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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dan Vis Weekend

Daniel Vis

This is Life Eternal

Father in heaven, I thank you for this opportunity to study your word and just to review some of these promises you've given.

They're familiar, we all know them, we've read them before, but I pray that somehow they would just speak to us in a new, a fresh way that something would be kindled in our heart and you would just encourage us and strengthen us tonight.

We invite the Holy Spirit to be here and I pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

Promise I wanna talk about is found in the book of John, 1 of the most familiar promises.

I'm sure you probably all could quote this.

The Bible says, let not your heart be, what?

And then this amazing, wonderful promise.

In my Father's house are many mansions, or some versions say many rooms.

If it were not so, I would have told you.

I go to prepare a place for you, for me, for each of us.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there you may be also.

You know in the context Jesus was meeting with his disciples there in the upper room and he knows he's about ready to go through the most difficult part of his experience here on earth.

He's about ready to be arrested and taken to the cross.

And He's meeting with the disciples here at this last minute, trying to prepare them for the worst crisis of their life.

If you skip back just a few verses to chapter 13, verse 33, Jesus says, little children, yet just a little while I'm with you.

And as I said to the Jews, where I go, you cannot come.

So now I say to you, Just like I told the Jews, I'm going to be leaving, I'm going away, and you're not going to be able to find me.

You're going to want to look for me, you're going to want me to be there, but you're not going to be able to find me.

He knew his time on earth was almost finished.

He was about to return to his Father in heaven, wherever that is, somewhere up there, you know, 1 of those stars up there maybe.

And He's going to be leaving the disciples behind.

Verse 36, chapter 13, Peter said to Him, Lord, where are You going?

And Jesus answered, Where I go you cannot follow me now, but you shall follow me afterwards.

There's going to be a little delay, there's going to be a wait, there's going to be some things you have to go through first, but the day is coming you're going to be able to go to heaven too.

You're going to be able to go to the same place I'm going.

Can you imagine what it's going to be like to go to heaven?

I don't know about you, but I have a real interest in the space industry as it's burgeoning right now.

And I try and keep up with quantum physics.

I don't really understand it, but I read every news article that comes out.

You know, I'm interested in Einstein and relativity.

And, you know, I try to keep up with all the latest technology news, keeping up with NASA.

In fact, today I had a little time this afternoon, I was thinking maybe I ought to drive over to Hawthorne and go to SpaceX.

It's like I don't have a lot of hobbies outside the Bible and whatever but I thought if I have 1 hobby this is probably trying to keep up with what's happening in our world.

And just imagine what it would be like to be able to go to visit other planets.

Sometimes I think the reason I'm fascinated by this is when I look at all the suffering in this world, and I saw so much of it as a pastor.

And so many people are going through so many different struggles and challenges and your heart just breaks you almost feel like you're kind of trapped in this world you think I could just get out go somewhere else where there's not all this heartache and suffering.

Well we're not going to figure out how to get out of this world Jesus is going to be the 1 to take us out of this world.

It's not going to be SpaceX or NASA or anyone else.

And right now He's preparing a place for us.

This is really actually important for us as believers.

Sometimes I think we minimize or under appreciate the importance of our belief about heaven.

You know this is the great faith chapter.

Hebrews 11 starting with verse 13 after describing all of these great heroes, Noah and Abraham and so on.

In verse 13, it describes what they all had in common.

These all died in faith, not having received the promise, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them and embraced them.

They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on their, this place is not our home, This is not our world, right?

We're citizens of another country, another place.

For they which say such things declare plainly that they seek a country, another country.

And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out of, that is this world, they might have had opportunity to have returned.

Sometimes Christians think about going back into the world, don't we?

Better country, that is a heavenly, Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared for them a city." See, the thing that keeps us from ever having even the chance of turning back to this world is we know that God has prepared something better for us.

We've seen it, we've embraced it, we believe it, and we're heading for it.

And nothing's going to change where we're heading.

We live our lives looking for a better place.

I remember when I first became a Christian, you know, that's often when it's hardest for new believers.

