so different from everybody else.

The third year, the man came again, and by then, the young Muslim and the German tourist were having Bible studies together and talking quite a lot and writing in between when the German tourists would go back home.

I asked this young man a few years ago when I first met him, again not so young today, but back then he had been young.

I said to him, what was it that made the difference?

Why did you leave being a non-practicing Muslim and become a faithful Seventh-day Adventist?

He said, well, first of all, no question, it was that man's friendship.

He said, I never would have had any interest whatsoever, except that I watched him for 3 years and got to be his friend.

But then tears started coming down his eyes as he was talking to me and he said, all my life, I thought I had to balance the scales.

I had been taught as a Muslim, he had been taught that he had to do enough good deeds to offset his bad deeds, and then he might have hope of salvation.

That's why some terrorist organizations will recruit people, saying, oh, you can get really a lot of credit if you'll go and do this for us.

And that credit can offset your bad deeds and then you might have hope of salvation.

I couldn't do enough good deeds to offset my bad deeds.

And so I finally just gave up and said, phooey with this, I'm not having anything to do with God or religion or anything anymore.

I'm just gonna live and do whatever I want to do.

He said, but 1 day as we were talking, and I'd already developed a friendship with that man.

He said, 1 day that man said to me, you don't have to balance the scales.

God doesn't ask you to balance the scales.

And he said it was life transforming to him to think of that concept.

You mean God sent Jesus to balance the scales for me?

All those things that I didn't want to do before, I do them now not to earn God's love, not to balance the scales, but because I love him because he balanced the scales for me.

I do those things now because he balanced the scales.

You know, years later, I asked that not so young man anymore how his family felt about it and he said, well, at first they were very upset I had become a heathen Christian, but now my mother says, Adventist didn't take my son away from me, they gave him back to me.

He used to hate God and live a wild life, but now he loves God and is faithful to his family.

Well, someday I hope she will learn, his mother, that Jesus came to balance the scales.

But to me, that's a powerful illustration of what we believe.

But much of the world around us doesn't know that.

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Jesus Didn’t Die for Me

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