GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

Last Day Events, The Remnant, and Church Organization

Mark Finley

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

05 The Triumph of God’s End Time Church

Biblical Faith - Secular World

Jordan Reichert

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

We are now bridging a gap in our fourth presentation, 4 or 5 presentations.

The first 3 dealt with sort of general Christian apologetics in the sense of, you know, what about a person who is, you know, unchurched, you know, more of a secular mindset?

How would we, you know, how do we answer questions like is God even relevant anymore in the 21st century?

We moved into the reality that actually what we have available to us in the New Testament is essentially the best historically attested document from the ancient world.

I think that was just cool, powerful stuff.

We talked about the resurrection of Jesus.

There really was a man named Jesus of Nazareth who lived when the gospel account said that he did, where they said he did, who died a real death, who was God in human flesh, made those claims, but then vindicated every 1 of his claims when he rose from the dead, a real event in history, yeah?

We would not be here, there'd be no generation of youth for Christ if he wasn't risen from the dead, right?

Because you have to have Christ to have a generation of youth for Christ.

And then in the last session just now, we talked about the quiet and the pain.

Where is God in terms of, it seems like quiet, if somebody said, oh yeah, there's a God and there's, you know, he's capable of miracles and all sorts of things You're like, well, I don't really see that kind of stuff happening in the world the same way that I seem to read it in The Bible, right?

So we talked about some of that but then even probably more importantly we talked about How do we wrestle through the pain and the agony of real sorrow and trauma and evil that we experience in this world in the light of the fact that the Bible says that God is all-powerful and all-good, right?

And the heart of it basically came to, I don't know, what did we come to, friends?

What was the big slam-bang finish about it?

The story of the cross, the message of the gospel is that God himself knows what it is to suffer.

If any of this is interesting to you, let me know and I'm happy to hook you up with any further extended resources because I'm like I'm like this smart and there's other people who are a whole lot smarter, right and so but welcome Today we are venturing now into The first of 2 specifically more Adventist style topics.

I think that it's I think that it sometimes you know produces this mental image Of the person who's like basically got you machine gun against the wall and they're like no you're gonna you're gonna hear all my good Reasoning and then you are going to factually assent to being a believer, right?

Yeah Right, and then you when you get to the pearly gates you will pass you will pass the basic 25 you know 25 multiple-choice question test that makes you qualify to be a man it's like no not at all it's gonna be a lot of people Matthew 7 says that come rolling up to Jesus we're gonna say Lord do we do all these amazing things in your name in other words weren't we super present truth people Didn't we do a lot of incredible things?

We did seminars, we cast out demons in your name, we did incredible things.

Jesus will say, apart from me, I never knew you, you workers of lawlessness.

My goodness, all this time you thought heaven was a place, turns out heaven's a person.

So we're gonna talk today about something that's really on my heart and we'll start off with a word of prayer.

Father, I'm a big fool, but I determined to know nothing else except you and you crucified.

And I ask that you'd speak through that, the willingness of a fool who said yes, and God, that you guide your people here, that you've brought here.

I will never know most of them till eternity, but for whatever reason You have brought The paths and the strands of our lives to this moment to this room for this time and I ask that you'd make it something that needs to be what it needs to be.

I pray this in Jesus name shield me if I'm gonna say something that's wrong.

The imperative from our friend Peter, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you yet do it with what?

You're not gonna do it in gentleness and respect.

It wasn't Jesus speaking through you, right?

You can still say something that's true and that's hard cutting and hard hitting but you can do it in a way that's gentle and respectful but always have a reason for the hope that is in you.

Don't be like my friend who called me up 1 day and said hey I'm talking to this guy here what is it that we believe about hell again?

Well For those of you who don't understand the joke, you know, if you have to ask that, you don't actually believe it, right?

Sister White says this, there's an eloquence far more powerful than the eloquence of words and the quiet, consistent life of a pure, true Christian.

For the sake of time, I'm going to jump into this next bit of it Look what she says here only through a living faith in Christ as a personal Savior Is it possible to make our influence felt in a skeptical world.

No other influence that can surround the human soul has such power as the influence of an unselfish life.

The strongest argument in favor of the gospel is a loving and lovable Christian.

If you get nothing else, hold on to Jesus.

And when your friends and your people and your community and your circles ask you questions about your faith, let the presence and the person and the love of Jesus shine through more than your ability to be very articulate and have good answers.

People aren't looking for you to always have the right answers.

Sometimes they're looking for you to be the presence of Jesus in their life, right?

