ASI 2012: It's Time... To Be About Our Father's Business

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ASI 2012 Plenary Sessions

Frank Fournier

It’s Time... To Afflict Our Souls

Allen Lloyd

Increasing Your Capacity to Learn, Retain, and Apply Knowledge

John Bradshaw

Doubtless

ASI Members in Action

Abraham Lincoln, Ellen White, Emotional Intelligence & True Leadership

Steve Wohlberg

Christ Our Righteousness in the Last Crisis

Chad Kreuzer

It’s Time... To Overcome

Self and Salvation - The Two Emotional Attributes Necessary For Salvation

Phil Mills

Friends Forever

Shawn Boonstra

My Father’s Business

Ted N.C. Wilson

ASI Presents

Steven Grabiner

He Shall Reign Forever

You have no idea how good it is to be at this convention.

I always have to check in case she left me.

Just come through 2 of the toughest years of our lives together, And it was the prayers of this crowd that held us together.

A special thank you to my family at It Is Written.

And to the folks at Eden Valley, who actually helped me bounce back.

Now, this morning, I was going to preach a sermon called, Whatever Happened to the Lost?

But as you came into the auditorium this morning, it had become an article in the Adventist Review, and so everybody already has the sermon.

And so we could probably take our time, and I could get everybody to pull out their copy of the review and we could quietly read the article, and when we're done, I'll come back up and have the closing prayer.

But I suppose that would make for bad television unless I were to hold up 1 copy in front of the camera and very slowly pan it for the TV audience, too.

It'd be like 3ABN reading theater, wouldn't it?

I'd like to take a look at the Word of God.

And in the time we have together, I want to explore it a little bit.

It's in the book of Jude, right before the end of your Bible, just before the book of Revelation.

It's the last few It's the last few verses, verse 22 of the book of Jude.

And on some have compassion, making a distinction, but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.

Father, as we've opened the Bible, we know in our hearts that we are not about to listen to human opinion.

It's the voice of our Almighty God, our Creator, our loving Savior.

And hearts are changed by the Word of God, and it's our prayer that our hearts would be changed by the Word of God this morning.

I feel like a toddler handling the fine china when I come out and preach.

I have no right except that you call us to tell the story of what Jesus has done.

And so it's my prayer that what I say would not be human opinion, but that you would bless me from – with thoughts from the throne room, and that above all else we would see Jesus more clearly, that we would become a little more like Him.

And when He speaks to our hearts today from the Word, it is our covenant with you that we will follow Jesus.

So take this time, bless it with your presence, I ask in Jesus' name.

I read this story the other day about a Very, very successful man who worked very hard for a very long time.

And he came to the end of his long and very successful career and the time had come for him to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labor just a little bit.

And it was something he had earned because he really was very successful.

In fact, this guy was so successful that when he got up in the morning and looked out of his bedroom window, he literally owned everything he could see.

He could not see past the boundaries of his property.

And that's not because he was on some large ranch somewhere in the state of Texas, as impressive as some of those ranches are.

It's because this guy had something bigger than those.

Oh yeah, the big ranches for small potatoes compared to this man.

As a matter of fact, he could get on a horse and he could ride in any direction for a week or 2 and never leave his property, Ever, because this man is Nebuchadnezzar at the end of his career in Daniel chapter 4, the man who quite literally conquered the whole known world and gave us the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

He managed to conquer the Assyrians and put an end to their domination of the Babylonian people, and then his son Nebuchadnezzar took it a little bit further.

And before he knew it, he was down to the south and to the west, and he was knocking on Egypt's door.

And by the year 597, He'd been to Jerusalem a couple of times and utterly conquered it He was in Daniel 4 at the end of his career the king of the world and everybody still remembers him to this day in almost every culture and in Daniel chapter 4 after huge success on the battlefield and after a very impressive reconstruction program in the city of Babylon, fixing all the damage that had been caused by the Assyrian hordes, he was rightfully proud of everything that he'd accomplished.

The old temples to the Babylonian gods that were in disrepair, he rebuilt those.

He created a revival of Babylonian religion.

He was a spiritual man at the heart of things.

The royal palace, the 1 his dad had started building, he finished that.

And according to history, he spared absolutely nothing.

He decked it out in a way that nobody else could afford.

It was covered with cedar and bronze and gold and silver and precious stones.

The average population couldn't afford it, and the whole world talked about this palace.

The city wall, you've heard about that in the prophecy seminars.

The triple wall to keep the enemies out of Babylon.

She literally sat as a queen, a triple wall, too high for the enemies to go over, too thick for the enemies to dig their way through.

Nebuchadnezzar also built an underground passage that connected the 2 halves of that city.

There might be 1 in the back of some Bibles.

If you remember it, the city was roughly bisected by the Euphrates River.

And so he built a tunnel to connect the 2 halves of the city, a real engineering feat given the time period that we're talking about.

Then he also built a bridge over the river with specially constructed pilings that would not wear down in the current of the river.

And it was also engineered so that when the river came out the other end of that bridge, it slowed down the current enough that it would no longer erode the foundations of the city.

That happened because 1 day his wife came to see him.

Nebby, she said, and only his wife could call the king of Babylon Nebby.

I've been living here in Babylon for quite a while.

We're living out here on the plains, and out here on the plains last week I watched our dog run away for 5 days.

I can still see him out there on the horizon.

And I'm from Persia, and we had mountains.

Now I can identify with Nebuchadnezzar's wife.

They have something there they call a mountain.

Let me assure you, Marylanders, that is not a mountain.

She was lonely for her mountains, and so he built the hanging gardens of Babylon.

He gave her an artificial mountain right in the city.

When Nebuchadnezzar was finished building that town, it was absolutely stunning and it is no accident that the world still remembers that city to this day.

When people say that ancient Babylon was 1 of the wonders of the world, that's almost an understatement.

It was so mind-boggling, so beautiful, so impressively engineered that we really don't have much that rivals it to this day.

Not when you compare apples with apples, not at all.

And now At the end of his career in Daniel chapter 4, it is time for the king to rest.

And he did what any of us would probably do.

Series

ASI 2012 Plenary Sessions

My Father’s Business

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Seminar: Lift Him Up

Lift Him Up: Evangelism’s Last and Only Hope

1h 20m

The Vindication of God

45m

The Cross & The Great Controversy

Redemption and Conflict

35m

ASI 2012 Seminar: It's Time

Stand Firm

1h 22m

Why Am I a SDA?

5. What’s Wrong with Being a Cultural Adventist?

49m

God’s Prophetic Movement, Message, and Mission and Their Attempted Neutralization by the Devil

1h 11m

Eric Walsh Weekend

01 Purified in Persecution

1h 1m

The Essence of the Gospel

30m

The Long Journey Home

A Pillar and a Prophet

52m

Jesus On Prophecy

Is there a Prophet in the House

38m

Breakout Session #2

The High Priest and the Second Advent Movement

1h 14m

Revelation Made Simple

18. Revelations Spiritual Revolution for a New Millennium

57m

Sound Doctrine