I lived a pretty wild life as a young man, and I had a pretty dramatic conversion, and it was like 1 of those 180-degree changes, And I had to leave all kinds of habits and just drop everything.

And you know, that's hard to do, isn't it?

And I remember when I was struggling in those first few months of being a Christian, every once in a while, this song would come on the radio.

Now this was a long time ago, and probably none of you ever heard this song.

I don't even remember the name of it, but it was a song about heaven, and it would just come on the radio just at the right time when I needed it, and when I was struggling the most with all the bad habits and the things I was getting rid of out of my life, I would remember there's a promise of heaven.

And it would encourage me, it would strengthen me.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about heaven, maybe too much time.

I remember my daughter and I, we used to sit around the dining room table and we'd bring out a big sheet of paper and we would design our houses.

And I got a floor plan for my house and have it already planned out.

I mean, it's going to be pretty exciting.

And heaven needs to be that real to each 1 of us so that We never have to worry about losing heart when things are tough in this world because we know we have something better.

If you turn back to the book of Isaiah chapter 65, just reviewing a few familiar prophecies, some verses I'm sure you've all read before.

Isaiah 65 right there near the end of the book.

There's that chapter that says, I'm going to create new heavens and a new earth.

The former shall not be remembered nor come to mind.

That They Might Know Him

Father in heaven, we do want to go home to be with you.

We want to see all the suffering and heartache in this world come to a close, but you've given us a work to do, and we haven't been doing a great job at it.

I pray, Lord, that as we study this morning, that you would help us to understand exactly what has to happen so that this work can be finished and we can go home to be with you.

Please send the Holy Spirit, make things Clear and simple is my prayer, and I ask this in Jesus' name.

I want to talk about a word, it may not seem related at first, but actually I think this is the root of the problem.

You know, the word was popularized back in the 1960s by a physicist named Thomas Kuhn, and he wrote a book, he wasn't really a historian, but he wrote a book on the history of science, and it was called The Structure of Scientific Revolution.

And what Thomas Kuhn argued in this book, he said that science didn't advance the way we normally think of it as advancing.

We normally think of laboratories and they're doing all these experiments, And little by little, step by step, they're tweaking and refining their theories.

And things are getting more and more accurate.

But it's a very slow, gradual, incremental process.

That's how we normally think about science.

But what Thomas Kuhn argued was that science didn't advance this way at all.

It said that science advanced when there was a radical shift in the underlying paradigm of the theory that was being used to model whatever discipline he was studying.

And what he did in his book is he went through all sorts of major academic disciplines, whether it's physics or chemistry or astronomy or biology or whatever, and he showed time and time again this is what happened, that there'd be a certain way of thinking and they'd be working and working and working trying to develop this thinking until finally someone would come along and say, no, we got the whole paradigm wrong, we need a paradigm shift, right?

And propose a brand new model that completely revolutionized and upended everything that we thought about that particular field.

Take the field of astronomy, just 1 example.

If you go back about 2, 500 years ago roughly, there's a man by the name of Plato, and he argued that all the planetary bodies moved around the Earth in circular, perfect, uniform motion.

And if we could just calculate how those spheres were configured in their speed of rotation, in the angles and so on, we should be able to predict the planetary motion, the different wandering stars is what they call them.

We should be able to predict when there would be eclipses and when Mars would be in some place or Jupiter in another place.

And so for the next 1, 000 years, Greek scientists set out to try and maximize their understanding of the stars based on this paradigm.

By the time we finally get to about 400 or 500 AD, You have a man by the name of Ptolemy and he came up with this amazing masterpiece that was extremely accurate and predicted exactly where the planets would be and all the eclipses and all the astronomical.

It actually explained the phenomena that we noticed.

And For the next thousand years, no 1 really questioned Ptolemy's work.

Until you come down to about the 1500s, and you kind of know where I'm going with this, right?

A man by the name of Copernicus said, you know, why don't we, rather than just tweaking the model, why don't we change the underlying paradigm?

And rather than putting the Earth at the center and all these things spinning around the Earth, why don't we put the Sun at the center and we put all the planets spinning around the Sun?

And he developed a mathematical model to try and explain the very same exact astronomical phenomena that they'd been studying for 2, 000 years.

