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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

Brian Hindman

Divine Genetics

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea?

Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.

Say, love there is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved.

Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth.

He maketh wars to cease unto the ends of the earth.

He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder.

He burneth the chariot in the fire." Psalm 46, verse 10, Be still and know that I am God.

Our subject this morning is divine genetics.

Divine genetics, divine meaning of or pertaining to or related to God, and genetics meaning the composition, the genetic DNA code of our existence.

Biologically, animals, human beings, the hereditary traits and features that combine to make a person who they are and what their personality is like.

Divine genetics is our subject this morning.

If you'll bow your heads with me, I would just like to seek the Lord in prayer as we begin.

Precious Father in heaven, Lord, it is a great privilege to stand before your people and to present your message, your word, and to share just a small portion of what you have done in my life in transforming my heart, my mind, and my character.

Lord I thank you for your goodness to me which is entirely undeserved on my part.

But I praise you and exalt you and I pray Lord that today we would see what your divine grace can do through a simple humble jar of clay.

I've shared some of this before, and I'm going to skip a little bit ahead.

1 of my biological relatives, an aunt that I have, about 7 years ago did some research and found that she was related to a passenger on the Mayflower.

That was the ship that came over with the Puritans in 1620, almost 400 years ago, and landed there at Plymouth Rock.

I've not been there in person, but I've seen pictures of where they have put that in the rock the year 1620 and founded the Plymouth Colony.

It just so happens I'm related to the captain of that enterprise that was chosen to be captain, Captain Miles Standish, to be exact.

And if you look over here on the left-hand side, I don't know if you can see it, but it traces down to where I am, and my name is not on this list, but this was an official list that was sent to what is called the Mayflower Society to authenticate that you are related to indeed 1 of the 102 plus the, we don't know the exact number, the number of crew on board, but we know 102 for sure passengers on that boat.

And so it goes from Miles Standish, his son Alexander Standish, this is in my line on the left hand side, had Ebenezer Standish, who had a daughter named Zerviah Standish, who had a son named William Ring, who had another son named William Ring, that's confusing, who had a daughter named Sarah Ring, who had a son named Caleb Nickerson Smith, who had a daughter named Hannah Isabella Smith, who had a son named Roy Byron Longard, who had a son named William Albert Longard, who had a daughter, Carol Marie Longard, and that's my aunt, and so I would be in the 13th position in that line, me here, Brian Heinemann.

And so it's fascinating that just, there's just 13 generations between me and the Mayflower from the captain no less.

And she did some other research and found that in fact for sure we're related to 8 of the passengers on board, possibly 9 because of all of their marriage and marrying their kids, but for sure 8 passengers on the Mayflower.

And that's a picture of Captain Miles Standish, a portrait of him up on the right.

And I used to work in high school, and I had A student of mine did a little Photoshop there and you can see a little bit of a resemblance.

But I can assure you that's actually me when I was a lot younger and had a lot more hair.

So, all right, ancestry and heritage matters.

As I mentioned, I am adopted, and the family you belong to is significant and key in your life for many reasons.

If you are part of the British Royal family, then that makes you royal.

Other famous families we have in the United States, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys.

In this area we have the Vanderbilts, who are responsible for building the Biltmore House and constructing that.

I happened to, my wife and I, years ago before we had our son, we were in a class with I believe the grandson of the founder of Ingalls, and we were in a class together preparing for all the birth experience.

And so anyway, that was kind of interesting.

But it is considered very shameful not to have a family or to be illegitimate.

This is a picture of my parents of when my mom was pregnant with me, as I'm told.

Now it's interesting the way that I acquired this picture is because my adoption was supposed to be a closed adoption.

Neither family was supposed to know, the biological family wasn't supposed to know the adopted family and the adopted family wasn't supposed to know the biological family.

But there was a pastor who happened to know both families and knew that the family that adopted me, they had had 2 miscarriages and they were afraid they were not gonna be able to have a child And so they were interested in adopting a child.

