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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jeremiah Holt

The Spirit of Prophecy

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the Sabbath that you have set apart.

We thank you for the freedom that we have here in this country to come and worship you openly.

We pray that as we are here this morning that your Holy Spirit would come into this room, that you would come into each heart that is present here this morning.

Please guide us, guide our understanding.

Please soften our hearts and teach us what you would have us to learn.

Lord, I pray that you will be of my lips, that you will help me to speak your words.

I was sitting in lab, and I was drilling away at my little plastic tooth, not paying attention to the 40 other dental drills that were buzzing away, when all of a sudden I heard it.

Immediately my ears perked up and I began to listen.

I tuned out everything else, all the other conversations of a hundred classmates all around me to listen to this 1 conversation that was going on a few seats down from me.

I quickly gathered that there was a student who was, I guess, a prospective student looking around the school, interviewing, and she had stopped to talk with 1 of my classmates.

My classmate had now posed this question.

She responded that she was not, and she began to express a little bit of curiosity and maybe even a little bit of concern as to what it would be like to go to school in a school that was like this.

And he's kind of sure, the Adventists are really nice.

He said, we basically start class with prayer, which consists of some well-wishing.

And then we have chapel once a week, and we get out of school early on Fridays.

And as their conversation continued on in a different direction, I was stuck sitting there thinking, is this really all my classmate knows about what I believe?

There's a classmate I sit beside quite a bit.

You know, I have the opportunity to be here and work with Avent Hope and some outreach and have a real burden to reach the students on our campus who come to us from all over the world and you don't know anything about Adventism.

I really believe that he puts that together.

But he leaves the telling to us, because he's given that to us as our job.

We have started a series this quarter, started this week, called Our Story.

If you're a student, I'd invite you to ask a friend to come with you during lunchtime, we'll give you lunch on Wednesdays after chapel.

The series is targeted at students who are here at Loma Linda, but who are not Seventh-day Adventists.

We want to share a little bit about where we came from and what we believe.

In studying for this series, I have had the opportunity to think about some of the Seventh-day Adventist beliefs that we have that we hold dear, and I think oftentimes we think we know these, we have them down pat, and we don't discuss them much because they're kind of the ABCs of what we believe.

And I have been studying the gift of prophecy to relate with this group, and I have really been convicted and strengthened in my faith.

And so I want to share with you this morning a little bit about that.

I've had many classmates who have asked me questions about, maybe, why I don't eat meat.

Also, I've had a little more thoughtful questions about, why does your religion invest so much on training you for an earthly career?

You know, that's a question that makes you think a little bit.

And most of the time it comes back to the spirit of prophecy to what we know through the ministry of Ellen White.

And oftentimes I find myself kind of wondering, how do I approach this?

How do I tell them what I believe about the ministry of Ellen White?

And I think that's something that a lot of us end up kind of wondering about sometimes.

You have the opportunity to tell somebody, you get in a conversation and you wonder, how should I approach this?

And so as I was preparing for this talk, I realized the concept is really not that far-fetched.

A lot of times We think because of the way society has molded us that it's a little bit of a weird idea to believe in a prophet.

But I want to go with you this morning through what the Bible says about a prophet and what it is.

We see that in the Bible there's lots of prophets.

In fact, most of the Bible was written by prophets.

We have Enoch, Noah, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, just to name a few, much of the Old Testament.

And going into the New Testament as well, we start off with John the Baptist and go all the way to John.

Prophets are really the basis of the whole Christian religion in a lot of ways.

Christ is the basis of Christian religion, but prophets have been a big part of it.

There's also female prophets that are listed in the Bible.

I think of Mariam, who is the sister of Moses.

In Exodus 15-20 you can find that she is called a prophetess.

Deborah was 1 of the more well-known ones who was a judge.

Anna is also considered a prophetess who meets Jesus at the temple.

So prophets have been a part of the Bible and been involved in the Bible and the Christian religion from the very beginning.

So I want to take some time to look at what a prophet really is.

If you turn with me to the book of Exodus chapter 4, I put a few key verses up on the screen, but I would encourage you also to go ahead and turn with me Because I think there's a lot that is in the story.

Sometimes it's nice to read in between the lines a little bit.

But in Exodus chapter 4, we have the story of the burning bush.

In this story, if you recall, Moses, who had fled to the wilderness, is now being called by God to go back and to address Pharaoh and to tell him to let God's people go.

Now it's very understandable that Moses shrunk from this because he had been well acquainted with the Egyptian courts.

So he came up with a number of excuses which God gave him the responses that at first sight you might think that would be convicting enough for me but he still shrunk from this And in Exodus 4 verse 10 we read that Moses said to the Lord, Oh my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant.

But I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.

Now at this point, God's a little irritated with Moses because he's already demonstrated that he has the ability to help Moses through this.

He tells him, your brother Aaron is coming out to visit us, visit you, and he's a good speaker, I'll make him a mouthpiece for you.

In Exodus 4 verses 15 and 16 we read, he says, Now you speak to him and put the words in his mouth and I'll be with your mouth and with his mouth and I'll teach you what you shall do.

So he shall be your spokesperson to the people, and he himself shall be as a mouth for you, and you shall be to him as God.

It's interesting here, we don't normally see God telling a person that they're going to be as God to somebody.

So I want to look a little deeper into this, and I think some of the answer to this is expressed in Exodus 7, verse 1.

We see that the Lord says to Moses, See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet." What I believe that is being expressed here is that a prophet is a spokesperson for someone.

So Aaron is Moses' prophet because he's a spokesperson for Moses because Moses shrunk from the responsibility of having to speak to Pharaoh.

I think As we go through the study this morning, this will be reiterated in a few other verses.

But I want to establish here that a prophet is a spokesperson for God.

In fact, the Hebrew definition of prophet, I'm told, I do not speak Hebrew, but I'm told the definition actually is spokesperson.

So when a prophet speaks in the name of God, a prophet is speaking on behalf of God.

God is actually speaking through that prophet.

So you might ask, well, why are prophets sent to the church?

There are 4 lists of spiritual gifts that are given in the New Testament, And 1 of them is found in Ephesians 4, verse 11 to 16.

I found it very interesting in my study that of the spiritual gifts that is mentioned in the New Testament, the prophet is the only 1 that is in all 4 of those lists.

We read in chapter 4, verse 11 through 16, And he himself gave some to be apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the working in ministry, and for the edifying of the body of Christ.

So We see here that Christ is sending prophets to his church to equip them for ministry, to help them to fulfill the Great Commission, the job which he gave his church.

It's also to edify the body of Christ, so we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness and deceitful plotting." So we see that a prophet is also sent to clear up discrepancies or disagreements on how the scriptures are interpreted.

There's never discrepancies on any of that.

Sometimes God sees fit to send a prophet to help us understand what he has already told us.

We see that, we continue on in verse 15, but speaking from the truth and love we may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, for whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself and love.

In a nutshell, God sends prophets to his church, to his people, to edify them, to help them to grow up in the full stature of Christ.

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The Spirit of Prophecy

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