GYC 2009: unASHAMED

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Clifford Goldstein:  Unashamed to be an Adventist

Clifford Goldstein

Called by Name

The Fifth and Final Kingdom

The Resurrection of Jesus

New Look at the Sabbath

Father, I thank you for the opportunity to be here.

I consider it a privilege and I just pray that your spiritual guide and what I say, in the name of Jesus I pray, amen.

You know, I was raised in a Jewish home, but...

Of course, that 1 simple thing I'd forget.

Even though I was raised in a Jewish home, Goldstein, it was really a very secular home and my folks were pretty much very secular, didn't believe in God and we really never talked about it much.

And I was very much raised post-modern, maybe not even knowing the term, and I was basically raised with the idea that there is no absolute truth.

You could have your truth and that was your truth.

And it didn't matter if You looked at them logically and they contradicted each other because there was no sort of Archimedean point.

There was no point that you could stand above and ultimately judge.

And this was the way I was raised, this is the way I was educated, and this is what I strongly, strongly believed.

Now, I don't know what it was from the time I was young, I always had an interest in philosophy and I had an interest in some of these questions and I used to do a fair amount of reading of philosophy and I'll never forget I was about 20 years old, 21 years old and I was sitting in a pizza parlor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

And I was eating a pizza, drinking, let's just say, a non-adventist beverage, and I was reading a philosopher.

And if I can't think of anybody who I think has got it all wrong now, I'd say it was Spinoza.

But I read this guy and he said something that changed my life.

I'm reading him and I'm sitting there and he said, in order to live the most perfect life upon the earth, you need to find out the reason why you're here and live your life accordingly.

Well, for some reason, well now I know the reason, but back then, but anyway, those words went in my mind like a prefrontal lobe lobotomy.

It just took like a shiv and it went right in.

And suddenly all that subjectivism, all that relativism, all that stuff that I had been raised on, in an instant, just got wiped out.

Because it was like, here, I was sitting there at the table.

There was this pizza sitting on the table in front of me.

Now, you could have had 1, 000 different people.

They could have each 1 had their own explanation for how the pizza got there.

Some might have thought the god Marduk created the pizza.

Some might have thought aliens came and dropped it in a flying saucer.

Some could have believed that it evolved out of the ground.

You could have had a thousand different people with a thousand different views, views that they would die for or kill for.

They could have started religions over their belief on how the pizza got there, and maybe every last 1 of those views were wrong.

But it didn't change the fact that there was a pizza on the table.

And somewhere out there in the universe, somewhere out there, there had to be an explanation for the origin and purpose of the pizza.

And that explanation of whatever it was, wherever it was, that was the truth about the pizza.

And at that moment, I mean, I can't still, I never forget, I was 21 years old, I'll never forget, at that moment, it just suddenly hit me.

I stepped back from the pizza, and I just looked around, and I thought, oh, here I am.

And in this, and that moment it hit me, just as there had to be a truth about the pizza, somewhere out there, there had to be the truth, the truth that explained the existence of the world, the existence of the universe, that just explained everything.

And whatever that was, that was the truth with a capital T.

And I can't tell you what an earth-shattering...

Anybody would have looked and just would have seen some kids sitting there.

You know, they had what was an earth-shattering moment for me.

And you could have thought, oh, what's the big deal?

You know, Mickey Mouse could have told you that.

But had you not been raised the way I was raised, you couldn't understand what a life-changing moment that was for me.

And I'll never forget, it was 19, oh it was the mid-1970s.

I was, I said I was 21 years old and I'll never forget it was at night and I was walking through the streets of Gainesville, Florida.

And I'm walking through the streets, and I'm realizing that truth had to exist.

And I'll never forget, I just felt this burning.

This was almost painful because I thought, if it were possible, because the fact that I realized that truth had to exist didn't automatically mean you couldn't deductively pull from that, that I would ever know what that truth was.

I mean, 1 didn't automatically flow into the other.

But at that moment, I suddenly realized that's because I knew truth had to exist.

I thought to myself, if it were humanly possible, if it were humanly possible, because it was almost, I can't describe it, it just felt like, I just felt like I had, I thought, if it were humanly possible for me to know what this truth was, I thought to myself, I wanted to know it.

I didn't care where it led me, what it cost me, what I had to suffer, what I had to give up.

I thought if I could know it, I wanted to know it no matter what.

I mean, I can still remember, it was almost painful, this burning inside me.

Well, all I know is about 3 years later, and I've gone into getting into all sorts of different things, you know, gains, and I went through my Marxist phase, and I went through this and that, and of all the different ways I could have gone, About 3 years later, I ended up becoming a seventh-day Adventist.

Now, that's remarkable for a lot of reasons, because, first of all, growing up in my life, well, first of all, I only knew 1 seventh-day Adventist my whole life.

I only knew 1 Adventist, and we used to smoke pot together.

I probably won't have time, but you know, it takes, you gotta go about 30 years later to get a happy ending for that, but that story does have a happy ending.

But plus 2, in my life, there were 2 kinds of people I used to hate.

I used to hate Christians, and I'm serious, I used to hate vegetarians.

I mean, I was so carnivorous, I was so into eating meat that, you know, I'd meet vegetarians, it was all I could do to keep myself from spitting in their veggies.

But anyway, now my animosity though towards Christianity was a little deeper seeded though.

Because even though I wasn't raised a religious Jew, I was raised a Jew.

For most Jews, secular Jews, that's their religion, the Holocaust.

And I was just so bitter over all the persecution done to the Jews in the name of Christ.

You go through the centuries of crusaders rolled into Jerusalem, dragged all the Jews, put them in a synagogue, burned the synagogue to the ground where the Jews are inside alive, why these Christians sang hymns to Jesus, you know, and the Holocaust happened in all these Christian countries, people that went to church, you know, and then with all this, and I was so hostile against Christianity.

There used to be this hellfire and brimstone preacher named Jed Smock.

And my kids heard me tell this story for years.

And then 1 day, I got on YouTube and showed him Jed Smock and the kids, students harassing him.

But anyway, this preacher used to come out on the campus and he'd stand out there with a Bible in his hand and he'd just start preaching hellfire and brimstone.

Well, I would, used to get in the center of the circle.

I mean, I could have gotten arrested for what I did to this guy.

And I mean, he used to, if he damned my soul to hell once, he damned my soul to hell a thousand times.

He used to put his hands on me and speak in tongues, try to cast demons out of me.

And I'd start drooling and writhing on the ground.

Eventually my friends nicknamed me Heckle.

Because I said, what are you doing out there harassing that guy?

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Series

Clifford Goldstein: Unashamed to be an Adventist

Called by Name

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Clifford Goldstein Weekend

Called by Name

1h 6m

Called By Name

1h 11m

An Intelligent Faith: An Adventist Apologist's Adventure

Called by Name

1h

OYC 2010 Morning Devotion

Hope for the Hopeless

55m

Faith and Healing

59m

How to Read The Bible

2. Case Study #1 - Why Did God Kill His Own Prophet?

1h 10m

The Alpha and the Omega

1h 11m

The 4th Angel: Literature Evangelism Made Relevant In A Postmodern World

3. Angels & Demons: Supernatural Beings, Literature, and the Struggle for the Soul

53m

Sound Doctrine