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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Daniel Vis Weekend

Daniel Vis

01 The Final Warning Revelation 18:1

02 Walking with God

03 Walking with God

Father in heaven, we thank you for opportunities like this to meet and gather and just reflect on your word a little bit.

I pray that you would send the Holy Spirit to be here in our midst.

Be especially with me, give me strength, clarity of mind, the discernment to know what to say, what not to say.

Be with each listener here, Lord, that your Spirit would interpret the words in just the right way, that it would be a blessing to each person.

And I thank you and I pray this in Jesus' name.

So we have a long history of freedom in this country going all the way back, I guess you could say farther, but going at least back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, penned by Thomas Jefferson.

If you haven't read it in a while, it's worth looking at.

I had a member of my last church who actually memorized the Declaration of Independence, and he did a whole recitation.

It's an important document, and in many ways, that's regarded as the kind of the birth of our country, at least it sparked us on our path to independence as a nation.

Some 87 years later, Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address, he described that event, the signing of the Declaration, in these words, he said, "'Fourscore and 7 years ago, ' you've heard this before, right, "'our forefathers brought forth on this continent "'a new nation conceived in liberty "'and dedicated to the proposition "'that all men are created equal.'" I like that idea, that this nation was conceived in liberty.

Now, it's true we've not always lived up to our ideals, I'm not going to talk about that.

But we were birthed with this idea, this desire to fight against tyranny, to promote democracy.

And this was a major step in the history of our world because from the United States it spread around the world to many other countries.

In the great controversy you'll read that the reason that we have been blessed so wonderfully in this country is because of our love of freedom.

That's given us our prosperity and our success as a nation.

I read this little interesting tidbit, a couple little side notes before we get into the main points apparently George Washington immediately after the Declaration of Independence was ratified He took it out and read it on the steps of the Capitol Building in New York to this loud, raucous crowd that was all enthusiastic and zealous and they and immediately after they heard the words of the Declaration of Independence they ran over to a big statue of King George And they knocked it over and ultimately they melted it down and they made more more than 40, 000 43, 000 Cannonballs not cannonballs a musket balls for their rifles.

I thought wow, that's a pretty good start to this country Fledging fledging army getting its ammunition right there from a statue of King George.

Another interesting story I heard 1 time was about when they first made the Declaration of Independence, they had a printer by the name of Dunlap.

He printed like several hundred copies and they sent them out to all through the colonies and so these original copies were called Dunlap broadsides a man in Philadelphia bought a picture frame for $4 at a yard sale and he opened it up and guess what he found inside the frame He found 1 of those Dunlap broadsides.

It was worth more than 8000000 dollars How would you like that kind of freedom, you know money brings a certain kind of freedom, but that's not the freedom I want to talk about tonight Freedom is important every 1 of us.

As long as we have life, we want freedom.

Many times we don't appreciate it till it's taken from us.

But as long as we have freedom, we should remember it, we should acknowledge it, we should celebrate it.

Now, the Bible has a lot to say about liberty, and this is really what I want to talk about tonight.

If I had time, we could do a much deeper study in what the Bible has to say about true biblical freedom, but a few verses immediately come to my mind.

For example, in John chapter 8, verse 31 and 32, maybe you know the verse, some of you probably do.

Jesus was speaking to the Jews that believed on him and he said, if you continue in my word, Then are you my disciples in the deed, and the truth shall make you free.

Now clearly, this is a different kind of freedom than what I've been talking about so far, because this is not talking about a political freedom.

They were already under the bondage of the nation of Rome, and he wasn't talking about breaking free from Rome.

He was talking about a completely different kind of freedom.

He was talking about a spiritual freedom, an inner freedom, something that is incomparable and unconquerable, something the world can never take away.

Something that's not guaranteed by any constitution or by any Supreme Court or any political leader.

This is a different kind of freedom that's completely separate from political freedoms.

In John 8, 36, Jesus said, if the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.

This is an even better kind of freedom, an even better kind of liberty.

Paul said something similar in 2 Corinthians 3.

This is verse 17, right near the end of the chapter.

It says, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is what?

Wherever the spirit of God is, when the spirit of God comes into our life, it gives us a certain kind of liberty, this liberty, this freedom that Jesus was talking about.

In the context here, Paul was talking about the Jews, how they had a veil over their eyes and they couldn't see clearly And it was that veil that kept them in bondage.

And he said when that veil is taken away, when they're able to see clearly, the Holy Spirit comes in and gives them freedom.

And this is what Paul wanted them to experience, that true freedom.

It's a powerful passage, has nothing to do with government or politics, has everything to do with turning back to God.

The kind of freedom I wanna talk about tonight is something that is supernatural.

It's something that's spiritual, that's separate from the things that are going on in our world.

Something that God and God alone can give to us and it cannot be taken away by anything that happens in our political system here.

Am I making a little bit of sense so far?

You guys, by the way, do you usually say like amen or is this like 1 of those churches that just never says anything?

All right, so we need a different kind of freedom, right?

We want the kind of freedom that only God can give, that the world cannot take away, no matter what it does.

There's another verse that comes to my mind.

I'm just thinking through some that just sort of come up.

Here, Paul says to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

We should stand free in this liberty that God wants to give us.

Now I suppose you can make a case from this verse that we as Christians have some obligation to fight for our freedoms in the political sphere, especially our religious freedoms, but I don't think that is primarily what this verse is talking about.

It's not about those freedoms that we get from our political systems.

It's about the spiritual freedom that comes to us when the Holy Spirit comes into our life.

It's something that cannot be taken away by the political world.

It's that inner freedom that comes when the Holy Spirit fills us.

And that's what we need to stand fast in and not be distracted by other things, well, that are distractions.

There's a lot of people that are getting distracted by what's happening in this world and they forget that the only freedom that's going to count in the end is the freedom that God can give.

All right, I'm gonna work on you guys a little bit, see if I can get a few more amens.

I had to train my church back in Indiana.

Like, they were like just mumbling a little bit.

So you gotta help me out a little bit, okay?

You gotta remember too that it's a little past my bedtime.

This is like 10.30 for me at home, so I'm not used to preaching this late.

Anyway, turn with me and your Bible to Galatians 5.

I'm gonna look at that passage just a little bit more.

This is a really interesting passage in terms of talking about freedom.

Galatians chapter 5 verse 1 is the verse I just read.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Let's not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage and so on.

If you skip down to verse 5, you'll see the kind of freedom he's really talking about.

Back to Menu

Series

Daniel Vis Weekend

01 The Final Warning Revelation 18:1

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

When Lady Liberty Lays Down the Torch

49m

Antichrist: The One You've Never Known

Antichrist, Episode 6: Revealed

38m

Righteousness by Faith

Righteousness by Faith and the Three Angels Messages

58m

Last Day Events

A World in Crisis

1h 4m

Revelation 12 and the Forgotten Prophecy of Religious Liberty

57m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

17 The Judgment and 1844

1h 8m

Healing the Nations

The Bible and the First Amendment

48m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

19 Our Great High Priest’s Victory Over Death

1h

What Jesus Said

19. Religion and Politics

1h

Norman McNulty Weekend

01 Prophetic Peril in America

48m

Freedom in Christ

40m

Sound Doctrine