GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Why am I a Seventh-Day Adventist?

David Wright

01 Does the Truth Really Matter?

02 Isn’t Loving Jesus Enough?

03 What Makes You So Special?

04 What Makes the Devil Angry?

05 What’s Wrong with Being a Cultural Adventist?

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for another day of life and for health, for strength.

And we pray that you will help us through the power of your Holy Spirit to reason certain things through.

I pray that you will anoint my lips, that it will be clear and that it will be practical and something that we can apply to our daily lives.

So we just ask that you'll be here in our midst, and we pray it all in Jesus' name.

All right, so, as Adventists, we certainly know what a potluck is.

I just grabbed this picture off the internet.

That's a lot fancier than probably most of our potlucks ever look, right?

And as the pastor, you're always coming in at the last, and you're scraping the edges off of stuff to try and get anything that's left over.

But the idea of potluck is there's a lot of food.

People bring pots of food, and you're lucky if you get something you like.

Actually, the churches I go to, I like a lot of the stuff that's there.

And I load up my plate with probably far too much.

If you get a lot of something that looks good, and then you get back to your table, it's like, that really is not so good.

It could be the person across the table wanting to see how much I enjoy it.

And then you try and do like the little napkin trick, and have a little burial, and cover it up, and try and just put it in But maybe you're still hungry you go back for more so potluck.

It's an interesting thing Buffet is kind of the same idea if you've been to a buffet You know that you pay 1 price and you go in and it's all you can eat.

I mean this is incredible if it's a good buffet.

And if you've ever been to a buffet you recognize that there are some professional eaters there.

I mean you can just tell by looking at them like they're not messing around.

And my task at this moment is to eat and eat and eat and eat.

And so there, if you don't like it, you just set it to the side.

You go back for another 1 and another 1 and you just go through the line.

You say, I'll take some of this, I'll take, ooh, I don't like that.

I don't even know why that's here and that smells gross.

And if you're a real professional, you even go around all of the buffet first.

You're just looking because you only have 1 stomach to fill and you want to make sure you get the right stuff on your plate.

So my question for us this morning is Adventism, is religion like a buffet?

Is it a potluck and I can just pick and choose?

I love the Gospels, but the God of the Old Testament, not so much.

I love this verse over here, but this 1 steps on my toes.

And eventually I'll have a Bible of only the pages that I like.

Nothing offensive, nothing to bother me, But really at that point, is this book authoritative in my life?

So that's kind of our question that we're going to wrestle with today and why I'm a Seventh-day Adventist and here's some of the things.

We're doing what's wrong with being a cultural Seventh-day Adventist.

I'm going to borrow a definition, if you will, from Clifford Goldstein, who wrote, I believe it's in the review, the citing is at the end.

It says, a cultural Adventist is someone by his own admission is an Adventist solely because he was raised and educated In the church, but who by his own admission takes exception to many of the church's theological beliefs and religious practices.

In other words, boy this is going to be painful, he's a Seventh-day Adventist not because of the church's teachings, but despite them.

I don't know why I have 1000000 builds in here somehow.

I'll just read it to you off of this small thing.

It's not ethnicity, it's not nationality, it's not politics, it's not social or economic status, not gender, not age, not language.

There's only 1 thing that makes us Seventh-day Adventist and that's our beliefs.

We're who we are only because of what we believe, period.

He goes on, get rid of those beliefs, water them down or push them to the sidelines and you're left with nothing that justifies our corporate experience.

Then he says, I'm an avanist for 1 reason, the beliefs, the teachings, the doctrines that this church and this church alone espouses and that's taken from Avenus review there it is and under thing that he an article cultural avenues from April 28 are you an avenus for that reason Because I know plenty of people that leave the church because someone just wasn't nice.

I wish everybody in the church was nice and so do you.

But maybe there's even been times you haven't been so nice.

Well, the church is a hospital for sick people.

But sick people have germs and they have diseases and they have all these things.

So do you want the church to be a hospital for sick people or you only want healthy people that are always nice?

Well somebody in the church, I get that, I understand, but again you have to ask yourself why are you there?

If I'm there because of the belief system that I feel like is most aligned with Bible and scripture and the doctrine all those things then I'm going to have to put on my big boy pants and deal with the mean person in a kind Christ-like way.

And maybe if I'm a leader I'm going to have to directly deal with that person and say hey sister so-and-so hey brother we can't talk to people that way we can't put that foot forward when when a guest comes in you know with purple hair or whatever we have to be kind Jesus wouldn't do that but again we should be here because of the doctrines of this church and that alone.

I hope the answer to that is yes, because I can say all kinds of things.

But what if what I say is wrong, is incorrect, is not true?

Revelation 3.14 says, And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, that's us, that's the final church that symbolizes us and in times, it says these things says the amen the faithful and true witness the beginning of the creation of God.

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Series

Why am I a Seventh-Day Adventist?

05 What’s Wrong with Being a Cultural Adventist?

Transcript

Parent Series

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