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University SDA Church- East Lansing

Jesus On Religion

Jermaine Gayle

Jesus on Doctrine

Jesus on Scripture

Jesus on Shame

Jesus on Suffering

Jesus on Justice

Jesus on Exclusivity

And welcome to night 2 of our series, Jesus on Religion.

I actually took the liberty of labeling the stool for you.

We're going to talk about this in just a second, but if you don't mind just bowing your heads with me as we pray together.

Holy Father in heaven, we would like to thank you for another day of life.

We ask you now, Lord, that as we come to your word that you may give us even more life, and life abundantly.

We ask there Father that you be our teacher this evening, and that you may guide us into all truth.

We pray, Lord, that as we allow our lives to be molded by your word, that we too may see what you intend for us, is our prayer in Jesus' name.

So you remember we talked about the 4 witnesses.

If you were here last night, you remember that each witness has a name according to John chapter 5.

And these were the names that Jesus gave to those 4 witnesses.

We're going to go through them again because we're laying the foundation, okay?

And who was the prophet that Jesus made reference to?

And then the second witness was the works of God.

Now these 2 are hidden back here, and I'm going to see if you can...

I have no prizes, by the way, on this quiz in particular, but let's see if you have it.

What's the other witness according to Jesus in John chapter 5?

So we have the Word of God and the voice of God.

We say that if someone wants to live a stable life, This would be the foundation on which they must rest their experience and their existence.

If a society wants to be stable, that society must sit on this solid foundation.

So our personal lives depend on these 4 witnesses stabilizing us.

I want to talk to you about a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson.

I'm talking about the Thomas Jefferson, the president, the third president of the United States.

Now I didn't know this about Thomas Jefferson, but he actually really made an impact in the world at the age of 33.

Anyway, the point is Thomas Jefferson was very very smart.

He was the kind of intellectual that really made an impact in the world around him and Thomas Jefferson actually wrote in the Declaration of Independence, He was the 1 that coined the term that all men are created, you know the rest of it, equal.

Thomas Jefferson really had a challenge though, because really 1 of the 4 witnesses made him very uncomfortable.

1 of the 4 witnesses made him very uncomfortable.

1 of the 4 witnesses made Thomas Jefferson so uncomfortable that he decided to take a razor blade and cut out portions of the Bible.

Thomas Jefferson decided that he would take the volume, the book, this witness, the Word of God, and he would narrow it down to about 44 pages.

Thomas Jefferson actually, like I said, he took his razor blade and cut out portions of the Bible.

Everything that he thought that did not represent in the Gospels, that did not represent God, he felt, had to be removed.

So he cut it out and he narrowed down the life of Christ in the Gospels to what he called just simply the morals and the philosophy of Jesus.

He said, I have performed this operation for my own use by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book and arranging the matter which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a what?

So he calls the rest of the Bible a dunghill.

And his goal was to isolate the diamonds from it.

So he cut pages out, portions out, sections out, and that's what he was doing.

The result is an octavel of 46 pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.

Thomas Jefferson took his Bible, cut it up, and he said, what I wanted was pure and unsophisticated doctrines.

He said, The care I've taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that I am in fact a what?

That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Christ.

Doesn't mean that you're a real Christian if you take a blade to the scriptures and cut out the portions that you don't feel comfortable with.

But he had some doubts though about his rendering of the gospels.

In fact, Thomas Jefferson did not want his book to be published.

The time, the point in which it was found actually, was after he was dead.

And then the Thomas Jefferson Bible was published.

He hid it in his room and he would read it every single night, his own volume of the Word of God, 44 pages.

Oh friends, are you like Thomas Jefferson?

See, you may not put a blade to the Bible, but there are portions of it that you may feel very uncomfortable with.

People are doing this more and more today, more than ever.

They try to dissect and they try to resist or deny portions of the scriptures.

By the way, there was a curator who found the book of Thomas Jefferson, and this is what he had to say.

His name is a man by the name of Cyrus Adler.

Cyrus said, In 1886, I was engaged when a fellow of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in cataloging a small but very valuable Hebrew library.

He wrote, amongst the books were 2 copies of the New Testament.

The 2 highly edited English New Testaments he discovered also came with a note indicating that they had once been the property of Thomas Jefferson who had used them to make an abridged version of the Gospels.

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Series

Jesus On Religion

Jesus on Doctrine

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Loss

41m

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Lessons in Warfare

Special Forces

51m

The Big Questions (Evening Meetings)

10. The Reformation Will Not Be Televised

2h 6m

GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Music

God’s Instruction on Music

1h

Hands-Free Operation

56m

Love and Hate

41m

Plenary

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid!

57m

The Almost Overmastering Delusion

54m

The Godhead- Part 3

1h

There is Hope

Extreme Makeover

59m

Experience The Power

Good People Doing Bad Things

1h 14m

Look Up and Live

How Are You Living?

42m

Sound Doctrine