ASI Scandinavia 2013: Transforming Grace

The Bible or Ellen White?

Jonathan Karlsson

ASI Scandinavia

Part 2: How Inspiration Works

We're right in the middle of the test of a prophet, that's where we left off.

And I think let's just go through quickly the 3 more tests that we will look at.

And then we shall look at inspiration and how inspiration works.

So this is a very sensitive and an important topic so I really wish that we could have a word of prayer and ask for the Lord's guidance in this.

Our Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us this moment of time that we can study your word together, help us to understand inspiration, help us to understand how you spoke through the prophets of old so that we may have a clear picture of it.

You see that there's so much misunderstanding about this topic, so I pray Father that you will direct our minds and help us not to fall into error.

I see that I have been lacking faith here.

We've been looking at the gift of prophecy.

We've seen that that the Bible calls us to test the prophets and the third test that we'll look at today is by the fruits you shall know them Jesus said in Matthew 7 Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?

Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.

Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.

So the fruits of course we find in the Bible refer to the fruits of the spirit in Galatians which is their behavior, their attitude, but also the fruit of their work.

And so the question we could ask is how did Ellen White live and what was the fruit of her ministry?

And I've quoted for you some of her sharpest critics.

Canwright was a minister, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, who left the church during Ellen White's time, but he was very closely acquainted with her and it was on the basis of the inspiration of Alan White that he left the church and started to attack it.

But he writes in a quote from Review and Herald I know Sister White to be an unassuming, modest, kind-hearted, noble woman.

These traits in her character are not simply put on and cultivated, but they spring gracefully and easily from her natural disposition.

She is not self-conscited, self-righteous and self-important as fanatics always are.

She is ever looking after the needy, destitute, and the suffering, providing for them and pleading their cause.

Towards the end of it, the headings started again and it's number 3.

There's 1 for yesterday that we're still going through and then there's another 1 for today.

So I should have put page numbers on this, I'm sorry, but if you go towards the end it's number 3 in big headings, by the fruits you shall know them.

Anyway this is 1 of her sharpest critics that writes this about Ellen White and that tells us something, in my opinion.

He says, she studies God's Word carefully and constantly.

I've heard Sister White speak hundreds of times, have read all her testimonies through and through, most of them many times, and I have never been able to find 1 immoral sentence in the whole of them, or anything that is not strictly pure and Christian, nothing that leads away from the Bible and from Christ, but there I find the most earnest appeals to obey God, to love Jesus, to believe the Scriptures and to search them constantly." This is a powerful testimony from someone who did not believe in Ellen White.

It tells us something about the fruit of this prophet.

Walter Martin, we don't have time to quote him, but he says basically the same thing, that she's a Christian in every sense of the term.

And, I mean, how many of you have ever read Steps to Christ?

If you've read Steps to Christ, Have you felt that you've been drawn away from Christ or towards Christ when you read it?

I mean if you read that book, that's the book that converted me, basically.

I read that book and I understood what it meant to be converted.

You know before my parents told me that all or other people told me you need to be converted Jonathan that's what what you're lacking and I was asking oh how am I converted and people were trying to describe it to me they were telling me that well it's like it's hard to describe It's kind of like falling in love, you know, you can't really describe it.

I thought I would get some kind of lightning from the sky that would just zap me and then I would be all hallelujah.

But that was not conversion until I read Steps to Christ and I realized it is surrender.

Through prayer I go down on my knees, I give my heart to Jesus and that is what, when God's Spirit comes into me and starts changing my life.

And Imagine if you're the devil, and I trust that you're not, but if you were the devil, and let's say that you were going to call a false prophet that was going to lead people away from Christ.

I mean, the fruits of this false prophet keeps leading people to Jesus all the time.

That's not a good fruit if you're a false prophet.

But it might not be that simple because actually there are many false prophets today that seems to lead people to Jesus.

But is the gospel, is it true gospel or not?

And that's why this is not only the only test.

We need to have all of the tests, but it is true.

Yeah, but if you think of some prophets, I don't know if they're prophets really, but you have these, if you see behind the scenes, there's for example this prophet that claimed to be Christ in Florida and he was leading millions of people to Christ or the Antichrist who he said was the same person And then he was a drug addict and he was saying there was no sin in the world because Jesus came to take away sin, you know.

And he had all these kinds of weird things.

And you can say, he can come and say, oh, I'm leading people to Jesus.

But the fruits tell that this is not the case.

He's leading people to a totally foreign gospel if you start looking a little bit into what the Bible says.

Many say that, that's what the Mormons told me and I told you about yesterday, that, oh, when you read these books you feel so good and that's the fruit of the Spirit.

So we can't isolate this 1, but at least the fruits should not contradict the message.

