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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Christian Berdahl: Music Seminar

Christian Berdahl

1. Overture: Our Personal Journey

Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, thank you that the Sabbath is upon us.

But Lord, we just want to let all that be behind us and embrace what you have for us this Sabbath.

Please, Father, forgive us for where we let you down.

Thank you for where you encouraged us, where you helped us through the week.

And Father, we ask that you would just pick us up, dust us off, and set us on that path that leads to everlasting.

Lord, I ask that you would be with us tonight and please be our teacher.

My wife of 19 years, we're going to be hitting 20 I believe it is, this June.

She actually really wanted to come on this trip, But as some of you know, my wife has been sick for about 5 and a half years, and she is about the worst that I've seen her in that 5 and a half year period.

I wouldn't say the most, but she's number 2 right now in her struggle.

I might as well tell you because many of you will come up and ask me what's going on with her especially being here in Loma Linda.

The reality is she contracted Lyme disease about 6 years ago, 5 and a half years ago, and we beat the Lyme disease through the 8 laws of health which, praise the Lord for that, took us over a year consistent fever treatments and daily fever treatments in fact detoxification, living the 8 laws of health like we never lived it before and we beat it.

But her symptoms didn't go away and as we progressed throughout the next years her health continued to decline.

We couldn't figure out what was going on, so she went and had some more testing done.

And unfortunately, they found this little demonic thing.

And it's, you hope and pray you get Lyme, even bad case of Lyme if you will, rather than this little thing.

There's no known cure for it and it's kind of like a malaria And so she's been now on long term antibiotic therapy for years and unfortunately her hair is starting to go fall out and she's very weak and it's kind of like taking almost a chemo ish kind of type situation.

And if you think of my dear wife, Kobi, C-O-B-Y, put her on every prayer list you know and please pray for her.

She was hoping she'd be strong enough because we do have friends down here in the area.

After all, we are native Californians, but we've been transplanted to New Mexico now.

And it has led to some special things which I'll share with you later this evening.

So from what I understand I'm going to be here with you until about 930.

So apparently like New Zealand you guys like to flog your speakers.

Praise the Lord I didn't fly here just to give you an hour.

So I will promise you this, if you come and you show up, so will I.

All right, how many will show up tomorrow?

This particular message tonight is entitled, it's from our Distraction dilemma music seminar.

How many of you have heard that seminar the full 12 hours?

And this particular message tonight is entitled Overture, our personal journey.

And since my wife is not here to share her part of the journey with you, I will actually be sharing her part for her.

Amazingly enough, my son Tyler, who's now 15, and he's actually taller than me now.

I was walking the other day in the parking lot of Home Depot, and my youngest son's this big, and my oldest son is this big, and I said, awesome, I finally have bodyguards.

And I told him that, I said, man, you guys need to travel with me and you can be my bodyguard.

Not that I need bodyguards, but they thought, that would be cool, dad.

And I looked at them, I said, wow, they're growing up so fast.

And last ASI, my oldest son Tyler actually was teaching in the, oh what were they, they were about the 8 to 12 year old classes and he gave a mini version of this music seminar to them.

It was so, his first time he's ever spoken public like that and he got the bug praise the Lord I've been praying they'd want to do something for the Lord Let's start in the beginning in Genesis 1 Amen in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and was void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God what?

That would be way better than that, right?

Probably multiple harmonies all at the same time.

And when He began to speak, and God said, let there be light, Man, there had to be light.

And God spoke this creation and God said and God said and He created all the things that we see.

What's interesting is every living thing, every inanimate thing as well, they all have frequencies emitting from them.

Any of you scientists, you'll know that's true.

God created, I guess, with like frequency.

Interesting that he chose to sound to create.

He said, let there be light and there was light.

Hans Jenny, now this is very interesting to me.

And This Swiss physician and natural scientist, as he was termed, he would photograph plastics, powders and liquids and other inorganic material.

And what he discovered was something very interesting.

He noticed that when he would send certain frequencies to different substances, they would create some very amazing and even unusual patterns.

Now, I don't know how well you can see that, discern what's going on there, but there's some very intricate patterns here.

And so when he would turn up different frequencies and mod to do different sounds, frequencies, he could create objects with inorganic material.

2. Opus: Identifying the Mind’s Mark

Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord thank you for this Sabbath day.

1 Sabbath closer, 1 day closer to heaven.

Father, I ask that you would bless us as we come to reason together this morning.

We ask that You would bless us with the Holy Spirit.

I pray You would hide me behind Your cross and let not me be seen but You.

You've promised that if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto myself.

