Christian Martin

Living Hope SDA Church

Unveiling the Ultimate Love Triangle

You know, when God is love, He is the God that I can't wait to just run to as fast as I can and just fall in His arms.

And today we're in His presence and He's here with us.

You know, a recent analysis by a leading psychologist at the University of Virginia, he finds that active conservative Protestants who regularly attend church are 35% less likely to divorce compared to those who have no affiliation.

On the other hand, nominal unchurched Christians are actually 20% more likely than the general population to get divorced.

Now putting divorce rates aside, other findings show that Other findings show that friendships have declined in the last several decades.

35% of US adults report that they have less than 3 close friends, while 12% have none at all.

And this is according to Civic Science poll results from January of last year.

That's roughly 40 million people who claim not to have any close friends.

And what does it say about our greatest need?

Not just as families, individuals, church even, but as a society, as a culture.

And my message today is entitled, Unveiling the Ultimate Love Triangle.

Father in heaven, we're going to acknowledge you as we open your word.

It's the Holy Spirit who speaks through the living word.

And so that's why, Lord, we find it necessary to once again just simply acknowledge you and pray that as we open the word of God that your Holy Spirit would minister to our hearts and unveil to us the message that you would have us take home and take to heart.

Did you know that friendships and our spiritual and emotional well-being are linked together, are closely linked?

Klenn and Phyllis Hill in their book, The Connections Code.

Connection codes conclude that we are coded from birth for relationship, for connection, for functioning interdependently with each other.

We were created to coexist, to live together.

Each of us is coded, you know, hardwired to or for relational connection with other humans.

And that's because He created us to be interpersonal creatures, to have friendship with God, yes, and with 1 another.

Yet as we look around, as we look at our generation, as we look at our culture, we're more likely to have lost friends than to have gained them by a significant amount.

And among husbands and wives in our generation, in our society, in our culture, 53% of marriages in 2023 turned to divorce.

So what is happening to human connections?

After all, if God hardwired us that way, if he wired us to be social beings, why these stats?

Why is there a disconnect and not only among those in the world and those out there.

No, I'm talking about even within these walls.

I'm even going as far as to say that 1 could argue that those in the world are doing a little bit better in connecting than many of the saints, than many of those within the church.

What can lead to an enduring joy when it comes to any kind of relationship?

And during this season of love, we're not just going to focus on marriage because we're on a different journey.

Any type of relationship, whether you're married or single, how does 1 experience positive emotions and connections with people as God wired us to be, as God designed us to be, whether it be with our very own spouse or with even with others.

How do we have those connections that are healthy, vibrant, and loving?

Well, the biblical answer might surprise you.

Luke chapter 14 is the context, the passage that we'll be given attention to today.

And as with any story, the context is important.

And in this instance, in Luke chapter 14, it's a great multitude that is following Jesus.

Let's just stop there and unpack that a little bit.

And the multitude of Jesus' followers is even greater today.

If it was great back then, it's even greater today.

I appreciate an amen, but it may not be exactly what you might be thinking.

You see, there's a fine difference, and I say fine, fine difference, between being another person who follows Jesus And on the other hand, being a follower of Jesus.

You can be a man, a woman, that follows Jesus.

And in every congregation, there's a mix of both.

According to a report that was published in early January last year by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, talking about great multitudes, there is an estimated 2.3 billion Christians worldwide.

2.3 billion Christians 2.3 billion Christians worldwide.

But as we take a closer look, we'll discover that a significant number of them are what is being termed nominal unchurched Christians.

When asked to describe their Christian faith, nominal unchurched Christians, 6% acknowledge that they're questioning their faith.

31% say they're not currently practicing it.

And 32% say they aren't particularly devout.

And so, there's a labeling of Christian, but that's about it.

And so as it is today, so it was in the days of Jesus.

Great multitudes followed Jesus because it was a trendy thing to do.

In fact, just 1 evidence of that would simply be this, that we go from 1 instance, there's great multitudes throwing their garments upon the road with palm trees saying, the Lord, he is king, let's crown him, Hosanna to the name of the 1 who comes in the name of the Lord.

And it was those same voices, same voices that less than 10 days later are saying crucify him, crucify him.

Great multitudes follow Jesus and in every age in some aspects it's the popular thing to do But that's the extent.

And while there are many times, and believe me, many times, and you can see it for yourself throughout the Gospels, When Jesus said things that comforted the disturbed, he said it often.

We can find examples of that in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

He came to speak words of encouragement, of affirmation, of healing words that would comfort those disturbed.

But while he did that often, he also often said things that disturbed the comfortable.

And in this particular moment, it's a good case in point.

Jeremy Arnall

South Bay SDA Church

Happiness By Faith

For 4 years, I attended Mount Pisgah Academy, as I've shared, and my twin brother and I worked in a nursing home.

My wife and I, I mean, not my wife then, but Tina and Tanya also worked there as twins.

And we also had twins that were older named Anis and Janis.

And what's, this is just a side thing, but what's interesting is that half the twins, you know what I mean, If you split the twins down the middle, half the twins worked on 200 wing, half the twins worked on 100 wing.

So those poor residents must have thought they were losing their minds at times.

