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Lansing SDA Church

Wes Peppers

What’s Floatin’ Your Boat?

Well, we're going to do a study this morning called, What's Floating Your Boat?

And you've heard the expression, whatever floats your boat, right?

And we're going to see this morning, we're going to ask the Lord to open our hearts and our minds so that we can examine ourselves, and we can look within our own hearts, and hopefully open our hearts so that the Lord can look in there and find out what is floating our boats this morning.

So let's just invite the Lord's presence to be with us.

We'll pray, and then we'll open the word together.

If you would, just bow your heads wherever you are.

Father in heaven, we thank you so much this morning that we can come together.

We're thankful today for the Word that brings life.

And the reason, Lord, that the Word brings life today is because Jesus is the Word, and He brings life to everything that He touches.

And so, Lord, this morning we pray that as we examine the scriptures, that they would speak to our hearts, that we would be convicted, we would be encouraged, we would be drawn to Jesus, and our lives would be surrendered to Him this morning.

This is our prayer, we pray this morning that the Holy Spirit would accompany our study today that you, he would convict every heart and Lord that you would speak to our minds, speak to our hearts this morning, change our lives, make us more like Jesus.

It's our prayer today in His name we ask, let all God's people say, Amen.

You know, I deal with, I have dealt with, in fact in my own life, I used to be a skeptic of God, a skeptic of the Bible, a skeptic of Jesus, a skeptic of Christianity, and in my own walk I've only been a Christian now, Seventh-day Adventist Christian, for about 12 years.

And I'm going to share my testimony in full with you coming up sometime soon.

I haven't set that exact date yet, but stay tuned.

And in my own walk, I wanted nothing to do with God and the reason I didn't want anything to do with God because I didn't feel, I didn't sense, I didn't believe that there was any real evidence for God's existence.

And so therefore I thought that the Bible was a book of fairy tales.

I thought that Christians were in some fantasy world and therefore I didn't want anything to do with God.

And I won't say too much more about that, but I've dealt with my own experience since being a Christian, a number of skeptics.

I remember a few years ago we had a fair at the, at Kalkaska, the county fair, we had the, you know, the little 7 steps to health, the fresh air and all that kind of stuff, the Weimar, New start, right?

And then the last station was trust in God.

And there I was manning the booth as the pastor.

You know, no 1 else wanted to man that booth, you know.

And there was this young girl in her early 20s.

She's a nice girl and she was she was just so happy about all the new start stuff and the nutrition and the water and the sunshine and she was smiling.

I watched every person because I was observing them, seeing how they would respond to all the different things.

So that way when they came to me they would talk to me and I would have a little idea of who they were.

And Some of the people would just pass me on by.

They would just go, they would just smile, and then they would look at me and just, and then just duck their head and keep walking.

This young girl, she was smiling the whole time, and she came around and remember, what's the 1 before T, Erwin?

She was smiling because she was so restful.

And then she turned and she saw the sign, Trust in God, and she went...

And I thought to myself, You were looking so restful when you came from the rest booth, and now you come to the trust in God booth and you're scowling.

And she comes up to me and she says, I don't believe in God.

And you're probably some sort of a pastor." I said, yes, I'm a pastor.

And she said, well, I just don't believe in all that nonsense.

Please tell me something that points to that.

And she began to ramble on, and I will tell you all the details of the conversation, but she was telling me this, and then I would answer with something.

And she would tell me this, and I would answer with something.

And finally, she got flustered, because everything she was saying, I'm not claiming to have all the answers you understand but every time she would say something I would have an answer for her and she says you're the first Christian I've talked to that had answers to these things and I said well I said all the answers are there you just have to look and then I started to talk I started to ask her a question, I said, have you ever considered this?

And I don't even remember all the details, but I do remember how the conversation went.

And she said, you've given me some things to think about.

I said, so why don't you like Christianity?

You know, I've heard you rant and rave about Christianity, but I haven't heard you say anything about Islam or Buddhism or Hare Krishna or any of those other religions.

Well because Christians are always like this and they're always like that, and Christianity's corrupt and look at the dark ages.

I says, oh, yeah, I says, I can't blame you there.

I said, but did you know that the Bible actually foretold that those things would happen before they even happened?

And that the Bible foretold that there would be those claiming to represent God who weren't actually representing God who would do those things.

I said, here's a wonderful book that will tell you all about it.

I said, you'll be absorbed because it goes through great detail about the crusades and the wickedness that went on in Christianity for a long time and what God's actually doing about it.

I said, here, take a couple more for your friends.

And I said, if you want to read it, if you read it and you have questions, just call me up.

She was in college, she might be in Texas, live in Texas somewhere and be going to the Adventist church, I don't know, we'll find out in Heaven.

But there's lots of skeptics, and the question today is, Where's the evidence?

Now I'm not talking, my whole sermon is not about the evidence, my sermon is actually about faith, but we're going to just examine real quickly a thought about the evidence.

You should already be there because of the scripture reading this morning, but we're going to back up just a few verses.

We're going to see what the Bible says here.

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What’s Floatin’ Your Boat?

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