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Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

David Shin

Experience Versus Scripture

Father in heaven, we thank you for the words of that song.

We thank you that your eye is on the sparrow.

We know that you watch us, you count the number of hairs on our head.

We thank you also for the word of God, the bread of life.

We thank you that we are not to live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Bless us this morning with your spirit, for we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus, amen.

A number of years ago, I was working in Tulsa, Oklahoma as a Bible worker and 1 of the individuals that was coming to our prophecy seminar came to our evangelistic meeting and she was ashen faced and she came to me and said, David, something's wrong in our home.

And she described what took place that morning.

She had gone out to her garage and in her garage was a closet, 1 of these portable closets on wheels.

And she was in there minding her own business and looking for something that she had in storage and suddenly this portable closet began levitating, moving around the room and as you can imagine she was quite scared and called out the name of Jesus and then this closet started shaking even more.

So I said, no problem, I'll take this to our workers meeting and our evangelist will be right over to take care of this.

So I go to workers meeting and I tell our evangelist what's going on, and he sits back in his chair and he looks at me and says, David, this will be good experience for you.

Why don't you and Bill go down there and pray, and this thing, whatever it is, will go away.

I mean, this seems more above my pay grade and more in line with yours.

They were dealing with some spirits and the spirit said, Paul we know, Peter we know, but who are you?

And these men jumped on these other individuals and they ran out of the house without any clothes on, and I didn't want that to happen with me, and I went back to my place of prayer and prayed to the Lord Jesus and the Lord started bringing things to my heart that I needed to make right with him because when you're in spiritual warfare, you need to be ready.

And then the Lord brought to my mind all of the pirated software that I had on my computer that I did not pay for.

I went and deleted all the pirated software.

Then I had some music in my car that I had been listening to that the Holy Spirit was telling me that music's got to go to, so I threw it in the trash can.

So went over there with my friend Bill, and it was this eerie silence in the car, driving out there.

It's kind of anticlimactic story, because she met us at the door.

And I said, well, I don't see anything, hear anything.

So we went and knelt in the living room and prayed.

Evidently, her father had been engaged in the occult for a number of years.

And she recognized that as she was making steps in regards to the Sabbath, in regards to baptism, that there was an invisible reality that was not happy with her decision.

I was trying to scare her into not following through.

So we knelt down and prayed that the Holy Spirit, God's holy angels would abide in that place.

And her and her family were baptized a few weeks later, and to the best of my knowledge, that thing never came back again.

Do you know there's an invisible reality around us that we can't see?

There's spiritual warfare and if our eyes could be opened, I believe it would drive us to our knees because we would recognize that there is something beyond the visible, the invisible reality.

I read a book entitled The Thunder of Justice and it documents supernatural occurrences that are taking place all over the world, Marian apparitions, Mary apparitions, and these are becoming more and more common.

There's a website that you can go to that documents all of the apparitions that took place since the year 1400, and there's something unusual that's taking place that when you track the number of apparitions throughout the centuries.

Usually 1 would happen every 5 years or 10 years, but in the 1990s into the year 2000, there has been a spike in these merry apparitions.

I was watching the morning show on NBC, and it was remarkable because as they are giving the morning news, they had their cameras trained on this structure, this underpass, and it was almost nonchalant as the hosts were Commenting on that day's news and telling jokes and stories.

They said outside you see on this on this This shot a merry apparition that's taking place on this under this underpass and sure enough live on Monday morning, I believe it was, you were witnessing the impression of Mary coming out on this underpass, and everyone's just like, huh, that's just business as usual.

I'm gonna quote a few excerpts from this book.

This happened in 1996, just before Christmas in 1996.

A painting of Jesus was seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses to be weeping red tears.

This painting was no ordinary icon, for it hangs in the Bethlehem Church of the Niftivity, above the spot where Christian tradition maintains Jesus was born.

A Muslim cleaning lady was first to see a light that came from the painting just prior to the tears flowing from the eyes of Jesus.

Since her sighting, thousands of Christians of all denominations, along with many Jews and Muslims, have witnessed the tears.

Time Magazine, front page, They had an excerpt, a series on Mary apparitions.

I want to read another excerpt from the book, The Thunder of Justice.

In Sicily, in the spring of 1953, a statue of Mary began weeping tears.

Doubting neighbors, cynical journalists, and rational scientific investigators were baffled by the phenomena of a virtual torrent of tears flowing from the eyes of the plaster Madonna.

A skeptical detective caught several tears in a chemist's vial and without identifying the liquid, sent the specimen to a police laboratory for analysis.

Just before Christmas in 1996, hardly any time passed before the crippled.

The lame, the ill from all over Italy were soon gathering before the weeping Madonna.

The tears were caught in a cloth and wiped on the bodies of the afflicted.

A middle-aged man recovered the use of a crippled arm.

A three-year-old girl stricken with polio was able to discard the stainless steel braces that had encased her twisted legs.

An 18-year-old girl who had been struck dumb 11 years before began to speak.

Hundreds of others claimed to have received a healing blessing from the tears of the little Madonna.

The Madonna's tears ceased to flow on the fourth day of the phenomena, but Exactly 1 month later, the statue was carried through the streets of Syracuse at the head of a procession of 30, 000 people.

1 individual, after experiencing some of these Marian apparitions, this is what he said, apart from all this doctrine and stuff, the reason I believe Mary is in heaven, helping us because I had an experience with Mary that I cannot refute.

No 1 can tell me she is dead." We live in an age where experience is king.

Millennials are high on experience, so much so that even their possessions are not to be equated with experience.

And no 1 wants to invalidate someone else's experience.

This is the postmodern era that we live in.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that our experience does not matter.

But the question is, what is the relationship between experience and Scripture?

We are to experience scripture, we are to experience Christ, but what do we do if our experience, which is real, quote unquote scientific, verifiable, as with the weeping Madonna, what if our experience contradicts scripture?

What if I experience something that is so moving, so emotional, that appeals to all of my senses and enraptures me, but then I read the Bible and the Bible says that my experience, even though it may be real, is not from the spirit that I assume it to be.

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Experience Versus Scripture

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