<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

Adrien Charles-Marcel

Pure and Undefiled Religion

Welcome to Advent Hope and I'm just very glad to be here and to welcome you here this Sabbath morning.

My name as you might have seen in the bulletin is Adrian, and I'm a first-year dental student here and Thanks all my classmates that came.

And I've really been praying that the words this morning would be God's words and not my own.

And so I'd just like to ask for your prayers as I speak this morning, that God would be speaking through me.

Advent Hope is a ministry that has really blessed my life quite a bit through the sermons on audioverse.org throughout the years so I'm really glad to be here and to be able to also work with the outreach department.

It's been a blessing and I would just like to let us begin our time with God this morning with prayer.

Dear Lord, thank you so much for this Sabbath that you've given us and for the opportunity to be here to worship you and to learn from your word and to see the example that Jesus left for us and to know how we can follow in his footsteps.

What I just ask that this morning you would speak and that you would reach each 1 of us, myself included, with this message Lord and help us to leave here today with a renewed sense of your calling on our lives and of the importance of working for you and and following you in all that we do.

These things you ask in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so let's open our Bibles this morning to James chapter 1 verse 27.

And when I chose the text for this morning, I did not know that the South School lesson was going to be on James coming up, so that was not planned by me, that was planned by God, I guess.

And I'll be reading throughout this morning in the new King James Version.

So I'll just give you a chance to get there to James 1, verse 27.

The Bible says, Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

Is that how you would have described a perfect religion?

Visiting widows and orphans in their distress and keeping oneself unspotted from the world.

It's not exactly what would come to my mind initially, but I'd like to say that from the little experience that God has given me, when you do that, when you specifically, the part about visiting widows and orphans in their distress, that brings a lot of satisfaction.

Now by talking about widows and orphans, we're not just talking about people that literally don't have parents or a husband or a wife.

We're talking about the people that are really in need in this world.

And I'd like to share a time in my life when God brought that to the forefront of my thinking.

My family and I lived in Mexico for about 10 years as missionaries, and we were at the Adventist University there, Montemarois University, and while we were living there, for the most part of that time, myself and I would say probably most of my brothers, I have 2 brothers, We were there as missionary kids, but not necessarily involved very much in outreach.

That might differ between those of us, but I wasn't really that much involved in any outreach activities per se for most of that time.

And around 2 years before we left, 1 day, 1 Saturday morning, I was sitting in the university church, which was a huge church there on campus, and the pastor preached a sermon, And in his sermon, I don't remember the specifics of the sermon, but I do remember a call that he made for a small little church not far from the university that was dying.

This church was mainly sustained by Adventist members that would come in from outside of that community and keep the church going, but it wasn't really embedded into the community itself.

There weren't many members of the church that actually lived in that community.

And at this point, the church had basically had to be closed because they weren't able to pay their bills.

And so that Sabbath in the sermon, the pastor made a call for people to get involved and to come out and help revive this church.

I felt that that would somehow be an answer to some of the things I was facing in my life at that point.

So I decided to respond and I started getting involved.

Now the group of people that were going to this church were mainly families or couples and I was just going on my own.

So becoming a part of the group wasn't exactly easy.

I had before that been accustomed to spending my Saturday afternoons just at home with my family, maybe just doing restful Saturday afternoon activities.

Not sleeping necessarily, but not involved in like going knocking on doors and things.

And this was something that the group was interested in doing.

So for the first maybe a couple months that I was involved with it, I pretty much just went in the mornings and went back home in the evenings.

I didn't really want to get involved in the obra misionera as they call it in Spanish, mission work in the afternoons.

But after a while, I started feeling like I should probably get involved.

And it was more from the point of view of feeling guilty than really having a desire to go out and help win souls.

And I was able to go with some of the church members to people's homes and study the Bible with them.

And that was kind of a new experience for me, but it was something that I enjoyed, even though it still wasn't my default position for what to do on Sabbaths.

By the next semester, I continued going to this church and by the next semester, a couple of friends were going with me and we would go in the afternoons to help lead out in the sociedad de jóvenes, as they call it in Spanish, the UAY or Youth Program in the Evenings, and we would organize that and speak.

The only problem was there weren't many youth in the church, so it wasn't exactly reaching the target audience, and so my friend who was going with me had the idea of instead of doing that, there were a lot of children in the community where we were going and so he had the idea of starting a children's outreach program in Sabbath evenings.

We stopped doing Sosiedad de Jovennes and instead started reaching out to the kids in the community.

And that first Sabbath when we did that, there were probably about 20 kids or more that showed up.

It was like the word spread that we were giving something away and all the kids wanted to come.

It wasn't always that many, but we continued going and continued reaching out to the kids that way.

The next semester from that, we continued on in our outreach and my friend decided that he felt called that we should do something to reach out to the poor in the community, not just specifically there, but in the town where we were living.

And so we decided to go ahead and do that in that community we had been going to, which was called Pancho Villa.

So we decided to start reaching out to people there.

And we also decided to formalize our group a little bit more, give it a name.

And the name we came up with was Mano sirviendo a Cristo, which in English means hand serving Christ, which conveyed the idea that through the service we were giving to others, we would be actually serving Jesus.

So 1 of the first people we started reaching out to was an alcoholic guy that lived near the church, and his life was really a mess.

He had been drinking so much, he wasn't very responsible.

His wife left him, his kids got taken away from him, and he was really in trouble.

So we decided to start reaching out to him.

Instead of just giving him money for whatever he thought that he needed, we decided to help him to learn to help himself.

And so we went and took flowers, this is not potted flowers, to help him.

We had an idea of giving him something that he could do that would help him generate some income but that wouldn't be very labor intensive.

So we wanted to help him grow flowers, learn how to do that.

And we started studying the Bible with him.

Unfortunately, after a while, he didn't decide that he wanted to continue in that.

But we still had a desire to reach out to that community.

So another person that a couple weeks around that time, we reached out to.

There were 2 older ladies in the community that we decided to go and help them with cleaning up their yard and their house.

And 1 of them, we discovered, was very sick.

Now she had been having some problems with breathing and respiratory problems.

She had seen the doctor and had medication, but it wasn't helping.

So after we helped clean up her house that Sunday, we and some of the church members decided to take her to the Adventist hospital.

And at this point, we had been blessed by receiving some donations, so we were able to help cover the cost of some of her x-rays and medication.

And they gave her a free consultation with the doctor.

And she went home and was scheduled for a follow-up visit on Tuesday.

Now, this was a really good experience because we felt like we were really helping somebody.

Now Tuesday morning, I was getting ready to go to the hospital to go be with her for her follow-up visit, and I received some shocking news.

Back to Menu

Pure and Undefiled Religion

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

How to Encounter a Personal Relationship with God and Receive His Blessings

Hollywood’s War on Truth

57m

Being True to Our Trust

What the Law Could Not Do

50m

Bible Weekend

02 Answering False Doctrines

43m

The Power of Perspective

Two Covenants

57m

Speak it in Love

49m

How to Not Excel

49m

Scotty Mayer: Media Weekend

Glow in the Dark Christians

39m

Last Generation Victorious

55m

Excellent Service

2h 2m

Look Up and Live

The Healer and Restorer

41m

The Spiritual Rat Race

39m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

08 The Daily Today

58m

Sound Doctrine