Which might look more like, I mean, like in Elijah's case, it meant like a nap and making him some food, right?

You remember that story love that story so good the remnant elitism or evangelism Start off with a question each time.

I'm gonna have you I'm a classroom teacher Turn to somebody next to you Imagine that somebody casually strikes up a conversation with you and you mention that you're, oh yeah, we're Seventh-day Adventists, and they're like, oh, you know, the knowing, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

They start kind of sizing you up and like you look like you need more protein in your diet, whatever it is, right?

And they make some remark about like you're the ones who Like think that your church is like the only right church or something.

I don't know something some remnant something like that What would you say?

If somebody said yeah, what's that all about?

Now maybe you've never even heard of this doctrine.

We'll try to define our terms here in a minute.

So it makes sense but turn to somebody next to you What would you say if somebody said?

Oh, yeah Your your movement claims to be like the 1 true church or like the final faithful church and everyone else's I don't know What would you say?

You're only gonna need the edge I want to hear from you.

I would say, I hope you feel the same way.

I would say that the idea of a remnant of the biblical truth that we see throughout Scripture.

Okay, yeah, I had a fun conversation with my uncle about this once What an arrogant claim like well, like the word is actually in the Bible Do you like the Bible?

So like it's that's a thing right somebody is gonna be that group What about us?

Addiction in the Last Days: Breaking the Invisible Chains on the Mind

Eric Walsh

05 Sobriety and the End of Time: The Need of a Clear Mind to Avoid Deception

Let's get into God's Word for this morning.

And just to give a recap before I read the verse and pray.

So this session has been on addiction and it's been about how the devil uses these chemical substances behaviors.

And with the advent of legalized sports gambling, there are reports now that some of the young men in college campuses are really losing a lot of money over gambling because you can legally do it now.

And we talked about how marijuana's different from every other drug.

Marijuana works on both the presynaptic and the postsynaptic aspects of the dopaminergic system of the dopamine nerves.

And so by doing that, it actually is a gateway drug.

And as we're gonna talk a little bit about today, marijuana also opens up the mind for spiritualism and demonism.

This is why there are religions like Rastafarianism and others and some of the practices of Hinduism, which is actually where Rastafarians, a lot of them don't notice, that's where they get that practice actually from.

And it is to open up your mind so spirits will come in.

And so that you're open to this to the spirit world.

We talked about marijuana and alcohol how they may how they change your ability to make wise decisions and of course we we had a whole session where we really focused on sexual sin, pornography.

And as I travel around, this is 1 of the biggest, I think this is 1 of the things that is really going to destroy many in the remnant church.

Sexual sin for sure, Ellen White talks extensively about it and uses the analogy back to Baal Peor where Balaam and Balak conspired against the children of Israel and the men of Israel fell.

Always when it comes to sexual sin the devil starts with the men.

The sexual revolution started with magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, all designed to make men give up the Victorian ideas about sex, traditional ideas about sex, intimacy, commitment, and pervert men.

Once you pervert the men, almost by default, the women fall in line.

In fact, as much as I celebrate that the feminist movement is very much against pornography, feminism basically said that whatever a man does, a woman should be able to do.

And hence, the curse carried from the men of Western society to the women of Western society.

And so that now We talked yesterday about the fact that in churches, when they did a poll on Christians, 75% of the men, 70 or 75% of the men said they used pornography, 40% of the women.

And that more than half of those who said they used pornography said they actually have no problem with it.

And once you do that you fulfill the prophecy of 2nd Timothy 3 5 where it says that they have the form of godliness but they deny the power of thereof which is the Holy Spirit.

So all that we've talked about so far is really to get you to a point where we're going to talk about today, which is the reason God forbids these things, the reason the remnant church, Adventism, even though we are ridiculed because of our stance on sexual issues, on abstinence from alcohol, drugs, our health message around what we eat, and all these different things.

We're ridiculed about the fact that we don't drink caffeine, or at least we're not supposed to.

But as the science comes out, it supports the idea that if you want the kind of mind that will be able to discern deception in the last days, you cannot be involved in these practices.

They will cloud your judgment ever so slightly and if you want an example of how important it is to not be deceived in these last days.

Think about what they can do with artificial intelligence now.

If you are not rooted and grounded, you trust what you see.

The time is coming when they will be able to make you see things.

So we've always said, well, the demons are gonna come and impersonate.

Somebody can program a computer to promote the deceptions and I don't think I put it in this talk but there's a really good study out of MIT that shows that in fact where If you take if you put on social media, if you put a lie on social media, it travels about 1000 times faster and about 100 times further than if you tell the truth.

