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Advent Productions

Benjamin Ng

Revival and Reformation

Father in heaven, as we come to study your word once more, I want to thank you for this time.

Thank you, Lord, for the wonderful Sabbath hours.

And I pray, oh Lord, that you would grace us with thy presence.

Please be with us, draw close to us, lead us with your spirit, and may Jesus Christ be uplifted, we pray in Jesus' name.

Do you ever feel disappointed in your spiritual life?

You're on the way home from school or work, you're telling yourself, I'm going to read the Bible, I'm going to pray.

You have all these holy endeavors flowing through your mind and you reassure yourself that you're gonna do it by telling yourself out loud and reassuring yourself as you're in the car or you're on the motorbike and you just say it out loud to yourself and more for reassurance rather than affirmation to somebody else.

Or maybe from the morning, you've told yourself that you're going to have evening devotion tonight and then you get to the evening and after dinner, after 1 hour of Facebook and 5 Netflix episodes later, you drift off to sleep with your phone dropping to the floor which awakens you enough to wipe the drool from off your face and turn off the light and get under your blankets and go to sleep.

You wake up early out of habit because you've just got accustomed to it in the next morning.

You spend time with God and His word and prayer and you're disappointed from what has happened from the day before.

I'm describing something that has happened to me a lot, many times, even when I'm on the scooter driving home, I say, okay, Ben, you're not gonna do this, we're gonna make sure that we do this, and we're gonna use our time wisely, and there's a lot of stuff that I can get done, and I need to do, and I'm going to do, and then somehow you fail to carry through with your plans.

Has this been your pattern of life before?

Only some of us, the problem is not about reading our Bibles in the evening.

It's maybe a deeper rooted problem in your life.

Addiction to smoking or drugs or pornography.

And you're on the way home and you tell yourself, you're not gonna do it, you're not gonna do it, you're not gonna do it.

And you're reassuring yourself, you're reaffirming it and yet somehow when you get in through the door, it's like you're in a trance.

You're hypnotized and before you know it, all the holy endeavors and plans that you had are out the window and you find yourself doing that same sin over and over again.

And this cycle of hating yourself starts all over again because you know that you don't want to do it, but somehow you're not able to stop.

You know, the Bible tells us in Psalms 85 and verse 6, please turn with me in your Bibles to Psalms 85 and verse 6.

The Bible says, Psalms 85 verse 6, will thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee.

You know, this morning I was talking about bursting forth and being fruitful and You know, friends, this word rejoice, it lines up with that feeling that we want to have.

And in order to do that, the Bible says that we must be revived.

The word R-E is a prefix and it just means to do something again.

We've done it before, we're gonna do it again.

And the word vive or vive, It means to live.

So we were living once, but somehow we died.

And so revive is, you were living, you died, now you want to be brought back to life again.

Sin is that thing that killed our living experience and really all have sinned.

So all of us really need to experience revival.

But let me show you what revival needs to go with.

Because you will find that as we look into the principles of revival, to be revived, to be brought back to life, We know this formula and somehow maybe even many of us are experiencing it, but it's not enough.

Let's, if you're able to, it's written in Christian Service CHS 42 paragraph 2, Christian Service 42 paragraph 2.

She says, a revival and a reformation must take place under the ministration of the Holy Spirit.

Revival and reformation are 2 different things.

Revival signifies a renewal of spiritual life, a quickening of the powers of mind and heart, a resurrection from the spiritual death.

Renewal of spiritual life, quickening of the powers of the heart and mind, resurrection from spiritual death.

We all need to experience revival, But it goes together with Reformation.

But let's look at revival first before we get in to the Reformation part.

My soul cleaveth unto the dust quicken thou me according to thy what?

The word quicken means to make alive, to bring alive again And so the 1 first ingredient that we're looking at here this evening, we already know, we've been studying it, I've been hammering it week in and week out, this has been the basis of my message.

And maybe some of you are thinking, man, Ben, you spend a lot of time talking about the same thing over and over and over again.

You know, I never used to be like this as a preacher.

I used to go in, I used to travel and preach in different places and around the world from Indonesia.

I preach an evangelistic series down in Dominican Republic.

I've been in Europe, Asia, different churches.

And my mentality used to be at least, I don't know when I'm gonna see this group again, so I gotta tell them everything.

And the minutia of details that they probably don't know, I just gotta throw it at them and hit them over the head with it.

And then I'm gonna be done with it because I don't know when I'm gonna see this group again so I'm gonna tell them everything and the minutiae of details that they probably don't know I just got to throw it at them and hit them over the head with it and then I'm gonna be done with it because I don't know when I'm gonna see them again So I just got to tell them everything.

When I used to do that, I'm used to make people hate the Bible even more.

But I realized that if I am able to just get them to fall in love with scripture, when they are able to spend time in the Bible, when they can be reminded to read the Bible again and again.

They can be brought back to life without me telling them anything else.

Friends if you were to stop the video right now and you get on your knees and you pray to God and you say God help me to understand the Bible and you read it, you will experience revival.

Faith I Live By, 345, paragraph 4, FLB 345.4.

Let us give more time to the study of the Bible.

We do not understand the word as we should.

The book of Revelation opens with an injunction to us to understand the instruction that it contains.

When we understand what this book means to us, there will be seen among us a great revival.

And yes, Ellen White is specifically talking about the book of Revelation.

We got to study the Bible and if there's any book that is for our time it is the book of Revelation and maybe some of you growing up in the church a lot all your life you like oh that's all I hear revelation revelation revelation but you know what going to church as a Seventh-day Adventist all I heard was Sabbath Sabbath Sabbath however I didn't know the Sabbath personally for myself.

I didn't even understand how I could tell people and share with people what the Sabbath was from the Bible because I never read it nor studied it.

But here we are told that Revelation is the book for our time.

If we would study it, but friends really if we were to generalize that more than anything else, if we were to study the Bible, there would be seen among us a great revival she says.

1 of my favorite topics, but if there's anything that you gotta focus on, it's Revelation.

This is the book that demands our attention today of all the 66 books of the Bible.

Revelation, the last book there, is for our last time, which is we're living in today.

Friends, we need to take time and spend time in the word of God for that will revive us, amen?

It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.

The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

What is it that quickens us and brings us back to life?

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Revival and Reformation

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