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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Rich Constantinescu

Accessing the Supernatural: From New Age to Scripture Memory

The privilege to be in Loma Linda and beautiful songs.

We are coming from Israel, from Romania, from California, all kinds of places.

I know some of you and others of you I'm looking forward to getting to know.

Tonight's message is not a promotion for you to access the new age.

Just want to make that clear from the very outset.

However, at the end of time, where we find ourselves looking at the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, we certainly will come into contact with 1 supernatural force or another.

And this is tonight my story of how I moved from New Age into Scripture memory in accessing the supernatural.

My parents escaped from Romania in the 1970s.

It was an international event, because at the time Ceaușescu, the Prime Minister or the dictator of Romania, was promoting Romania as a moderate communist nation, kind of a broker between the capitalist West and the communist Soviets.

And so he was promoting himself as a moderate communist leader of a moderate communist nation, and when my parents escaped and then went on a hunger strike for 18 days in Italy to encourage the Romanian government to let them have their children back after they escaped because they had to escape without them.

Then it kind of took the covering off of what was really happening in Romania.

So it was widely, widely covered in the press.

Radio for Europe was running hourly updates on the family.

Finally, after 18 days, They were granted the privilege of being together with their children.

The Romanian government released the children.

And they ended up in Chicago, Illinois, where I was born.

So I didn't know what happened before I was born.

When I was born, I just came up and all I knew I was from a mammalian, sodmiley-eating family and I was living in Chicago and my parents spoke with an accent, but I had no idea about all this great history.

And so as I grew up, I remember I saw some pictures that my dad had taken in Romania.

He was a photographer, and they were all black and white pictures.

And he said, or rather I was looking at them, and I noticed that it looked very dreary and gray and everything.

And I said, I'm so glad that you escaped from Romania because it was a good idea to come to America.

And they said, why do you say that, Richie?

And I said, because there's no color in Romania.

And I was certain in my little brain that I had figured it out.

And you know, growing up I didn't really realize I was involved in this great supernatural drama, that I was part of something that was outside of this world, that actually my life meant something not only to the people around me, but it actually meant something to God and to the universe.

And so as I grew up and I acclimated to the culture of America, I really wanted to be an American.

I don't speak with a Romanian accent, as you notice.

My parents really wanted to be Americans, and they said, we will speak only English in this household because we need to be able to work in this country.

And so they came to America and they wanted to speak.

And so I tried to acclimate myself to America as much as I could.

And as I did so, I picked up some bad habits along the way.

This is me when I was a little baby, hadn't picked up those bad habits yet.

My parents were both immigrants, so they both needed to work to support our family.

And really, you know the most powerful job in the world, the most powerful position is the position of a mother.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the luxury of being able to have the mother in the home, and so I was raised by, for the first few years, 4 or 5 years, by my grandmother, who made up for her lack of English and her lack of energy like we had with some flexible rods at the top of the refrigerator.

And so she loved me very much, but she was very regular in her corrective actions towards me.

And so I was growing up with my cousin here, and summertime was a difficult time Because what happens during the summer when you're a kid?

You're by yourself and then you find neighbors that are by themselves and then you learn all the habits of the neighborhood, right?

And so I found myself listening to the music that the kids were listening to.

You know, I won't repeat the names of my former gods to you, my musical gods, my entertainment gods.

I don't need to give them more publicity than they already have, amen?

But I chose, suffice it to say, other teachers than God and His angels and His prophets and patriarchs and apostles and the Scriptures and His own Son.

And these teachers, just like teachers that we find in the Scripture, had another spirit in them besides something supernatural.

There was something supernatural in what I was involved in.

And I'm going to tell some of those stories tonight.

I really wanted to be like everyone around me and everyone that I thought was cool, but I didn't I just I was missing something.

1 of My friends, he said to me, he said, have you ever tried, and he named a psychedelic substance.

And he said, well, if you like this substance, you'll like this substance.

And it was at the last concert, outside the concert rather, that the Grateful Dead gave in Chicago in 1995 on July 9th.

They're in the parking lot where a little hippie teenager purchased his first psychedelic substance.

And Jerry Garcia then died very soon after that last concert.

I decided I did not want anything to do with God.

I wanted to just do whatever everyone else was doing around me.

I thought, Okay, these people are having fun, they're listening to this music, they're having these experiences.

Why would I want someone to bind me down, to restrict me, to block me, to fence me in?

I want to do everything that I want to do.

And so I told my dad, I don't want anything to do with your God, I told him.

And it pains me so much that I would say such a thing because God loves us so much, all of us.

You know, last night you didn't have a meeting about what you would do today if the sun didn't rise.

What if the oxygen wasn't there for you to breathe?

You know, we didn't have a committee meeting last night about that.

What are we going to do tomorrow if we step out of bed and we float towards the ceiling?" Every single day God takes care of us.

I thought everything was physical and tangible.

1 night I was with some friends and we were having a party and if there was a chart that was like a chart of my mind and you were to see where is God on this chart?

The radar was not showing any blips or beeps or there was no evidence whatsoever in my life of God working in my life.

In fact, if you had taken a poll of people in my school, who would be the least likely person to become a pastor?

Well, forget the pastor part, how about just the success in the world, like to be able to survive?

I was not your hopeful student at some points in my life, okay?

And I was having this party with my friends, completely outside of God, when suddenly the thousands of thousands of lessons that I had been taught as a child about God's love, about the prophecies, about Jesus coming again.

All of the things that I had been taught came with such rapidity and force In a moment that I least expected it, let me just paint the picture for you.

I had Christmas lights taped to my ceiling.

I was listening to electronic dance music, and I was surrounded by godless people.

This is not a promotion for any of those things.

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Accessing the Supernatural: From New Age to Scripture Memory

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