And you know, the fact is Copernicus's results were not any more accurate than Ptolemy's.

But what he did is he changed the paradigm.

He said, why don't we look at it from another perspective, a paradigm shift?

And if you think about what happened over the next couple hundred years in astronomy, as a result of that paradigm shift, the field of astronomy, and this happened in every scientific discipline, the field of astronomy just exploded, with Galileo and Kepler and Isaac Newton and all the way down to Einstein.

And within just a few hundred years, we're actually putting a man on the moon.

When you're locked into a paradigm that's not working, you can tweak as much as you want and you're not going to get where you want to go.

But if you can have a paradigm shift that changes everything in a remarkably short period of time, you can have dramatic change.

But I think what we need is not just some minor tweak to how we're doing evangelism and ministry today.

We can try and tweak our model, make it a little bit better here and there, and fix these better pictures in our PowerPoints or better advertise.

We can try and tweak it all we want, and we're never going to get where we want to be.

What we need is a radical paradigm shift.

The underlying model has to change in how we think.

We'll look at the scriptures in just a minute, but let's take your typical Adventist church.

I was a pastor for 7 years in the Chicago area, and we did this time and time again.

I mean, our church tripled in attendance over the course of about 7 years.

But I've seen this in church after church after church, and we basically kind of follow the same model.

So what we would do is every so often, we would get together as a church board and say, we need to do some evangelism.

And so we've done this so many times, we know exactly how to do it.

We think about who we're going to get to be our speaker, and we think about how much money we're going to put into flyers.

So let's just take a hypothetical situation.

Let's say you live in a town that has, for a nice round number, say a hundred thousand people living in it.

And maybe in that town, maybe there's 50, 000 homes.

And so you decide you're going to mail a flyer to every single home in that community.

Now we've done this so many times as a church, we know exactly what to expect.

We know all the statistics and all the probabilities.

So we say, if we mail out 50, 000 flyers, we can pretty well predict how many people are gonna show up on opening night for our evangelistic meeting.

Now it varies sometimes, right now in North America, we get about 1 per thousand will show up.

So if we mail out 50, 000 flyers, that means we might have 50 people from the community, not counting our own church members, that come out on opening night.

Now if you had 50 people show up, would you be excited about that?

I mean, I don't think we ever quite had that many.

We tried to do evangelism at least once or twice a year.

But let's say that you have 50 people show up and everyone's excited, enthusiastic, and we're all praying and moving forward.

And we should be, by the way, praying, we should be moving forward, and we should be doing evangelism.

Don't misunderstand me by this illustration.

But you know what happens when you start the meetings, right?

I mean, little by little, something happens, maybe someone hears something they don't like, or maybe there's some other problem scheduling conflict, and that number just seems to shrink down, shrink down, and it gets smaller and smaller, until you finally end up with just a handful left, and some of them don't even make a decision to accept the message even if they make it all the way through to the end.

Now I don't know what you think is a good percentage but my guess is if you have 50 people show up at opening night you might if you do well get 20% to make a decision for baptism by the end, maybe 10 people.

Now if you did a series like that and you had 10 people get baptized in your church, would you be excited about that?

I mean, even if it's just 2 or 3, it's like praise the Lord.

I mean, every person is precious in the eyes of God, right?

And we'd be ecstatic, and the angels in heaven, we know they're going to be celebrating.

And of those 10 people, you know, what's probably going to happen, right?

I mean, they may show up for a few weeks and then little by little, some of them start to slip away.

And we don't always know why, but we lose track of them.

Maybe someone in the church isn't quite as friendly as we'd like, and they say something they shouldn't.

And for all sorts of reasons, we start to lose some of these brand new members.

In fact, in North America today, we lose about 50% of every new member that's baptized within 12 months.

For Such a Time

Father in heaven, I just want to come before you 1 more time and pray that you would bless our time together this afternoon.

I pray for your Holy Spirit to draw very close to each 1 here in this room and close to me, Lord, that I could only say what you would have me to say, and that you would make every word clear and simple and make just the right impression.

And I just pray your message comes through clearly.

