FYI 2013 Mini conference - The Great Controvery: Fully Persuaded

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Florida Youth Initiative

Malcolm Douglas

The Conflict

Lord, we come before your presence to ask for your Holy Spirit.

You said you would give us your Spirit if we were to ask.

You said you would give us wisdom if we ask.

So we ask that your divine presence will come into this place and we will be connected to you.

Please Lord we ask that the Bible will speak, that we will be brought to Jesus.

So Lord I pray that you will give us a sense of who you are, a sense of your holiness and your divinity, for we pray these things in Jesus' name.

God had just finished creating the world.

Everything was pristine, everything was perfect, everything was beautiful.

I don't know if you know what that's like, perfection.

I don't know if you know what it's like to view into something that you can consider just Wow you know I have a wife and I call her my invisible wife because most people they just they don't have the privilege of being able to see her.

But now when I look at my wife sometimes, man, I know God did something good.

I'd like to invite you to turn with me to Genesis.

And I believe that this is very important, especially for this weekend.

We're gonna look at 3 major things this weekend.

But I believe that these will be very important topics for this weekend.

If anything to be persuaded about, we should be fully persuaded about who we are and what we stand for and what we mean when we go out and say we are Seventh-day Adventist.

So I would like you to be fully persuaded, if nothing else, about the gospel.

The Bible says in verse 26, And God said, Now God had said many things at this point, but God says something unique this time.

And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth so God created man in His own image.

Many people refer to this as the Imagio Dei in Latin.

It means that they were created in the image of God.

If nothing else that we know from anything else that God created, whether it was light on the first day, whatever it was, we know that God created man in his own image.

If nothing else, God created man in his own image and so he tells Adam what Adam was created for.

You know many people think that Christians are some of the laziest people and it's so sad to think that but the truth is Christians were made to work.

You know there should be no such thing as an unemployed Christian sorry I was unemployed once upon a time and then I realized I had a mission So God places Adam in the garden, gives him this task.

Do you understand the intelligence that is required in naming animals?

Actually so much so, if you continue reading through the story, and we'll get there, he had to help him out by giving him a woman.

So God puts Adam in the garden and in this garden we see something very unique.

Chapter 2, verse 7, it says, and Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul divinity was linked with humanity Adam was destined to be like God.

He was destined to reflect the image of God.

And so God plants this garden in the, plants a garden eastward in Eden.

Verse 8 describes this for us and it goes through this description.

And we see in the midst of the garden there are 2 trees.

It says, verse 16, and the Lord God commanded the man saying of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

You guys are probably fairly well associated with this.

What was the function of the tree of life?

What was the function of the tree of life.

You know the tree of life actually gives us in its name its very function.

I know some of these things are so hard to grasp.

I know but you know it's very good for us to read the details.

And as long as they ate of this tree, they would be provided the nutrients to continue to live as they lived.

It describes that when God created Adam, He created Adam to live forever.

He never actually intended for Adam to die.

Jesus Christ was the symbol of this tree And often when you read through Jesus' sermons, you have illustrations brought back to agricultural metaphors that resemble life through what you eat.

You're not supposed to die because of what you eat.

You're supposed to live because of what you eat.

There's a lot I could preach just on that.

But you guys have Florida Hospital and you're very well associated with that.

You're educated and if not I think we got a doctor or 2 in here.

And if not just come to my church we got a few when you were to eat from that fruit it would continue to sustain you with life-giving power this was phenomenal it also taught them if they were to stop eating this fruit at any time they could not exist forever they were totally dependent on the life that God provided through that fruit to give to them do you understand that they had to eat the fruit They had to be continually and constantly and totally dependent on the life that God provided in that simple fruit.

They had to be plugged into eternal life.

And on the opposite end, we have this other tree, a tree of knowledge of good and evil.

If the first tree represents our complete and total dependence on God, what would the second tree represent?

And when we diverge for 1 moment from depending on God, We know the rest of the story.

This also represents that God, when he created everything perfect, there were boundaries.

My father was an Adventist, but my mom was.

And so my parents were divorced at a very young age, and young enough.

They were divorced at a very young age and so I spent half the time with my dad and half the time with my mom.

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The Conflict

Transcript

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