They shouldn't be hypocrites in that sense of the word, because God wouldn't keep giving them messages if they were hypocritical all the time.

And a true prophet needs to fulfill this test if it is actually a prophet from God.

It's from people not of this church and even people who are opposed to Ellen White There's 1 instance, Vincent Ramek was a Catholic lawyer And he spent 300 hours investigating and comparing Ellen White's writings.

He was going to investigate the charges of plagiarism, which we'll look at today, later.

And he concluded that too many of her critics, I'm on number 3 and D, too many of the critics have missed the boat altogether.

I personally have been moved, deeply moved by those writings.

I think I'm a better man today because of them.

And I wish that the critics could discover that." He was a Catholic.

Part 1: The Prophetic Gift and Ellen White

For those of you who don't know me, I work as a Bible worker in Finland at the moment.

And it is a very challenging work, but a very blessed work as well.

So I'm going to share something that is very close to my heart and I'll share some of my own testimony concerning the spiritual prophecy and Ellen White and we'll try to in this presentation I'd like to go into a little more of depth of how to have a balanced view of Ellen White because I believe and we'll look at that later that there are extreme views on both sides and We will look at it, and I believe that we'll see from the scripture actually what what a prophet is and how we should read Ellen White, so I'd like to pray before we start and let's get right into it.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to study your word.

We pray for your Holy Spirit's illumination so that we may understand the things that we are going to read.

So I was raised in an Adventist family but During my teenage years I felt the Bible was extremely boring, nothing interesting at all.

I drifted away from God and I was brought back through some ways that I can't take time to explain right now.

But during the preparations for my baptism, I had come across some of the websites out there that attacked Ellen White.

Have any of you ever been to such a website ever?

There are at least lots of them out there and I came across this and it was because I was discussing at a forum and some person said well Ellen White is a false prophet, look at this.

When I was reading these things, I was thinking, wow, why didn't anyone tell me about this?

And I was looking into all this and I started to have questions about it.

And I told my pastor that, I actually printed the objections.

And I came to my pastor and I put them on the table of the pastor and I told the pastor, I want an answer to every single 1 of these questions before I get baptized.

And yeah, I guess the pastor really got to work.

It was actually the pastor's wife that helped me out.

And A week later, she had studied into all these subjects and we went through these different points, point by point.

And as I was reading them and as I was reading the things in the context, I was very convinced that whatever motive was these people had, they were not, that had written these web pages, they were not pure.

They were not honest in their way of presenting the material, in the way of presenting Ellen White's writings.

And so, needless to say, I got baptized and I praise the Lord for that.

During the years, The writings of Ellen White have been an extreme, extremely great inspiration to me in my ministry.

If I get discouraged, that's where I go and I get encouraged again.

It's meant so much to me in sermon preparations and all these things that I have a passion for this subject.

But I also know that there are, as I said, extremes in this regarding Ellen White.

And I think that we will want to look at what Ellen White actually means by what she says and how we can have a clear view of what the Bible says about prophets.

Now my clock is falling down so I won't see what time it is.

Otherwise I'll keep you here forever and you won't get any supper.

Basically this is what I'll talk about but this is in more depth so we won't go into all of it, and I'll just share some of my own experiences.

But what I want us to look at in this presentation is first of all the question of what is a prophet?

And then afterwards we look at Ellen White and we'll see, we'll look at the tests of a prophet in the Bible and see if it corresponds with what the Bible actually says.

So I've done it this way so we don't even have to have our Bibles here, isn't that lazy?

If you have your Bible you can turn to it but if you look at that in the first verse or first paragraph there 1a or it says Hebrews Hebrews chapter 1 verses 1 and 2.

Let me let me just share when we come to the question what is a prophet There are so many interesting ideas out there of what a prophet is.

I was actually at a pastor's meeting not too long ago and there was this prophet there that didn't belong to my church at all.

But this prophet came and they, the prophet went around all of the pastors around there and she put her hands on each of us and she put oil on our heads and then she said some kind of, you know, I almost considered Christian horoscope, you know, a little bit, something that was said, a bit general, some general information that, oh, you have some difficulty in your life that you need to let go of, you know.

And when she came to me, she said that I needed to stir up the gifts within me.

Thus says the Lord, stir up the gifts within me.

And when she was saying the gifts, she was thinking of speaking in tongues and these kinds of things.

So I was actually a bit skeptical to this prophet, but there are so many different variations of what people say a prophet is.

So I would like us to look at what the Bible actually has to say about it.

In Hebrews 1, verses 1 and 2, it says, and 2 it says God who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us by his son.

So according to this verse God has spoken through who?

The prophet is actually the spokesman of God.

Sometimes we think that a prophet is a fortune teller, you know, that's not the definition according to the Bible.

