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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

All Hands on Deck

Scott Mayer

01 Realize, Realize, Real Lies

Tonight's topic, you're gonna hear about 3 kind of different messages from me over the course of this weekend, and I chose to do that for a reason.

I'm sure you guys are not unaware of the crazy things that we have in our world right now.

That it really is interesting to me that we can have such opposite ends of the spectrum on information and it's like how is that possible that people who are very intellectually smart, intelligent, schooled, you name it, they can have 2 totally polar opposite ideas and both seemingly seem true?

Do you guys feel like that is something we're experiencing in our world today?

And so, this message that I wanted to give you today is like, as the world gets crazier and crazier, how are we going to stay grounded to be able to see the difference between truth and error.

Because if you guys think that we just now have entered into some strange times, buckle your seat belts, it's about ready to get a whole lot more weird.

And I believe that God has given us the tools to be able to distinguish between those truths and those errors.

And that's what I really wanna talk about with this particular message.

Tomorrow's message for Sabbath will be a little bit different than this.

And then on tomorrow afternoon, we'll be talking about aliens.

And the reason that I would like to speak about that topic is because I believe it's important to understand and know where we stand in the wake of this time that we're living in, because I believe that we are running out of time on the clock.

And once that we see these events starting to play out and unfold into our world.

I hope that it lights a fire underneath you and you will, with extra energy, go out there to win souls because we don't have much time left to win them.

So that's kind of my goals with these messages.

Let's bow our heads for a quick word of prayer.

Dear gracious heavenly Father, Lord, as we open up this topic, may you just speak to our hearts, open our eyes.

Lord, we need to see the world with your eyes, not our own eyes, and help us to be able to distinguish between truth and error.

We love you and thank you in Jesus name, amen.

I think it's very interesting in the English language that we're able to say something with the same sound and it means something completely different.

But it is interesting to me that how is it possible that we have this very foretold things in the Bible that are telling us what's coming and this is nothing new.

I mean, in the world, when Jesus was stepping onto the scene, I mean, those Jews were not ignorant of what was happening in that day and age.

In fact, you remember the story of the 3 wise men that came to meet with the king and ask him, where is this newborn king that's been born?

He goes and asks the religious leaders, well please tell me in your prophecies and everything, go tell me when this baby's being born.

They went real quick, they told him, oh yeah he's going to be born around this time and he's going to be born in Jerusalem, I mean in Bethlehem.

And so discernment is the ability to judge well.

And like the second definition in a dictionary, it says the perception in the absence of judgment with the view to obtain spiritual guidance and understanding.

I believe there's a lot of wonderful ministries in our church.

We don't all do the same thing, and our ministry has taken the hard task to go and talk to the teenage to college age range.

And so that's why we pick the topics that we do, that's why we aim at the kids that we do.

And I'm shocked in today's world when I go in and I talk with young people, the lack of discernment that kind of is alarming to me.

And I often leave some of those conversations going, Lord have mercy upon this generation that's coming up.

And I'm sure every generation, my parents probably looked at my generation and said, oh Lord, have mercy on these young souls coming up.

I know it just seems like it's getting worse and worse.

So You guys have probably seen this floating around the internet, right?

This is that dress that some people saw 2 different colors.

You see black and gold, or do you see blue and, Let's see what the 2 colors are.

Black and, is blue and black or white and gold?

So isn't that interesting that you actually can see 2 different things?

Here's another thing that's kind of fascinating to me.

The box, I'm just talking about the box, A or B.

How many of you think B is darker than A?

It depends on how your brain is interpreting that information.

Now you guys are kind of thinking a little bit, they're actually the exact same color.

So it's interesting to me that we can look at the same topic and come up with 2 totally different ways of interpreting that same information.

Have you guys seen this floating around the internet?

You could read it with quite ease, couldn't you?

You know, I often will use examples like this to tell kids we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And our brains are incredibly intelligent and are able to pick up on some incredible information that we don't even need to see the full picture.

Your mind can breeze through this and read the whole thing even if it's all jumbled up.

And so I point these little fun illustrations out because There's a story in the Bible that comes from Luke, and this is when Jesus is being brought into the temple and going to be dedicated as a baby.

And remember this gentleman, Simeon, walks by, an occurrence that they had seen every single day, all the time, babies coming and going, all the time.