So Father, we want to lift you up in the person of your Son, Jesus Christ.

Please Father, we plead, we beg for your wisdom this morning.

This particular message is entitled Opus, Identifying the Mind's Mark.

This is 1 of my favorite topics to talk about, and we'll be talking specifically about the brain, and specific regions of the brain.

And opus is a musical term, actually, and an opus is an artistic work, especially 1 on a large scale.

And I believe when God created our brains, when He created not only the brain, but the mind, it's all together different by the way, the brain is an organ, but consciousness and the mind is something science just doesn't understand.

And when God created the brain and more so the mind, I believe He put within each 1 of our heads an opus, a great work, a grand scale.

Because friends, what we can do between the few inches between our ears is remarkable.

And if we allow God to capture this brain of ours, and more specifically, the mind, and let God have control of it, there's no end to what He can do through a human being.

Should we not protect this beautiful opus?

God created a masterpiece in each 1 of us.

Now let's put into perspective that we are in a cosmic battle.

There's a cosmic battle over you and over me and the devil wants to capture our attention.

God wants to capture our attention and so there's both sides here and they're at war for our soul but specifically the way that they they gain our soul is through our decisions and through our choices.

God wants our willing worship, our willing love.

On the other hand, Satan wants our willing or ignorant worship.

And there are many people around the country and around the world who are ignorantly obeying and worshiping the devil.

He doesn't want us to ignorantly worship Him.

He doesn't say eat the whole meal, right?

In other words, let's spend some time together.

The devil just wants to, frankly, force feed us his will, his desires.

God says, if you so choose me, then I will be here for you.

We can have a great relationship, even a saving 1.

God wants our minds fully intact and aware.

He wants to help us to use this opus that he has given each 1 of us, this masterpiece in each 1 of our heads.

Satan wants to, on the other hand, short-circuit our minds.

In fact, the devil has figured out many cunning ways, he's very sly, and he has no good intention for you, we talked about that last night.

The reality is he wants to do anything he can to blunt our view of God.

And he wants to sever, tarnish, erode away our connection with God.

In fact, he's learned that there are certain methodologies, certain vehicles, mechanisms that he can put in our life that will short circuit our minds.

He will short circuit our connection with Christ.

He's very good at it and dare I say most of us at some point in our life have probably had this situation in our life.

This will make more sense as we progress.

God wants us to make an intelligent decision based on evidence of his love.

He doesn't want us to just blindly follow, he wants us to make intelligence decisions.

In fact, that's what most attracted me to the Seventh-day Adventists, because they were thinking people.

I had gone to a lot of different denominations and they were feeling people.

Not that Adventists aren't feeling people, please don't misunderstand me.

I was involved in a neo-Nazi version of Seventh-day Adventism.

I say that tongue-in-cheek a little bit, but the reality is I was part of a very ultra-conservative form of Adventism, and frankly it was a lot of a dry formalism.

And I learned what that phrase meant, we'll have to learn how to draw warmth from the coldness of others.

But I also found many loving people, and I found people that were allowing Christ to live within them.

And so God wants our minds to be fully intact and make intelligent decisions based on the evidence of His love.

And as I spent time in the Word, I found those evidences and my heart melted.

And I wanted to become part of the family of God.

And there's a big difference because the devil wants us to make emotional decisions based on our own happiness.

And many of these other denominations that I had looked into, they wanted us to have emotional responses in the worship service.

They wanted us to have emotional responses because of the sermon and when the emotion died away I would feel like something was missing now in my life because I had mistaken that for the presence of God.

By the end of this afternoon this is all gonna tie together and why it's so dangerous to bring Babylonish worship into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

It's just very interesting what the devil's doing.

God wants us to know what he stands for and who he is.

And the devil wants to mask who He is and what He stands for.

And when I started to open the open book, I started to find God's character.

Unfortunately, the open book many times is being closed by his people.

Now, there is a war going on in each 1 of us, inside each 1 of us.

Now, we all can look at it and go, yes, there's a cosmic war, but sometimes we don't wanna bring it down to the nitty gritty.

We don't wanna say, yeah, there's actually a war going on inside of us.

The reality is I spend a lot of time with young people, weeks of prayer, going to their classes, going to their academies, and doing these types of presentations, And so this is a pretty simplistic explanation because I am dealing with younger crowds sometimes.

Frankly, the adults like the simpler explanations as well.

There is a very war going on inside of each 1 of us.

We have the carnal dog fighting against the spiritual dog.

3. Music Overview

Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, I pray that you would please bless us now as we come and reason together.

