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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eugene Prewitt

Confronting Calvinism

Father God, we thank you so much and praise you for this beautiful Sabbath rest and getting us through the week.

Forgive us, Father God, for falling short of your glory.

Cleanse us all from all our unrighteousness.

And at this time, we'd like to lift up our brother, Elder Eugene Pruitt.

We ask that you would please send your Holy Spirit into his heart and let it abide there.

And we pray likewise as we sit and listen and open up your word.

Lord, we ask that you would please also hide brother Pruitt behind the cross that you may be seen and high and lifted up and in spite of all of ourselves we ask that you would please speak to us and through us, and let us walk out of here a changed man and woman, fully abiding in Christ that he may abide in us.

These things, Father God, we pray in the name of your son Jesus, amen.

The last 5 weeks have been some of the most enjoyable weeks of my life.

I've been involved in an evangelistic campaign in our church plant in Arkadelphia.

And my part has been to travel door to door visiting people with Chad and Fadia, I want to call her Benjamin, but they're cruisers now.

Has he been here any time in the last year?

So right now, he's at my home while I'm here, and he'll be preaching there tomorrow.

What I've really enjoyed about these last few weeks is going into the homes of people who love the Bible, who love the Lord Jesus, but don't know nearly as much as you know.

And persons who have not yet become familiar with the 3 angels' messages.

I've talked to some of you here, and I know even some of you have thought through the contrast of the kind of sacrifice that people make to become Seventh-day Adventist, contrasting that with the kind of sacrifice you make to grow up as a Seventh-day Adventist.

How many of you here grew up with some other persuasion than being a Seventh-day Adventist?

Like you were something else, and, or nothing else, for example?

So it's been delightful to be in these homes, and at the same time it's been delightful, I've seen some things that have really disturbed me.

That's his real name, but I won't tell you his last name for privacy purposes.

I never have been private before, but I'm learning.

That is, his view of the Bible and of religion is that God is the 1 who is sovereign to such an extent that he chooses everything that happens, everything that will happen, what you will do and what your neighbors will do, and he's chosen it all from way back when.

So for Mike, he really hopes that God has chosen him to be saved.

Because he knows if God hasn't chosen him, his case is hopeless.

And What really is getting him down right now is it looks like maybe God hasn't chosen his children to be saved.

Because you know they're in that teenage to 20 range, he's watching them, and as he's watching the choices they're making, his heart is just filled with fear that God's eternal purpose for his children is that they will burn in hell forever and ever and ever.

What I want you to just imagine for a minute is how if you believed like Mike, how that could drive you to distraction.

Can you sense how just thinking about the thought that maybe God created you for the very purpose of burning you for forever, I mean, just forever burning is enough to cause someone to go to distraction, I mean, to lose their mind.

But the fact that you were created for the purpose of it, wouldn't that just make it very difficult to love God, to consider that?

But then, can you imagine, if you're very sincere with yourself, if you don't love God anyway, doesn't that almost guarantee that you have not been chosen to be saved?

Because those that are chosen to be saved are the ones that God would fill them with love for himself.

I'm just trying to help you understand for a moment to get a picture that there are people in this planet that are they're under a burden of error that takes away their happiness, will take away their sanity, will cause them to lose their salvation.

And I hope that tonight I can give you some tools so when you encounter someone like Mike, maybe you can do something to help him or her.

I wanna give you a list of some names you're familiar with.

William Carey was responsible for really changing the direction of many Calvinists.

William Carey was a Calvinist and but when he had the idea that we should take the gospel to the whole world, he was told that when God wants to convert the heathen, he'll do it without your help or mine.

Carey, who believed in predestination, the thing I've just described to you, yet he was able to see in the Bible so much evidence that we should do evangelism that how will they believe unless someone is sent to teach them?

What I'm trying to describe for you for Carey is that Carey had 2 sets of ideas that he thought were both in the Bible and he did an honest job at trying to believe them both at the same time.

Calvinism and the evangelical idea of take the gospel to the world.

Adoniram Judson, the 1 who took so much of the gospel to Burma, Myanmar, he was a Calvinist.

John Bunyan, that man who was in the prison who wrote Pilgrim's Progress, who saved so many souls, he was a Calvinist.

And George Whitefield, called by some the greatest of preachers, he was a Calvinist.

John Wesley wasn't, John and Charles were not.

And John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield had been friends for much of their ministry.

And then this issue of Calvinism versus Arminianism, You don't even need to know those words, but most people in religious circles today know something about those 2 words.

I'd say most people who are intellectual about their religion know something about those 2 words.

That issue, these 2, these friends, Whitefield and the Wesleys, they parted on this issue.

The Wesleys believed in free will, and Whitfield believed in predestination and what he would call election.

And because they believed so strongly, they began to oppose each other on this ground.

But in the great controversy, Ellen White describes this experience.

And she says that Mutual forbearance and, it's not love, mutual, love and, I forget the words, mercy I think is the 1.

Mutual forbearance and mercy reconciled them that they had no time to argue while they saw souls going down to ruin.

In other words, here are people in the past who differed in the same way that you differ from Calvinist, and yet they were able to put aside those differences and work together closely.

Of course, you differ from others in many other ways besides this, but just listen to what I'm talking about.

This issue, they were able to put that aside because what they had in common was a belief that sinners should be saved, that they should do something for it, and they both worked to save sinners.

Just a few pages later in the same book, Great Controversy, though, it describes how even though the Westlers were reconciled to George Whitefield, they weren't reconciled to all Calvinists, Because the doctrine of divine decrees, that was the phrase that was used back in the 1800s and 1700s for this idea.

In Daniel 4 you have there that there's the watcher that made the decree.

We might come to that a little bit later tonight.

This doctrine of divine decrees leads quite naturally to antinomianism.

That is, if you believe that God has chosen you to be saved The sinful mind realizes that's very good news and it really doesn't matter what I do.

And if God has chosen you to be lost, that's very bad news and there isn't anything I can do about it.

So that though this didn't happen to Bunyan or to Whitfield or to the Judsons or to Carey or even to Spurgeon, he was also a famous Calvinist, though it didn't happen there because those were really intellectual Calvinists who really tried to get the whole picture that Calvin taught.

Though it didn't happen there, there are many more simple-minded Calvinists who think just about like this.

When they hear about this idea of predestination, they don't understand about all the rest.

Now we haven't even opened our Bibles tonight, and that's a shame, but I wanted to introduce this idea somehow.

Turn with me in your Bibles to Romans chapter 8.

Romans chapter 8 is a beautiful chapter for Seventh-day Adventist.

It shows why some people are subject to the law and why others can't be.

Romans chapter 8 also addresses this issue of predestination.

Romans chapter 8 comes, of course, just before Romans chapter 9, which is where you have the difficult passages.

And rather than read through Romans 8, oh, it's verse 29.

Verse 29, for whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

What comes prior to predestination in verse 29?

Do you see foreknowledge comes before predestination?

That is true in the verse, and this verse comes before the troublesome chapter.

I say the troublesome chapter because my guess is that either you have wrestled with Romans 9 or else you just have never studied through the book of Romans.

Does anyone here ever wrestle with Romans 9?

Do any of you know what I'm talking about when I say wrestling with Romans 9?

It's not enough hands, and so it tells me a lot of you are gonna see things tonight that you haven't read enough, and so they haven't bothered you sufficiently.

And what I'm trying to show you is that in Romans 8, 29, you come to a solution even before you get to the problem, which is the way I'm sure Paul intended it.

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Confronting Calvinism

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