What was it that all of a sudden Simeon walks by and goes, there's the Son of God.

How was he able to discern that thing when the religious leaders are literally seeing the same thing, they've got their noses in the Bible, they're reading this all the content all the time, the same kind of content he's reading.

So I wanna share with you, because I believe that this gives us a little bit of a window into how do we begin to discern the things of God.

Luke 2 25 says, and behold there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon and this man was just and devout.

Here's some facts that he was a good man, he was devout, meaning he was worshiping God, and he's waiting for the consolation of Israel.

He's waiting for this time that he knows is coming close.

That's how he's able to discern something that the Jewish were really not waiting for the same thing as I'm sure he was understanding, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

Luke 2 26 says, "'And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.'" So not only is he waiting, he's a good man, he has a relationship with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is telling him pieces of information such as he would not see death until he had seen the Lord's Christ.

So he is led by the Spirit into the temple and when the parents brought the child Jesus to do according to this the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, Now Lord you are letting your servant depart in peace.

According to your word, my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all the peoples.

A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles.

Now here's something that's kind of interesting, because he's letting us know, Luke is recording these words, letting us know that he understood the mission of Jesus, that he was to be a light to the Gentiles.

That's a very important piece of information because you see the Jews, they just took that light that they were supposed to be sharing with the Gentiles and they hid it.

And the salvation is not even for them, it's just for us.

So here he's understanding of what the purpose of Jesus's mission really was, and to give glory to your people Israel.

And Joseph and his mother marveled at those things which were spoken of him.

And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother, "'Behold, the child is destined for the fall "'and the rising of many in Israel, "'for a sign which will be spoken against.

"'And yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.

You know, I got into a conversation with someone the other day of, when do you move out of the cities?

Like, when is it time to actually go out of the cities?

02 All Hands On Deck

Fears God, not man, and exercises discretion and strong discernment.

If that is your desire this morning, then I would like to echo the words that Moses spoke when the people came up to him and said, hey, there are people in the camp that are prophesying, make them stop.

If only the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would pour out His Spirit upon them.

It is my wish that you all were prophets, that you all were angels and messengers for God.

Because I believe, brothers and sisters, I believe that we are entering into a time that is making it extremely difficult to share the word of God.

I was asked when I came here to share a little bit of story about my experience of even getting involved in ministry.

I haven't actually spoken about my testimony in quite a little bit of time, haven't shared it in a while, and when it was asked of me, I said, you know what, this morning's message might fit with a little bit of those components.

So I'll share with you a little bit of a story because I really have 1 goal with sharing this message with you this morning, and it's really to inspire you that every single person in this room, every single person needs to be involved in ministry.

There is no 1 in this room that should sit by passively, you need to get involved in ministry.

All hands are needed on deck at this moment.

I come from a little town of Paradise, California.

In fact, I see some of my fellow paradisians in the room, in here.

There's actually a couple that have been here, actually, since the very first time I ever spoke in front of an audience.

The Lengs have come from Paradise, and they were there the first time.

Yeah, it was my first time never ever being able to speak in front of an audience before and hopefully I won't go 3 hours.

I'll try to keep it under 2 and a half today.

But I'll tell you what, it was a very interesting childhood I grew up in, being from this little town of paradise.

I grew up in a very typical Adventist home.

Like a lot of Adventists, I'm third, fourth generation.

My grandparents were huge in the mission field.

My mother's parents and grandparents were big in Japan and helping to bring Adventism into Japan.

In fact, a lot of the schools in the Philippines have my grandparents and great-grandparents' names on those schools.

And so I come from this long line of Adventism, and my parents, bless their heart, they were a very sweet, innocent parents that raised my brothers and I with no television and no video games.

I did not spend indoors like the rest of my colleagues and friends.

You'd go over to your friend's house and watch them, right?

So I was exposed to, in fact, the very first movie I ever saw in the theater was Rambo 3.

Not really your first movie you should be exposed to.

But I'll tell you what, I had a fascination, my brother and I had a fascination with filmmaking.

My father had an 8 millimeter film camera and he would buy my brother and I film and we would go out and we would film little stories with our brothers and our neighborhood kids.

And it was kind of just a passion of ours.

It grew into something that when I got into college, I didn't know what I wanted to do for a living, and I went to 1 of our Adventist schools, and they offered a film studies program.