And then he also knew the condition that came up when my mom was pregnant with me, a young teenage girl.

And so he agreed to be the 1 to go between the families.

Well, He retired to the estates over at Mount Pisgah Academy, which is where I taught for 17 years.

And in visiting him 1 day, he brought out and shared this picture with me, and so I happened to have that.

But as I'm told, my mom was pregnant for 8 and a half months before she told anyone.

Now I don't know, I mean I was there, but I wasn't really there, how that can happen.

But in some way, It was a short time period to make a decision.

And my mom has a younger brother who's 9 years older than me, my uncle.

And so they considered keeping me and having me to be raised just amongst my aunts and uncles and have my grandparents be my parents.

They strongly considered that, but I think it was a truly providential act of God that I was placed in the home that I was placed in.

I cannot say enough about the providence in my life, the making a decision to put me up for adoption and then place me in a home, I couldn't have had better parents.

I hope you feel the same way about your parents, but I could not have had better parents than Charles and Linda Heinemann.

So anyway, these are a few pictures of me when I was growing up and you know I could see here that I had a lot of fun playing in a mud puddle.

We grew up very poor in a single wide trailer.

But in prayer meeting this week we read something, a very interesting statement about what matters most to children is actually not the amount of money or the amount of land that you have, it's the amount of love that you have in your home.

And so all parents can provide that for their children no matter what their situation or their condition is.

And so there it is, you can see on the top right, I have a sister who is not adopted, she came along 11 months after I was born and adopted.

We look very similar even though we're not actually related, but she is my sister and I love her dearly.

And so, grew up in a very happy home and very thankful that my parents, when they adopted me, they were living in Greenville, South Carolina at the time.

I was born up in Virginia and I think I mentioned, it's kind of interesting that I think they would have had to drive right through here at Hendersonville, between Greenville and Virginia, the place where they picked me up, right here.

That would be back in 1973, which is the year that abortion was legalized, at least in the eyes of the federal government.

That very year is the year that I was born in December of 1973.

And I'm thankful though that my mom made the difficult decision, I think really it was with her and her parents, my grandparents, to not have an abortion.

To choose life and to choose, you know, this is a bad circumstance, but is it possible that God can work and bring about for His honor and glory, out of man's mistake, God can still bring something worthwhile or beneficial?

I hope and pray that is the case because God has been so abundantly merciful and gracious to me that I cannot put into words or express to you the value and the influence, the training that I had from my parents who raised me.

Well, although the circumstances of my birth are shameful and humiliating, I still believe that God has a plan for my life.

And I believe God has a plan for your life too.

God somehow in his great love and mercy loves and wants even me, and he loves you and wants you too.

If you did not know that, if you're not aware, well, the parents that raised me are no longer living, but I am so grateful to them that even when I'm reunited with them, Lord willing of, they'll be there and I'll be there when the roll is called up yonder, I will belong to them for all eternity.

That is my position, that is how I feel about the people that raised me and took care of me.

Even though there was not a DNA connection, Is there a difference in divine genetics than just physical genetics?

The way that God views and sees us is not the same as we oftentimes view and see ourselves.

My dad, who became a, he was a literature evangelist whenever I was born in Greenville, South Carolina.

He went and became a Seventh-day Adventist pastor for many years, pastored here in Carolina, 7 churches, 7 districts, rather, many churches.

And he read to us the Bible stories every night, my sister and I, every night.

And if there's 1 thing I could appeal to you as parents to do, read the Bible stories to your children every night because it will just impress on their minds these wonderful, amazing stories in their hearts, their precious little hearts and minds, and it will stay there as long as they live, because these stories, they've stayed in my mind.

That is my grandfather here in the middle, and he was actually working for the Review and Herald, the press, up in Tacoma Park, Maryland for 35 years.

And he was a model for many of the paintings of the Bible stories that I was reading as a kid, years later.

This is actually him here on the left, posing as Enoch.

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Divine Genetics

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