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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Mark Howard

How to Know God’s Will

Father in heaven, again, we are so thankful for the Sabbath and the privilege we have of fellowship, of coming apart from our regular busyness and resting and taking note of your presence and power through your word, through your created works in Christian fellowship.

And Lord, I pray that you would bless our time here by your Holy Spirit this afternoon.

May the message be helpful to those who are here and who perhaps would be either viewing it online or listening to it later.

We ask and pray that you would be with all of the technical, technological things involved and with our presentation here as well we ask and pray it in Jesus name, Amen.

Apparently we had some technological challenges with this this morning's message.

Is this, do they stream these in the afternoon?

So for those joining us online, I'm glad to have you joining us.

But that's not my message this afternoon.

Now this afternoon, we're talking about how to know God's will.

And I was thinking after the presentation, I know for a lot of pastors, after you give a certain sermon, when you're done with it, you think, yeah, maybe I should have said this, or I should have said this different, and what have you.

And I know I was bringing the fire this morning somewhat with trying to impress you with the importance of the every member involvement in our mission.

And I should probably clarify, there's a...I'm gonna share with you a couple slides I left out that's gonna segue into what we're talking about here this afternoon.

But Ellen White tells us in the book Ministry of Healing, and perhaps you're familiar with this reference, this quote, every church should be a what?

And I wanna pause there and say, I understand as a pastor that 1 of the reasons we don't have as much active lay involvement is that we have failed the members in training.

I will tell you that pastors, when they go to seminary now, we don't learn how to train members in seminary.

We don't even learn half of the administrative stuff.

I can just tell you firsthand, we learn how to be good theologians and that does not help many lay people get active in the work.

And so I have that in mind and this is this particular statement is saying this is our churches should be a place where members can get trained and I want you to notice the areas she mentions.

Its members should be taught how to give Bible readings.

How to conduct and teach Sabbath school classes.

How best to help the poor and to care for the sick.

Incidentally, let me just interject here.

We just did a training in the Michigan conference with the Sabbath School and personal ministry.

We did our Sabbath School workshop and you can actually access it.

Some of the videos, We had some challenges we ran into with the videos, but they're complete enough to communicate what we were teaching.

But Pastor Cameron and I did some presentations for adult Sabbath school, and our website is michigansspm.org.

Michigan SS Sabbath School PM Personal Ministries.

And then on our homepage, I wish I had a picture of it up here, there's a little floppy disk, a 3 and a half floppy disk, which a lot of you younger people just don't even know what it is.

But for your benefit, underneath the icon, it says digital files.

And if you go there, there are several folders, and 1 of those is the Sabbath School Workshop.

Now, I bring that up to say this, some of you are familiar with our Talking Points program.

Pastor Cameron and I do a program every week where we outline the adult Bible study, the adult Sabbath school lesson.

And I know there are a lot of people, in fact, if you haven't seen it, I talked to somebody after the service, and I'm like, where do I get that?

The General Conference Sabbath School app, if you go to that app, and you go to any 1 of the day's lessons, in the upper corner, there's a little icon that looks like a YouTube arrow, right?

And you click on that, There's several videos there, Hope Sabbath School.

Or you can go to YouTube and search Sabbath School talking points and find it there.

And the outlines incidentally that we do are also at the bottom of each day's lesson.

Some people try to get on our website or they try to go through YouTube and like I can't access the the outlines, I can't get them from Dropbox, just go to the app.

So if you didn't know that, there's some bonus information.

Now The reason I'm bringing this up is people will watch Talking Points and they say, oh, that's how they teach Sabbath school.

I would never teach a Sabbath school class the way you see me on Talking Points.

When I teach the lesson, I rework it to engage my class.

And 1 of those videos that I just shared the link to, I walk through how I would take a lesson and do that to the lesson.

Well, at least in part because inspiration tells us where to teach people how to conduct Sabbath school classes, how to give Bible studies, how best to help the poor and to care for the sick, how to work for the unconverted.

But the idea is sometimes when we talk about our church's training, it's like, oh yeah, we need to train them to go out and do door-to-door work and give Bible studies.

I think we need to be training people how to be good greeters, how to be deacons, how to carry out the responsibilities of an elder or a head elder, how to do, how to teach Sabbath school class, adult classes in children.

I think our churches, and I think I'm in good company here, should be training centers, training schools, and I think that they should be giving training in very practical areas.

Ellen White warns us about getting above what she calls the simplicity of the gospel.

And I feel like there are some very practical things like knowing how to determine God's will that we just don't talk about.

I've given this presentation a number of times to young people And it was brought back to my mind recently because I ran into a young person who had heard me do the presentation several years before.

She said, listen, Pastor Howard, she said, that sermon, I want to thank you for that sermon.

She still had her notes from it that she took in her Bible and said, I was going through a situation just recently, and this was like precious gold to me.

And I thought to myself, you know, sometimes I assume as a pastor, oh, everybody knows this, everybody's heard it.

And I fear that sometimes we're trying to be so complex with our messages we get above the simplicity.

So if I'm repeating things this afternoon when I'm talking about knowing God's will, that's okay.

I'm sure there's some things that you maybe haven't considered, but you don't just have to be a young person to wanna know how to determine God's will and make sure you're in the right path.

So that's what we're talking about this afternoon, how to know God's will.

It is 1 of the most common questions I get from young adults, because there's a lot of decisions to be made at that time in life where later on you've either made them right or wrong and probably learned a little bit.

And in order to do that, I'm going to have you turn with me to 2 Peter 3, verse 9.

This is just a big overarching point, probably self-evident if you've been in the faith for any period of time, but still worth reviewing.

2 Peter 3, and verse 9, The Bible tells us here in 2nd Peter, the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, that is the promise of his coming, as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." What is that telling us in regard to the will of God?

Is it God's will that everybody be saved?

The Bible says here, For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." So here's what we know.

God wants everybody to be saved, including us, right?

Which would mean, consequentially, that whatever God's will for our life is, it must lead to our personal spiritual growth.

If it's to our spiritual detriment, if there's something I'm doing, if there's a choice I'm making or considering, and I'm like, yeah, I wonder if this is God's will, but it would lead to my spiritual detriment.

So that's just a basic principle to start out with.

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How to Know God’s Will

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