In Exodus 4 and verse 16, God says that Aaron shall be your spokesman to the people and he himself shall be as a mouth for you and you shall be to him as God and then in chapter 7 verse 1 God says to Moses so the Lord said to Moses see I have made you as God the Pharaoh and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet.

So if you compare those 2 verses you see very clearly that a prophet is a spokesman from God.

So it's actually God's primary way of communicating.

Sometimes he actually speaks through an audible voice.

Can you think of an example in the Bible when God spoke through an audible voice?

And at Mount Sinai, right, sometimes He makes His will known through that way.

And we wish, we sometimes say, oh, why can't God do that to me, right?

Why doesn't He speak to me through thunder and lightning?

And then it would be so easy to know God's will.

But God's primary method of communicating is through the prophets.

And we might say, but doesn't God communicate through the Bible?

It's actually the Scriptures of the prophets is what the Bible is called.

So if it wasn't for the prophetic gift, we would not have a Bible today.

So the prophetic gift is very, very important.

And we might wonder, so how does 1 become a prophet?

Do I go to prophet school 101 and then I graduate and then I become a prophet.

I once did 1 of these tests, I don't know if you've done them, in the church you have a gift test.

I actually did that 1 and I turned out to be a prophet.

I don't really know but it made me lose a bit confidence in those things because I don't believe that's how God in the Bible presents the prophetic gifts.

If we look in 1st Corinthians 12, maybe someone else can read it so I don't have to, you don't have to hear my voice all the time.

For to 1 is given the word of wisdom through the spirit to another the word of knowledge through the same spirit to another the faith by the same spirit to another gifts of healing by the same spirit to another the working in miracles to another prophecy another discerning of spirits to another different kinds of tongues and to another the interpretation of tongues.

But 1 and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each 1 individually, as He will.

It is a gift that God, when He sees necessary, He gives it.

The question can be asked, can all be prophets?

If we continue in that chapter in 1 Corinthians, Paul actually answers this question.

He writes that in 1 Corinthians 12 verse 29 that are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers, are all workers of miracles?

And the obviously implied answer in that is no.

Christ Our Righteousness- A Fresh Look At The Law, The Covenants, and The Gospel

Daniel Pel

Part 3: Christ Our Righteousness- A Fresh Look At The Law, The Covenants, and The Gospel

Welcome to our third and final workshop session entitled Christ Our Righteousness A Fresh Look at the Law, the Covenants and the Gospel and we have indeed already looked at the 10 Commandments in our first session.

In our second session we looked at the covenants, which I really enjoyed that study.

And this evening, or this afternoon, we're going to look at the Gospel.

Now I can say right up front that it's impossible to go into everything regarding the gospel in 1 hour but what we are going to attempt to do is to get kind of the big picture the larger picture an overview of the gospel through the book of Romans.

Romans is a New Testament book written by the Apostle Paul and specifically the first 8 chapters of the book of Romans are going to be some of what we'll be looking at and again we're not going to be able to look at all the, everything in there, but we're just gonna, I'm just gonna kind of pick out some gems that portray the gospel in the first half of the Book of Romans.

Before we get started, Let's have a word of prayer and then we'll get right into it.

Dear Heavenly Father, we're grateful to be here at the ASI convention.

We are thankful that we can be gathered together like this, that we have the opportunity to study your Word.

And we do pray that now you will inspire us through the Holy Spirit to understand the deep things that you have written to us.

We ask you Lord that you will remove all distraction from us and that your Holy Spirit may move upon our hearts, help us to see Jesus more clearly, and may He become everything for us.

Yes, the book of Romans, a little bit of, Let's get a little bit of facts together here.

What do we know about the Book of Romans?

Even Bible scholars don't really question that.

He introduces himself in the first chapter.

It was written in the first century and it was written to the first believers or the Christian church in which city?

Now isn't it interesting, just think about this for a moment, that of All the letters that Paul wrote and write in a lot of the New Testament is really the letters of Paul.

A letter to Ephesus, the city of Ephesians is the letter to the believers in Ephesus.

Galatians is a letter to the believers in Galatia, which is a province.

So you have all these letters written to different parts of the Roman Empire where you had these Christians, these believers and Rome was 1 of them.

Now think about that, Paul writes to the believers in Rome which was the capital of the empire, and he writes, and in his letter he in a beautiful way portrays the gospel.

Later Rome became the center of the perversion of the gospel, right?

In later centuries, when you look at the time of the Reformation, or time before the Reformation and leading up to the Reformation and into the Reformation, you have the papal power in control in Rome, and in many ways, tradition had taken the place of the pure gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so in order for us to recapture the beauty of the gospel, we can find it in many books of the Bible, but particularly the book of Romans is a beautiful explanation and exhibit of Paul through the gospel.