That means the most popular people on social media are probably inherently lying to you.

The more popular they are on social media, the more likely they are they're actually telling you lies because that's how you get you can't get very famous telling the truth.

So all of that is to say that as we talk about this 1, now today, the Lord led me that I should go back over another form of habit addiction, 1 of the ways the devil gets in, and that is entertainment.

So we're gonna talk a little bit more about entertainment today.

We did a little bit the other days, and we're gonna go a little deeper into it today as we talk about the clarity of mind.

So with all of that said, let's get into this.

Our scripture reading comes from 1st Corinthians chapter 6 verse 18 which says, flee fornication.

Every sin that a man does is without the body, but he that commits fornication sins against his own body.

What, Paul says, don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own?

For you are bought with a price therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are whose God's we belong to God changes the way you do everything because what society tells you is do what you want to do do what feels good to you that's not what the Bible teaches the Bible says Jesus himself actually says it deny yourself take up your cross and follow me.

That is the instruction given to each of us as Christians.

Father God we thank you for this opportunity to study your word and I just ask now that you lead us by the power of your Holy Spirit.

These are once again very difficult spiritual issues to talk about and the devil is busy.

But Lord, right now in the name of Jesus, we rebuke Satan.

And Lord, we ask that you bind him and cast him far from this place.

Soften hearts and allow the Holy Spirit for him to move on the hearts and minds of your people now.

Our talk, Clear Minds in the Last Days, Guarding Against End-Time Deception.

We're going to use the Bible story found in Daniel chapter 5.

Daniel chapter 5 says, Belshazzar the king made a great feast to 1000 of his lords and drank wine before the thousand.

Here the Bible gives the example again of the dangers of intoxication.

I mean I get around to it at the end of the story, but he knew the truth.

In fact, he is 1 of the few pagan people in the Bible who actually has a chapter that you can credit to him, Daniel chapter 4.

So he knew the truth, but here he is getting drunk.

The Bible says in verse 2, Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels, which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple, which is in Jerusalem, that the king and his princes, his wives and his concubines might drink therein.

When you get drunk, you naturally and almost automatically bring out the vessels that belong to the temple of God.

Every time you engage in these behaviors that destroy the body temple, you are violating, defying the vessels of God.

You belong to God and so as you do these things, all these things begin to happen and he has all his wives as concubines and he's just carrying on terrible verse 3.

Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of.

Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God, which was at Jerusalem.

Out of the out of the temple of the house of God, which is at Jerusalem and the king and his princess his wives and his concubines drank in them they drank wine and what did they do they drank wine and what did they do after that they praised the gods of gold and of silver of brass of iron of wood and of stone drunkenness led to idolatry drunkenness all care was gone It is even more interesting because again, we may not get to the back end of the story that in fact, right as they're partying that whole city and nation in a sense is surrounded by their enemy.

Some of us are partying while the enemy has us surrounded.

So here they're they're having this feast.

Ellen White doesn't use often use words like this but look at what she says.

Ellen White says, with reason dethroned through shameless intoxication and the lower impulses and passions now on the in the ascendancy the king himself took the lead in the riotous orgy You don't really think about Ellen White's talking like that there do you?

I normally wouldn't even read such a word except it's a part of the verse, a part of the part of the passage.

The Bible says, come let us reason together.

Without the ability to reason, you, it is difficult and I would almost argue impossible to be saved.

He wants you intoxicated with something so that you are unreasonable, so that you can't choose.

04 The Shaking, the Sifting, and the Remnant Church

The Quiet and the Pain: Where is God?

It's a great relief to realize that being an effective witness for Christ doesn't mean you have to be the knowledge person about everything.

Instead, just be a person who's going to the cross all the time.

Just be a person who's wanting to direct people to the cross of Jesus all the time, right?

It turns out what people usually need, probably more than 90% of the time, isn't like direct specific answers with like factual data.

What people want is the presence of somebody who is the hands and feet of Christ.

I was terrified when I first became a teacher.

I work out for those of you who, this is your first time here.

It's our Adventist Conference boarding school.

I was terrified my first several years being a teacher because I was like, oh man, I teach Bible classes.

I don't know what I'm going to do when they ask me questions I don't know what to do with.

And then slowly I read stuff and studied stuff.

And then I got like a little bit kind of arrogant like, oh yeah, this is good.

Like I found a lot of really good material.

And then over the years I've kind of realized that even that didn't scratch the itch for a searching person.

Just turns out people are looking for the presence of Christ more than anything.