And all of a sudden I found out that, hey, Harrison Ford's brother was gonna be 1 of the teachers.

Great, someone famous is gonna teach at our school.

And real fast, we got an opportunity to watch a couple films being made in San Francisco and that bit me and I was sold for the rest of my life.

My parents were big proponents on the spirit of prophecy.

I read a lot of the Spirit of Prophecy growing up.

I read the Conflict of the Ages series in high school.

I'm gonna make a distinguishment about that.

So I understood what the war between Christ and Satan was all about, but I'll tell you what, when I got into college I was unprepared for what the world was starting to replace in my mind.

I went, of course, trying to make up for lost time.

Maybe some of you have had this experience.

Maybe some of you don't remember, but there used to be a DVD store that you would, you know, go and rent these little plastic things.

And when I would come home, I would rent stacks of movies and I would just try to gobble up because I wanted to make them.

So I would watch and pay attention how they were making them.

And when I would go to the theater on the weekend, I was 1 of those people that would buy 1 ticket and see 6 films.

I was trying to make up for lost time, but what I was really doing was I was replacing the things of God with the things of the world.

And all of a sudden I got the opportunity to leave college and actually go down to Hollywood and enter into the business.

She was an actress, still is an actress today.

I went and stayed with her and I saw how people treated her.

And even though I had technically understood how to make a film, I kind of said, wow, I want to do that.

I want to get with an agent, and I want to take those kind of classes.

I jumped into the acting side of the business.

But real quick, Within months, I lost my way.

I stopped reading my Bible, I stopped going to church, I started doing drugs, I started hanging out at parties, and I started saying, if this is all the world has to offer, then I want to chase all the things in the world that you think would make you happy.

And time and time again, I chased women, money, fame, houses, you name it, I went after it, and I found a broken road every single time.

And it wasn't until about 10 years into this experience that my, I have an older brother that's a year older than I am, and he invited me to come back to his 10-year high school reunion, which was at an Adventist school.

I hadn't been around Adventists in about 10 years, completely walked away from the church.

And so he said, why don't you come back and you know share your share your weekend with me and let's go back to our old hometown up in paradise and we can rekindle you know some of the old spots that we used to visit.

And of course I said no I don't, that's not for me, I don't want that.

But he convinced me and I ended up going anyway.

And on that weekend I had a transformational experience where God was not going to let me live the life that I was choosing to live.

He was going to knock on the door of my heart and I had a kid come up to me.

He was a pastor's kid, first to try drugs, first to get kicked out of school.

He was a mess and here he was in his right mind in a suit and he came up to me at the school and he said, Scottie, I have a question for you.

And I just kind of went, Are you kidding me?

Like, how did God get a hold of your heart?

And so he invited me over to his house that afternoon and I went over there very curious.

When you see someone's life truly transformed, there's something attractive about that and I wanted to know how did God get a hold of this person's heart here.

So I went over to the house and he shared Bible texts with me and prayed and I had a supernatural experience that I went home and I went, what am I doing?

I'm this kid from paradise of California from all places.

I know there's a war between Christ and Satan.

Here I'm totally on drugs, have no care of God whatsoever.

And that realization was enough for me to go, God show me you.

There was never a point where I said he doesn't exist.

I knew he existed, but I said Lord show me.

03 Alien Deceptions

Sabbath, I hope you all had as wonderful of a lunch as I had.

It was a very blessed Sabbath fellowshipping and I always look forward to that.

It's always fun for me and I got the chance to reconnect with some of the people that I was with, like were out here when I came 10 plus years ago and gave some presentations at the Upland SDA Church.

And so it was really kind of neat, like even some pictures came out and I was like, oh wow, 10 years will do a lot to someone.

Me, only me though, they still look the same.

But no, it was a very blessed Sabbath and it's fun to be able to talk about some of these things.

You know, I feel so blessed to have the work that I do.

I really feel like if I were to sit down and think about, well, what is it that I'm actually doing?

I'm really taking a lot of these topics, no matter what they are, and I'm saying how can I teach some beautiful Adventist truth through whatever the topic is?

I'm really taking pop culture and I'm really attaching a deep-seated Adventist belief system through that topic.

And I hope as we teach these things, especially to our younger generation, that you should be able to talk about these things because these are the things that are gonna pop up, especially coming towards the end of the world.

