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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Adrian Zahid

Visualizing the Possible

Dear Father, as I talk today, I ask that you be with us, and that you impress through the Holy Spirit upon the hearts of my listeners, the importance of taking action, the importance of visualizing, of seeing the possibilities.

When I was thinking about what to say and I was planning what I was going to say, I had an illustration in my mind that defies me today, the empty seats.

Because I was going to say something and it would have gone really well, but I'm gonna say it anyway.

I'm gonna start this sermon kind of a little bit differently.

I'm gonna trace some parts of my life and my experience with Avent Hope and then I'm going to transition into the scripture and the Bible part of it and hopefully you will be blessed.

I came to Avent Hope in 2004, November, the first time.

And I remember coming and someone invited me to come.

And this guy told me, he said that, there's this conservative group that I know you'd really like.

And the first time I came, I came and I sat.

And then a few weeks later, I came back again, and I still wasn't impressed.

I just, people, you know, people would say things, I would listen to the Sabbath school lesson, I would hear people preach, and it just wasn't resonating with me.

And then the vacation, Christmas came, and January, and now people were talking about some restoration.

Restoration is coming and everyone should get ready for it because Pastor Randy Skeet is gonna be talking about it and he's gonna be preaching.

And I just thought in my mind, restoration.

And it has been going on for several years now.

In 2002, it started with somebody, and then 2003, and then 2004 now, and 2005, and so on and so forth.

And I thought, if you had restoration the year before, why are you having it again?

1 of the greatest, 1 of the greatest restorations ever.

But then I started coming afterwards and I heard how wonderful it was.

And I remember going to Loma Linda, the Del Webb Library, and getting online and listening to the restoration sermons, because in those days the audio verse didn't exist.

And so going onto the restoration website and listening to the sermons, I listened to Randy Skeet's sermons, Who is this man?

And I had never heard sermons like that before.

And I listened through all of the sermons.

Peter Gregory, David Asherick, everything.

I listened to all of them and I decided that this would be the place where I would worship.

We were still at 20, 25 people, 30 people now once in a while and we had a regular speaker coming once a month and then others would preach from Avid Hope Leadership.

In those days, leadership did everything.

Now we have the executive committee and the board and whatever else.

Only leadership could be on the platform.

Only leadership could collect the offering and could manage the sound and everything else.

And I started attending and 1 day I was at Potluck and 1 of the leadership, Ken Lim, he sat next to me And he said, you know, I'm just tired of this.

I'm tired of putting out chairs and putting things back and doing all this work.

And so I started helping out with chairs.

And then slowly I graduated to helping out with offering.

And then I got some some helpers to help me to make it more efficient.

I got some helpers and I asked some guys.

I asked him to help collect the offering and help put away the chairs.

And I asked David Stewart, another guy who was a lawyer at the time, and then there was a doctor, I forget his name now, Ramiz, Ramirez, I don't know, I forget his name.

Anyway, I asked him to help and my pitch was, if I asked you to help once every 6 weeks, would you do it?

Who wouldn't want to help once every 6 weeks, right?

And so I found 6 guys, so you would only help once every 6 weeks.

And we had a Yahoo group that would remind people when it was their turn, and it was all automatic.

And slowly, as I continued to learn more and I started to study more, I went back.

It was called, Great, I'm forgetting the book now.

I was fighting an immigration case in court.

And so I would stand at the ABC and I would read for an hour, then put it back, go home, and then come back the next day and read another hour.

I just kept reading and reading and reading.

I went in March, the Adventist Heritage Library, the section, they have a sale where they sell books for $1 or $2 or something like that.

I went and I bought every book that I had never read that was recommended to me.

And then I had an opportunity to visualize something that was impossible.

I heard that Amazing Facts was coming to town, they were going to LA, and they were going to be passing out 25, 000 final events DVDs at the General Conference for Pentecostals.

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Visualizing the Possible

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