The 20th century gave us more genocide than in any other century of world history.

And it was supposed to be the century that was going to do away with war.

You look at the 1870s, the 1880s, the 1890s, all the world peace conferences that were building up coming to the turn of the century in the name of enlightenment progress, the building of democratic, quote-unquote, empires.

This was supposed to be, we were supposed to purge the world of war and suffering, and then 1914, yikes, the guns of August roll out and tens of millions of people are killed throughout the fields of France and other places in Europe, World War I, World War II.

We come to things like the Holocaust, the Nazis, horrible genocides that have happened in Southeast Asia and China and other places in Africa throughout the world and Turns out for all our intellectual acumen guess what?

The human heart's still pretty messed up.

Yeah And what about the families what about my grandmother?

My grandmother was a little girl She was a German.

They were living in Yugoslavia, and Christmas morning, she was like 6 or 7 years old, the war had started, and the Russians were actually coming into town, and they were looking for local Germans to kind of punish them for everything that's happening with Germany, you know, World War II.

And my grandmother was, she got a little doll, it was Christmas morning, and then all of a sudden, knock at the door, Russian soldiers, you have 10 minutes.

Tells the family, you have 10 minutes, gather all your belongings, get out, you're not coming back.

Took all the belongings and what'd they do?

Saw my little, my Oma trying to hide her little doll, her little baby doll under her dress.

She watched her mom die in a concentration camp.

Little bit of a just, like, ah, doing that again.

Yeah, sorry, I'm a classroom teacher, is what we do.

So turn to the, you know, and if you are single and you are on the Adventist dating plan which is go to GYC then seat yourself well close our eyes seat yourself where You need to sit so you can turn.

Really quickly, turn to somebody next to you.

What do you do when somebody says to you, oh, you believe in God?

But there's so much horrible evil in the world.

Now that your conversation is going good, I'm going to cut you off.

There's all so much evil, horrendous evil in the world.

Somebody on this side, what would you say?

You want to unpack that suitcase a little bit?

We're going to unpack some of that today.

I was going to say, it's a test that no matter how many chapters of the Bible you do, there's a chance that you have to go down and just say, I'm on that.

I mean, it's, I'm not saying it's not the Word of God, it is, amen, but like it's pretty awful.

It's like this long, sad, one-sided love story of a patient, loving God who is suffering in the sufferings of his people, who are willfully choosing their own suffering, and he has the remedy, but they're like, yeah, no, yeah, no, right?

So no matter how much he keeps on, he keeps on sticking with.

04 Healing the Brain After Addiction: The Power of Our Health Message

03 The Rise of a Prophetic Movement

Father, thank you for your love and your grace.

Thank you for the opportunity to study your word.

The same Holy Spirit that inspired the word is with us as we study it.

So I pray that you would be with us this afternoon.

Give us attentive minds, alert thoughts, and prepare us for the overwhelming events that are coming.

And we know that in Jesus, we need not fear that his love and grace are sufficient to get us through the crisis in Christ's name, Amen.

Well let's suppose you were taking your dream vacation in Europe And let's suppose that you had bought a Eurorail pass which enables you to travel any place you want by train.

And you're on the train traveling across Europe.

And as you're going, you've never gone this way before and you get a little bit concerned.

And you begin to think, did I get on the right train?

If I'm on the right train, Does this train go to the city that I want to go to?

And am I gonna have to walk the last 7 miles with my 3 suitcases?

Now, I know you're fit, but I don't know if you're that fit.

And so you begin thinking, I'm a little confused here, does the train stop short?

Or maybe the train veers off the track, veers off in a different direction, and maybe we go in the absolute wrong direction.

Or maybe there's a calamity up ahead and there's a bridge out and we're never gonna make it there.

But then you get out your Eurorail map and you say, wait a minute, as I look at this map, the train is exactly on the right track.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

05 The Triumph of God’s End Time Church

45m

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

51m

05 Sobriety and the End of Time: The Need of a Clear Mind to Avoid Deception

1h 8m

04 The Shaking, the Sifting, and the Remnant Church

45m

The Quiet and the Pain: Where is God?

50m

04 Healing the Brain After Addiction: The Power of Our Health Message

59m

03 The Rise of a Prophetic Movement

1h 2m

The Word: Is it Reliable? Is He Alive?

52m

03 The New Drug: Pornography and Sex Addiction

59m

Not Home Yet

44m

02 The Holy Spirit, Laodicea, and Revival

52m

02 The Brain on Drugs: How the Devil Chains the Mind

59m

Sound Doctrine