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South Bay SDA Church

Eric Walsh

The Battle for the Final Generation

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to once again study your word and go into these subjects.

Lord, I just ask for your Holy Spirit to be poured out upon this place again.

We are asking, Lord, that angels that excel in wisdom and strength be given charge over this place.

And we ask, Lord, that Satan be bound, him and his demons, and cast far away.

Let the Holy Spirit lead now is our prayer in Jesus' name.

All right, so We're going to start in Luke chapter 15, 11 through 13.

We're going to modernize it and talk about how some of this looks for today.

Luke 15, 11 says, and he said a certain man had 2 sons.

And the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me, and he divided unto them his living.

So the younger son comes to his father and says, listen, I want my inheritance now.

In this time, in ancient Hebrew tradition, for a son to do this would be a statement that says, I wish you were dead.

It was a great insult for him, the younger son, to go to his father and ask for the money he doesn't, isn't supposed to get until his father had passed and ask for it while his father was alive.

Because as the younger son especially, it was his job to continue to help his father produce wealth for him to inherit.

So it isn't simply that he's asking to get his money now, he's also extracting from the family in that he is not producing for the family.

The Bible says the father divided his living.

Verse 13, and not many days after the younger son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country And there wasted his substance with riotous living.

So the son, as soon as he gets this, you know, he gets the check or I guess the Zell transfer nowadays.

He gets his money and the son quickly begins to pack his brand new bags he bought.

Takes everything, grabs his X-Box and all of his other stuff, throws it into the bags, packs them up nicely, and he is off.

The Bible says he took his journey Into a what?

Let me submit to you today that because of technology, the far country is not so far anymore.

You can be in full rebellion against God in your basement.

The Bible says in there, he wasted his substance with riotous living, with rebellious living.

Church, this is where many young people are today and the parable is designed not for the children of the world, it is designed for the young people in the church.

This is not a statement about the kid who never heard about God.

This is a parable for the kid who grew up going to Sabbath school.

It's a parable for the kid who was in Pathfinders.

The kid who sang in the choir, played in the orchestra.

The 1 who went to East Coast Korean camp meetings.

They got the best camp meeting, I'm sorry y'all.

And so if you grew up in the church, you're 1 of these 2 young men.

And hence, you reach this place where he's wasted his substance, the scripture says, with riotous living.

So, what we've seen is more riotous living.

This is an increase in non-religious adults in the United States.

You can see we have watched since the early 1990s, we've watched a precipitous increase to where 42% of adults, and compared to 29% of all adults were religiously affiliated, of young adults, sorry, compared to 29% of all adults.

Young adults disproportionately are walking away from God.

Today it is different and I wish I could tell you that this is in those Adventist homes that may not be so strict or may not be so, so, so, so, you know, they may not recite Ellen White as much, I'll say it that way.

But I want to submit to you that I have seen kids who are from the most conservative circles still wind up in the far country.

And in a five-year research project, they did it that I like to use research to quantify things.

They made a book from this research, You Lost Me, Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church and Rethinking Faith.

It's just a couple things I want to highlight for today.

The first 1 is that the second reason teenagers and 20-somethings experience of Christianity is shallow.

They say, they say, this is what the young people say.

They say, church is irrelevant to their daily lives, watch this, and there isn't enough in-depth study of the Bible and a real in-depth relationship or experience with God.

They didn't say there weren't enough pizza parties.

They didn't say you didn't bring in the latest Christian rock or rap groups.

They said in fact we are no longer in church because church seemed irrelevant and we didn't study the Bible in depth enough.

Church comes across as antagonistic to science, but that really goes along with not studying the Bible properly.

Here, number 4, young Christians' church experience, this 1 I found interesting, so I highlighted it, related to sexuality are often simplistic or judgmental.

The Modes of teaching that the church uses are not relevant to the sexual exposure and education young people have outside the church.

What is really happening is most young people get their, all of their sexual education outside of the church.

Because when I was growing up, and I don't know about you, but when I grew up in the church, they didn't talk about this except to basically say, don't get pregnant or don't bring somebody back pregnant.

There was really no other teaching at all.

They never taught us how beautiful sexual relations are if done as God prescribes it.

So young people don't know what to do with it.

They don't understand there is something worth waiting for.

And I'll give you a couple of things about the exclusive nature and the church feels unfriendly when you struggle with doubt.

So there's a lot of things they said, but the 2 I highlighted I think are key and we'll come back to those.

This is the age ranges of Seventh-day Adventists in North America.

I just want you to notice that the largest group is 54 to 72 years old, the green group.

The blue group, another huge section, so 63% are 54 years or older in the church.

In fact, there's a study that shows that if you went back to 1965, like the vast, the average age of the Adventist Church was 35 years old.

You fast forward to 1995, the average age of the church was 65 years old.

So, young people especially are critical.

And so, you see the 0 to eight-year-olds, they fit in here, 9 to 23.

I wish they broke up the 9 to 23-year-old group.

But you know these 0 to eight-year-olds have no choice but to come to church, so it's not like, I mean, they don't really count, do they?

A lot of you are going to be like, I'm 5, mom, I'm not going to church, right?

So you see that we have an age problem here.

And my point is many of our young people are on the road to the far country.

They're about to waste their substance on riotous living.

And I wish the wasting of substance was simply dollars and cents.

But what you waste in the world are bits and pieces of your soul that's what you waste and any of us and I don't raise your hand but if you're like me and you drifted sometimes and wound up at the nightclub and other places you shouldn't have been.

You know that when you drift, you leave a piece of yourself there.

Back to Luke 15, 13 says this, not many days after, read this verse again, the younger son gathered all together, took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

And when he had spent everything, there arose a mighty famine in that land, and he began to what?

Now, the way that he began to be in warmth, the way we all understand, if you remember the way the parable is taught, this is the guy, the younger brother, the guy who takes his inheritance and goes to the far country, when they were in line at the club, what did he do?

He paid, he said, I know somebody out there at the club, he's not even saying that.

He's Sanctified now, don't worry about it.

So he would pay for everybody in the line.

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The Battle for the Final Generation

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