And he addresses this to a place that we would maybe not connect so much with the pure gospel today.

When I say Rome, You don't immediately think of the pure gospel, you might think of much else that has happened, and it surely has, a lot has happened.

But here we are, back in the, for a moment, we're back in the first century when this was written to the believers there.

And the Book of Romans has 16 chapters and you can basically divide the book into really 2 portions.

The first 8 chapters, so half of the Book of Romans, is this picture that Paul gives us of the gospel message.

And then from chapter 9 to 16 is really the practical application of the gospel amongst the believers.

I really wish I had time to go through a lot of this material but of course we're limited here so we're just going to pick out a couple of things and hopefully this will kind of create an interest for you to go back and study this book, the Book of Romans.

If I could right away just give you a study tool, what has shaped my understanding of the Gospel and of the Book of Romans has been a book written by A.T.

Have anyone heard of those 2 individuals?

They were Seventh-day Adventist pioneers of our church, lived at the time of Ellen White, and they were both preachers, writers, and they wrote a book, and this book is called The Gospel in the Book of Romans, quite simple.

And it goes verse by verse, basically through the Book of Romans, and it's been very helpful for me, it's been very eye-opening, very beautiful, and so that's just something that I could recommend as a study tool when you're looking at this book.

And this fits right into our theme, Christ our Righteousness.

There was a general conference meeting in the year 1888.

And at that general conference meeting, A.T.

Wagoner presented the subject of righteousness by faith, or Christ our righteousness.

At that time, the Adventist church was really at a kind of a crossroads, you could say.

A crossroads between, because what had happened is they were very strong doctrinally, but they had lost sight of Jesus in the doctrines.

Now, the doctrines are beautiful, the doctrines are important.

Everything that we believe as Adventists, whether it comes to what happens when a person dies or how Jesus will come back or the time we will spend with him, the millennial prophecy or the truth about hell or the truth about all these doctrines are very important but if you take Christ out of that what you get left with is really just basically a theoretical argument based on scripture and that had happened to a large degree within the Adventist movement and A.T.

Wagoner in 1888, they got up and they had this theme of Christ our righteousness, we must come back to what it's really about.

The scriptures revolve around the person Jesus and the doctrines are really only a lens through which we see Jesus.

And in their attempt to bring Christ back into the focus, and they preach largely, by the way, from the Book of Romans, in their attempt to do that, there were different reactions to that.

Some, they responded positively, including Ellen White, the Prophet of the Lord, wrote that, she actually wrote regarding E.J.

Jones, that they were like Caleb and Joshua, the comparison she makes.

Well, if you know the story of Caleb and Joshua, those were the ones that said, hey we can go in, we can possess the land, right?

When the other spies, remember, they said no, no, this is too hard, there are giants in the land, we can't conquer them.

And so that comparison really shows that this was a very special message that was given to our church.

There were those that received it, there were those that rejected it, and up till this day within our denomination, there are people that receive it and people that reject it.

And I believe it's a very important message, Christ our righteousness, to bring Christ back into the picture where he belongs and to rightly understand what the gospel is because there is a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to what the gospel is.

The gospel is sometimes portrayed as merely a covering up of sin.

You just continue to sin, you'll be fine, Jesus will make it right when he comes back the second time.

We can live without sin, we're always going to do it.

Just trust in Jesus, that's all you have to do.

And when he comes back he'll fix everything.

That's a version of the gospel that you will hear.

Then you have other versions of the gospel like, no, we must do everything.

We must live perfect and we must do this.

And there's this attempt in our own strength to live perfect lives and there's failure in that and there's frustration in that and there's depression in that.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Part 2: How Inspiration Works

52m

Part 1: The Prophetic Gift and Ellen White

56m

Part 3: Christ Our Righteousness- A Fresh Look At The Law, The Covenants, and The Gospel

1h

Part 2: Christ Our Righteousness- A Fresh Look At The Law, The Covenants, and The Gospel

1h

Part 1: Christ Our Righteousness- A Fresh Look At The Law, The Covenants, and The Gospel

1h

Part 3: Question and Answer

1h 14m

Part 2: How To Maintain A Good Mental Health and Stable Emotional Intelligence

1h 34m

Part 1: Pre-Requisites To A Good Mental Health and Stable Emotions

1h 11m

Part 3: Self-Management- How To Use Time, Talents, and Resources

55m

Part 2: Self-Management- How To Use Time, Talents, and Resources

49m

Part 1: Self-Management- How To Use Time, Talents, and Resources

35m

Part 3: Work Ordained Of God- Supporting Ministries

1h

Sound Doctrine