Now I wanna preference this particular talk with you because my purpose of sharing this information with you is not because I think you're going to be deceived by this message.

So I'm not here to convince you whether it's real, whether it's not real.

I've never believed that there was such things called aliens.

It was really 1 of the guys in my office, Mikey, that was huge into this topic.

He came from the Baptist and evangelical world and he kind of left the church, went into the occult, and then when he was sort of thumbing around trying to find truth, he really got sucked up into the alien movement and he actually believed that these were real.

So when this topic came up in our office and they wanted to do something on it, I was always kind of, well, let's work backwards from here.

What is it that we're actually gonna teach people and what is it that they're gonna learn from this.

And it was very interesting as we kind of started to explore to see people on the internet that were quote unquote Christian and how they actually believed in aliens.

I live in the Bible Belt, I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

So I quickly grabbed a camera and Mikey and I actually went downtown Chattanooga and I said, I really wonder, do other people really believe in this stuff?

And I was shocked at how many people came by.

Oh, my uncle was taken up into a spaceship.

Oh, I know people that have communicated with them.

And it's like, so let me ask you a question.

If you thought that these aliens are real and they had the answers to peace and they were to come down here, our world is in turmoil right now, and they were to give you the solution to the world's problems, would you listen?

It was an overwhelming, yes I would, yes I would, yes I would, yes I would.

Brothers and sisters, I'm telling you that this particular message right here is very, very strange.

We were working on this project with 1 of the gentlemen that worked with Amazing Facts and he said that he had to stop looking into this because supernatural things started happening when he would talk about this or preach about it.

The night that Mikey put this this topic together, the very night he spoke at an Adventist church, when he walked up to the pulpit, he got a message in his phone his mother had a stroke that day.

There is something strange with this message.

There is something that the devil has been working on for many, many years and he is going to have an extraterrestrial component to his final masquerade as coming as the cosmic Christ.

So my purpose of telling you this is not so that you can go, oh wow, yeah okay We know that they're demons.

It's really to show you where we are in the wake of time This is here brothers and sisters.

They're coming out They're starting to communicate with people.

We are Here And so the message I talked to you this afternoon about was get involved.

This clock is rapidly running to the end of its life and I'm telling you if if that's the 1 thing that you walk away from this message, that's all I hope, is that you guys go, okay, we're here, let's get out there, let's win some souls, let's double up our efforts and get going.

So, that was my Disclaimer before getting involved and started in this.

1 Peter 3.15 says, "'But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts "'and be ready always to give an answer "'to every man that asks you for a reason "'for that hope that is in you with meekness and fear.'" I believe as Christians, as we interact with the world, we need answers for some of these things.

And I believe that if we have some precious truths about the state of the dead, about some of these things that are going to be involved in this deception, then it is our duty to go out and share those truths with the world.

And so I would hope that you will want to learn a few things about some of these different topics in case you ever come across the need to be able to talk about it.

Let no man deceive you by any means, for on that day, that day shall not come except there be a falling away first and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, says 2 Thessalonians 2.3.

There is nothing covered that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.

Do you notice there's a lot of stuff coming to the surface right now?

With the whole Me Too movement, There is a lot of things being uncovered right now that have been hidden for a long time in our world.

I mean there is evidence strongly with all kinds of things that you don't have to dig around on the internet very long.

It's hard to get away with some of this stuff in today's world.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, the devil and Satan which deceives the whole world.

Series

All Hands on Deck

02 All Hands On Deck

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

How Do You Know God’s Will for Your Life

47m

Community Services

How to Become an Organized Center

50m

Children's Ministries

Sabbath School and the Home

1h 16m

The Cost of Being a Medical Missionary

The Cost of Being a Medical Missionary Part 1

31m

Plenary

GYC Beyond

1h 17m

ASI 2009 Youth Meetings

From Partyer to Teacher

29m

Seminars

Beholding Christ in the Least of These: Serving in Practical Ministry

43m

Is Social Media a Sin?

50m

Elder, Deacon, Deaconess Basic Training

Deacons and Deaconesses Basic Training - Part 2

1h 16m

Repairer of the Breach

36m

Plenary

You Won’t Need Elbows in Heaven

51m

The Life of a Rich Man without Money

1h 5m

Sound Doctrine