Actually, what I want to talk about is a prophecy in the Bible.

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to the book of Revelation.

Down near the end of the book of Revelation, we just had an evangelist come to our church in North Dakota and he did a beautiful job going over the prophecies of Revelation.

But my maybe the 1 verse that kind of zooms out at me when I think about Revelation, he never mentioned the verse a single time.

When I think of Revelation and the prophecies in it, this is the first thing that comes to my mind.

John says, After these things I saw another angel come down from heaven having what?

Great power, and the earth was lightened with His glory." Now this is an amazing prophecy, isn't it?

I mean, if there's 1 prophecy in the Bible that should quicken our hearts at Seventh-day Adventist, it's these words right here.

That 1 day God is going to dispatch another angel, a mighty angel, maybe more mighty than any angel that's ever been dispatched to planet Earth before, and something is going to happen.

This angel will come down having great power, and the entire earth is going to be lit up like a light bulb with the glory of God.

We use different words to describe this coming experience.

We talk about the enlightenment of God's people.

We talk about the final outpouring in the Spirit of God.

We call it the loud cry or we call it the latter rain.

But whatever you call it, this thing is going to happen.

I mean, Revelation 18, these words are faithful and true as well.

Next few verses give us the timing of it.

Even though it's recorded in the Bible after the 7 last plagues, this event occurs before the 7 last plagues because of the warning.

If you look in verse 4, God still has a people that are in Babylon, and they still have the capacity to make a choice to come out.

And it says, come out of her, my people, that you receive not of her plagues.

So this is a warning that God sends before the plagues.

In other words, God shows us the devastation that's going to happen, and then He says, but before those plagues come, I'm going to send a great revival to my people, and the earth is going to be lightened with the glory of God, and I'm going to call all of my true people, wherever they are in Christendom, or wherever they are in the world, and I'm going to call them out of Babylon so they can avoid the plagues.

So it's before the close of probation, before the plagues come.

This is at the very last moment of earth's history when people can still make a choice to serve God.

Many other places in the Bible talk about this great final revival.

You don't have to turn to all these verses.

The Bible says, "...the earth 1 day shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

I mean just like the waters just cover the sea in the same way the glory of God is going to cover this entire planet.

It doesn't mean that everyone is going to receive it or even appreciate the glory of God, but everyone is going to be exposed to and have an opportunity to see the glory of God.

Isaiah 60 verse 1, a familiar verse, says, Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of God is risen upon thee.

Now we know in the very next verse it says there's going to be gross darkness upon the world.

But the point is that God will have a people that receive this special outpouring of Holy Spirit and they are going to be shining.

Ezekiel 36-27, I know we claim this verse all the time, but I think it has a fuller future application.

It says, I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes and you shall keep my judgments and do them.

And the reason I believe it has a special end time application because the very next chapter is about the Valley of Dry Bones.

And there's another picture of a great revival where God's people come together and they stand on their feet and they become an exceeding great army.

And it's going to be the Spirit of God coming into his people that enable them to live in full obedience to all of his requirements at the very end of time.

I believe that verse has an end time application.

In the last days it shall come to pass that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains, shall be exalted above the hills, and people shall flow into it.

Many nations will come and say, Come, let us go to the house of the Lord, to the house of God, or Jacob, and He will teach us His ways.

For the law shall go forth as I and the Word of the Lord.

I mean, there's going to be an amazing awakening and thousands of people are going to come into the truth at the very end, the very last moment of verse history.

Wherefore, thus saith the Lord, Jeremiah 5.14, Because You speak this word, behold, I will make My words in My mouth fire, and His people would, and it shall devour them." There's going to be a power that attends the people of God at the end of time like we haven't quite yet seen in this world.

I don't know about you, but I'm excited about this prophecy here in the book of Revelation.

Joel chapter 2, verse 28 and 29, it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, your sons, your daughters, your old men, the young men, the servants, the handmaids.

And there are many, many more verses like this in the various prophets.

I just keep seeing passage after passage after passage where God is saying, there is a time of great victory coming where I'm going to turn your captivity.

Series

Dan Vis Weekend

For Such a Time

Transcript

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