We need your Holy Spirit to guide and lead us, and so Father, we ask that you would please help us to tune our ears to you through the Holy Spirit.

And Father, we ask that You would bless us now.

We want to vindicate Your name in our lives.

And Father, we want to kick the devil to the curb, as it were.

I pray that You would please bless us now with Your presence.

Well, I have the daunting task of trying to squeeze 12 hours into what I thought might be 3 or 4 tonight, but now I've been told it's going to be a wee bit over 2.

So now we're going to squeeze it down even more.

I'm almost hesitant to share only a certain portion with you.

The reason being, we made the music seminar as short as we could, and the shortest we felt it did service for God's people was 12 hours.

So we're really going to take and squeeze actually about 10, because I gave you a little over an hour this morning and a little bit over an hour last night.

We're going to take about 10 remaining hours and squeeze it into 2.

So as I've said before I'm going to talk fast so that means you have to listen fast, amen?

The good news is you can listen a lot faster than I can talk.

That's just a unknown scientific reality.

This morning, this afternoon's message is simply titled Music Overview, and I was hoping to dive deep into, if we had more time, into the whole worship side of music.

But it looks as though we may not be able to get deep into that.

If we move right along, if we have time, I'll stop, We'll boot up for the second message and we'll go on.

So, as I am speaking, 1 of my friends, brother Randy Skeet would say, I want you to pray.

He and I were at a youth convention in Guyana and we spent and housed together for a little over a week and we loved our time together.

The Lord blessed and He always said, pray, you know, He's got this great voice, right?

Not like a little 1 like me, but he's got this great voice.

And he said, pray, Lord, pray that Lord put your words in that man's mouth.

And so I would like you to pray that for me as that comes to your mind as we move along.

Lord, put your words in that man's mouth.

There are 2 basic questions that we're going to look at today, and this is what we're basically going to answer.

And like I said, this 1 is simply called music overview.

So the questions that we need to ask today and that we're going to work on answering, and there's many more that we talk about in the series.

But the first question is, is music moral or amoral?

Some, I heard some yeses and I heard some noes.

And that's good that we're in mixed company because each 1 of us can hopefully learn something today.

The reality is, as you will see, music is very moral or immoral.

It's not amoral, in other words of no moral weight or value or impact.

The next question we're going to answer is, Is it the lyrics or the music bed that matters most?

Most people will say it's the lyrical content.

Some people will say it's the musical content.

The reality is, as you'll see as we move along, music itself, just the music bed, has an entire language to it, no matter what the lyrical content says.

Let's start off with a very famous singer.

And she was really big in the 80s and 90s.

And she's not so big now, but she's still well known even by the younger crowds.

Here's what Sandy Patty talks, what she says about music.

But a lot of artists are taking that very powerful tool and putting negative, horrible lyrics to it, and those lyrics are getting into the hearts of the listeners and are shaping their values.

Why can't we, for example, contemporary Christian musicians, take that same power for force music, put positive lyrics to it, and begin shaping values that way?

Now, is there anything wrong with what she said?

She's nothing wrong with it, but she's leaving some things out.

She didn't talk at all about the music bed, because the reality is in her thinking she can have any music bed that she wants as long as the lyrical content is okay.

Here's another, he was a quite a famous singer in the Christian world, David Meese.

Basically you have to focus on what the lyrics and the song is saying.

That is my criteria to decide whether the song is right or wrong.

It has nothing to do with the music style.

It has to do with the lyrics, what the song is saying.

As Christians, we can objectively judge it from that standpoint.

This is the mantra in contemporary Christian music everywhere you go.

I happen to interview and talk with and even hang out with quite a few different Christians from different denominations.

And as I spend time and rub elbows with these different brothers and sisters in different denominations, this is the mantra.

It doesn't matter what the musical content is, only the lyrical content.

Friends, it's quite dangerous water to be leave that.

Now, McLuhan's work is viewed as 1 of the cornerstone studies of media.

It really revolutionized the thinking back in the 70s and 80s.

He was a professor, a philosopher, and a scholar, and it's interesting what he said about music.

That is to say, the music, its melody, harmony, and rhythm, all by itself disposes a man to virtue or vice by moving the emotions.

Now, is it wrong for a song to move our emotions?

But the fact that it can move our emotions, we do need to be careful with it.

Because we could move them in an inappropriate way as a Christian.

Therefore, the way in which they move the passions, the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm, should serve as a principal basis for judgment on whether any given piece of music is good or bad.

So the reality is, if a song, I'll give you an example.

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Christian Berdahl: Music Seminar

1. Overture: Our Personal Journey

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