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Cedar Lake SDA Church

The Everlasting Gospel

Mark Howard

1. The Goodness of God

2. Another Gospel

3. The Lord Our Righteousness

4. Preparing the King’s Highway

5. Righteousness by Faith

6. And They Don’t Take American Express

7. Looking Unto Jesus

We are in a series on the everlasting gospel.

You may remember in the first part, we talked about the goodness of God.

You know, Seventh-day Adventists, we believe that we have a commission in Revelation chapter 14, and in that commission, starting with chapter 14, verse 6, it says, "'I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on the earth, right?

To every nation, kindred, tribe, and people, or tribe, and depending on what translation you're reading.

And the first thing that it says in that message is, fear God and give him glory.

In part 1 we talked about the glory of God representing the goodness of the character of God.

And how an essential part of the gospel message is understanding God's goodness.

And what we covered in there was that God has a love that we would call unconditional, that he doesn't love us because of what we do and how we perform, but because of who he is.

We learned that the wrath of God is not upon people or against people, but against sin.

That God has to destroy sin in order to save sinners.

And that he will do that and so right now what he's trying to do is separate his people from sin so that when that sin is destroyed the people aren't.

And so we learn that and then we learn that God's forgiveness is not like man's forgiveness.

When we get in a situation where we're asking forgiveness from another human being, oftentimes, in most cases anyway, what we're asking is that that person would stop being angry with us.

And I mentioned in part 1 that we tend to look at God that way sometimes and we think that asking God forgiveness is asking Him to stop being angry with us, but that's not forgiveness in the Bible.

Bible forgiveness isn't asking to change God, but it's asking God to change us, literally to give for our sin.

God gives the righteousness of His Son for our sin.

With all those elements of the goodness of God and that powerful core of the gospel, I mentioned at the close of that message that while that is an important truth, it's not all there is to the gospel because there are going to be people who are lost who God loved unconditionally.

There are going to be people who are lost who God did not have an attitude towards, who God was not intending to pour out His wrath upon.

Knowing the goodness of God in and of itself is not all there is to the good news.

Now today the message is called Another Gospel and before we get into it I want to kneel and ask God to bless our time in His Word.

So I invite you to bow your heads as I do so today.

Father in heaven, Father, we thank you so much for the privilege of being in your presence today.

We thank you so much for your unconditional love.

We thank you so much for the power of your forgiveness.

We thank you, Father, that you have not appointed us to wrath, but to receive salvation.

Now this morning I pray that your Holy Spirit would open our understanding.

As your people here at the end of time with an important message to proclaim to the world, the everlasting gospel message, I pray you'll give us clarity of understanding.

For Father, we ask and pray it in the name of Jesus and for his sake, amen.

I want to invite you to turn with me to the book of 2 Corinthians 11.

2 Corinthians 11, in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians.

We're going to the 11th chapter, starting in the first verse.

The Apostle Paul says here, Oh that you would bear with me in a little folly, and indeed you do bear with me.

For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy, for I have betrothed you to 1 husband that I may present you as a chaste or pure virgin to Christ.

But I fear, lest somehow as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

Did you know not every Jesus that you hear about is the same guy?

Apostle Paul says there's such thing as somebody preaching another Jesus.

So they might use the name of Jesus, But it might not fit the character of the 1 we read about in Scripture.

For he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different what?

A different gospel which you have not accepted, you may well put up with it." Now, the words here in the New King James may be a little bit confusing.

I'm going to read what the New Century Version says here.

He says, you are very willing to accept a spirit or gospel that is different.

In other words, when he's saying, you may well put up with it, what he's saying is I'm concerned about you, you guys don't have enough discernment to know when somebody comes and preaches a different gospel, you're gonna go along with it and think it's the same thing that we've been preaching.

So he's concerned that they're going to be deceived as the serpent deceived Eve.

Now I'm working on a sermon, I've been thinking about how the serpent deceived Eve.

