<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Scott Christiansen

Planet In Distress, Part 2: When Did We Stop Watching?

Pleasure to be here in this Sabbath school, these bright, sharp, and mostly young minds.

I left here 30 years ago for New Mexico and then on to Mongolia for 5 years and China for several years and then back to Maine, which is home now.

But it's a pleasure to come here and I'm just astonished at the number of people that I see and after a moment I recognize.

Turns out that while I was growing older, over the, did I say 30?

Okay, maybe 25 years ago I left, but anyway, while I was growing older over the last 25 years, It turns out everyone else was as well.

So it takes a moment, then I go, oh, I know you.

I wanna talk with you this morning about watching.

I wanna talk to you this morning about watching for signs of the end.

I want to talk to you this morning about watching for signs of the end.

I want to talk to you this morning about what Christ told us to do.

I want to talk to you this morning about signs that we have missed and what that means.

But I want to start this morning by telling you, talking to you about my great-grandmother.

My great-grandmother was only about this high and she got shorter and shorter and shorter.

She had a hard upbringing, hard upbringing, a coarse upbringing.

She was not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination until she converted to Adventism in her mid-20s, as a matter of fact.

And so if you irritated great-grandma, and there were 4 of us grandkids, we called her little grandma, by the way.

She had a daughter who was much taller and the grandmas would come and visit us and we'd call them.

With the simplicity of juvenile conceptual frameworks we would call them Big Grandma and Little Grandma.

But if you irritated Little grandma, he sufficiently, and it didn't take that much, she could turn the air blue.

She could let you know that she had come up hard and then she would apologize sincerely.

Now when we were young, we were living in Loma Linda, as I say, 4 boys, 4 rambunctious boys, and we always knew when the grandmas were going to come and visit, because there were certain preparations that were made.

We were living on Lomas Verdes, if you know where that is, on the other side of Mountain View.

Anyway, we would know when the grandmas were going to come and visit because the big red leather chair would be hauled out of my father's study and it would be placed by the fireplace.

The fireplace that for all the rest of the time was dead as it should be in Loma Linda.

I mean for crying out loud, why do they put fireplaces in houses in Southern California?

But anyway, so grandma was coming, and she liked the house to be oppressively warm.

And we would get a cord of dry eucalyptus.

I mean, We're talking serious firewood here.

We'd get that big red leather chair, put it right by the fireplace.

We'd get a little table and put it by the red leather chair.

We would get a small stand and get a black and white TV, which for some reason she preferred, put it right there in front of the chair.

The fire had to be going when little grandma got there.

So the house, I mean, we kids, we just couldn't even stand to be in that house.

But the winters, of course, were warm enough without the fire.

So anyway, Grandma would come and she would settle into that chair and as she got older and older, she lost more and more hair and she got smaller, she'd settle into that chair.

She'd look for all the world like a gnome.

And she'd sit there doing her sewing, her knitting, watching her TV, drinking her coffee.

And she would dispense wisdom from that chair whether you wanted it or not.

There were many of the times when I was innocently walking past the chair and she'd grab me and give me a piece of advice.

1 piece of advice that I got often, I don't know why, but 1 piece of advice that I got often, she'd grab me, she'd say, Scotty, you need to marry a pretty and hard-working girl.

I actually appreciated the advice, though I had pretty much picked up on that clue on my own.

There were other pieces of advice that were a bit more difficult.

Now, my grandmother, her health began to decline, of course, as everyone's does eventually.

So she would come down with her medicines.

She would come down with everything she needed to stay at our place for like 2 months.

Anyway, so she'd stay and she'd bring stuff and she had these coughing fits that would go on and on and on.

And she had this medicine that she called Green Thunder.

And I don't know what was in there, but you can imagine.

Now, you remember, some of you, back in the day, that when you used to go to the pharmacy you would get your medicine in a either plastic or glass, brown or clear bottle, right?

We're talking 60s and 70s here back in the day.

I had no idea that those came in the 2 liter size.

I mean it was huge, you know, but she had that there.

And she'd get this coughing fit and she'd have her Green Thunder and she'd have, I'm almost tempted to say a tumbler, but she had a glass there and she'd cough and cough and cough and finally with great reluctance she'd tremble and she'd reach into her bag, she'd uncap that huge bottle, she'd pour it out and she'd in 1 go, and she'd go, And then would come the advice.

And she would say, Scotty, don't ever grow old.

You know, some advice you can take, some you can't take.

And I'd like to take that advice, I really would, but I can't.

There were other times when she gave me advice more frequently than any other.

She gave me advice, she would grab me as I was walking by and she would make it, she'd pull me down so she could look me in the eye and she would say, Scotty, watch for Jesus because you will see him coming.

My grandmother was a very sincere, my great-grandmother was a very sincere convert to Adventism.

Whatever she did, she did with her heart.

She absolutely believed that she would see Christ coming.

She went to her rest in 1997 at the age of 99.

My grandmother, big grandma, my grandmother converted to Adventism along with my great-grandmother, though my grandmother at the time was 10.

The 2 were just 16 years apart, part of my great-grandmother's hard upbringing.

But my grandmother also believed that she would see Christ come.

But perhaps as a function of personality, perhaps as a function of upbringing, perhaps as a function of her taking in the culture in which she lived, what she believed, she believed in a drier fashion, a more intellectual fashion, a more calmer, passionless, almost passionless fashion.

Yes, she believed that she would see him.

Back to Menu

Planet In Distress, Part 2: When Did We Stop Watching?

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Plenary

A Call for Urgency

39m

To Know and Be Known

God Still Speaks

58m

Discerning the Time

52m

Get Ready!

44m

Plenary

Motivation for Service: The Explosive Power of the Gospel

1h 5m

500 Years Later: Is the Reformation Still Relevant?

1. The New Roman Empire: The Modern Rise of the Papacy

52m

ASI Southern Union 2013 Seminars

Releasing the Four Winds and the Sealing of the 144,000

1h

Purging the Filth in the Remnant

1h

Plenary

Pentecost Repeated

55m

Justification and The Third Angel’s Message

41m

Is the Wound Healed?: Assurance in Chaos

56m

Plenary

Red Sky in the Morning

1h

Sound Doctrine