And basically what he did was got Eve to trust in his word instead of God's word.

Listen carefully, to believe in His words instead of God's words.

So I'm working on a sermon called Unrighteousness by Faith.

You know what righteousness by faith is, but it's interesting that it was her belief in the serpent that led to unrighteousness.

So you're going to obey whoever you believe.

Whether, what does Paul say, we serve, we're servants of the 1 we obey, whether of sin leading to death or obedience leading to righteousness.

So he's concerned here that they may follow Another gospel.

And the reality is, just like the name of Jesus, you can use the word gospel and throw it around and we can all talk about the gospel and you can talk to your other Christian friends about the gospel.

We can all be saying gospel, gospel, gospel and talking about entirely different things.

Today, I want to talk about the gospel and I'm going to give a little Adventist history lesson.

Some of you maybe do and some of you maybe don't.

We have a Seventh-day Adventist, and there have been a lot of discussions and debates about the gospel.

I certainly don't want to get into all of that.

But there are some points that I think are important for us to understand getting into our topic today.

And I want to go back to an era in the 1950s when certain Adventist leaders met with certain evangelical leaders to try to remove the stigma that was on Adventism because, let's face it, our belief system is not what the Orthodox Christian belief system is.

And of course, 2 of the individuals that were met with was a man by the name of Donald Barnhouse.

Now, Barnhouse was the editor of the leading Christian, Evangelical Christian magazine.

Now when I use that word, evangelical, I just want to touch on the idea here.

If you look up the word in the dictionary, evangelical just means you believe that we ought to share the gospel.

But evangelical in this term is a word that these leaders used of themselves to describe the basic framework or belief system of the fundamental Bible-believing Christian.

So Donald Barnhouse was the editor of Eternity Magazine, a leading evangelical magazine, and then there was a man by the name of Walter Martin, and Walter Martin was the author of a book called The Kingdom of the Cults.

And in his first version, he had included Seventh-day Adventists in that book.

Now I want you to put yourself in that place, and these men, and I'm not giving you all the background of how this came together, but they want to meet with you as Seventh-day Adventists and say, hey, could we ask you some questions about your faith?

And depending on how our conversation goes, we're gonna decide where to put you in this new edition of Kingdom of the Cults.

Well, who wants your church to be called a cult, right?

So let's go ahead and meet together and they figured we'll meet and diffuse The concerns of these evangelical leaders.

Now here's the problem that I think in retrospect we understand more clearly.

You can't place Adventism in an evangelical framework.

Well, let's give 1 very glaring obvious reason.

They don't believe the law is binding upon the Christian and we do.

You think that changes your belief system a little bit?

Furthermore, the men that we met with were Calvinists.

God already determined who's saved and lost.

You don't have a personal choice in the matter.

How are you going to fit how we believe into that framework?

They also believed in the doctrine of original sin that says that we're guilty because of what Adam did, not because of what we do.

Seventh-day Adventists don't believe that.

So, you know, there are some complications here.

They believed in 1 saved, always saved, right?

They believed the law wasn't binding upon the Christian.

All of these things, how do you take Adventist belief system and put it in that framework?

Now, we can't fault them for attempting it, and I don't, but I want to tell you that we've got to process through because there's been some aftermath to this.

We've got to process through this a minute.

Back to Menu

Series

The Everlasting Gospel

2. Another Gospel

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

The Power of Grace

54m

Experiencing the Power of God

34m

AMEN 2009 Plenary Sessions

God’s Healing Power

51m

The Power of Grace

41m

Life of the Apostle Paul

No Insignificant Grace - Part 1

37m

The Oil of Grace

41m

Seminars

How Does Righteousness by Faith Work?

1h

Being True to Our Trust

What the Law Could Not Do

50m

The Travesty of Cheap Grace

41m

The Closet and the Prophet: Coming Out and Coming Home

51m

Sound Doctrine