Jamie and I, my twins, started out in the kitchen working there for a year.

Messy job, but we acquired in our sophomore summer a license to be certified nursing assistants, CNAs we called them, and Tina and Tanya did too.

Jamie and Tanya worked on 200, Tina and I worked on 100.

And in that job we would of course assist with feeding, with bathing, dressing, basically the whole whole deal.

I remember feeding a resident 1 night and as I was feeding her across the way there was a little lady named Sarah.

Sarah, I don't know her story, I just know that Sarah was having a dispute with her roommate.

And in the midst of the argument, which sounded as though it was pretty much one-sided, Sarah doing all the talking.

And I really don't remember what else she said.

But to hear this little lady who was, I don't know, maybe in her 80s, with just her meager belongings in this little corner of a room, to hear her cry out in frustration, I have no family.

Even though I was young with all my future ahead of me.

It was sobering to say the least and heart-wrenching.

They say that she modeled coats, you know, like it's like fur coats and so forth on the runway in New York City.

You see, Gladys only had 1 leg now and was dependent on us for her care.

After graduation in 95, I took a job in Ohio during my freshman year in college.

I went on to serve as a caretaker for a 92-year-old Jewish gentleman named John.

I remember sitting with him in his high-rise apartment.

He had plenty of money, so I thought anyway.

He was a retired lawyer, practiced into his early 80s, said he had to step out because he couldn't argue with a woman.

Had earned a reputation in the community, he had a family, a beautiful family, sweet, sweet family, but he had lost his wife Sylvia.

All of this and yet his life as it was drawing to a close, he seemed depressed and somewhat unhappy at times.

In my young mind, I thought, well, if money, beautiful family, a lovely wife, though gone, still a wife, traveled the world, or so it sounded, and he still wasn't really happy, What's left?

This morning, I'd like to invite you to join me to look at a message from a preacher that lived a long time ago.

He calls himself a preacher anyways, though most of us know him more as a king.

This preacher king takes a few pages to write out a memoir, some reflection on his experience, and in the process gives counsel to people like you and me.

You can almost sense in his words this sense of anguish, of sorrow, of being on the other side of this story and realizing that the pages are few that are left in his and feeling a sense of remorse, of shame, And perhaps if someone will listen to his story, they can avoid the same traps that he fell into.

Of course, if you haven't figured it out, I'm speaking of the wise man Solomon, who wrote 3 of our Bible books, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.

A book on love, a book on life, and a book on wisdom.

Today we want to look at his third work, or at least what we understand to be his last work, which was Ecclesiastes.

We can't be certain as to when Proverbs was written and we think of Saga Solomon, the way it reads, as something that probably came early in his reign.

But we understand that the book of Ecclesiastes was likely near the end.

A lot has happened during these 40 years of his reign.

During this period, he was given wealth, he was given wisdom, yet he still desired more.

He gathered unto himself more wealth, though God had warned about such behaviors.

He gathered numerous women unto himself for his pleasure as well as for political means, yet we know that sadly backfired.

He taxed the people to help pay for his lavish lifestyle which he had created and yet this also caused much trouble.

Somewhere along the line he realizes he gets his folly, you know, and as we gather from the book of Ecclesiastes he repents and turns back to God.

If there was ever a man who did it all, who had it all, Solomon would fit the bill.

Prior to his death, this experienced king writes these words to you and to me in hopes that we will learn from his failure.

The title of the message this morning, hear it carefully, Happiness by Faith.

Dear Lord, I pray that you speak to our hearts.

May we listen to this wise preacher who once lived such a lavish lifestyle, who had what seemed to be everything, and knowing that you gave him wisdom, Lord, that you've protected this book, this work, this memoir of sorts to be here in our Bible today.

Well, we take that as a directive from you that these words contain wisdom for us.

Would you help us to comprehend them, and more importantly, to apply them by the presence of your Holy Spirit, we ask in Jesus' name.

The word Ecclesiastes is actually Greek in its origin.

In Proverbs, Solomon is the wise counselor.

In Song of Songs, he's the romantic lover.

And in Ecclesiastes, he's the aged preacher.

He refers to himself as a preacher from the onset in verse 1.

Notice with me how the book reads, open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes.

It's nestled between his 2 other works, Proverbs and Song of Solomon.

And I want you to notice how he begins his work there in verse 1.

The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

What prophet has a man, he writes, from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?

So at the very outset, he writes what appears to be the most bleak and dismal reflection on life that we could conceive of.

All, not some, not what comes later in life, not what's early, all is vanity.

This term vanity is used 37 times in the book.

The phrase is referred to when talking about life under the sun.

And when it's used to refer to life under the sun, it's used 29 times.

When he says vanity of vanities, he's emphasizing his point.

You know, in the Old Testament, this was common fare.

We would say the holy of holies to refer to the holiest of places.

We would say king of kings to refer to the supreme king, or song of songs to refer to the greatest song known to man.

Hence today we are looking at what Solomon calls vanity of vanities, that is, life under the sun.

The term in Hebrew can be translated as vapor, breath, or futility.

We might say meaninglessness, as some of your translations do.

Vapor, or could we just simply say smoke.

If you were to try to reach out and grab a handful of smoke, you would find it, while it would seem to make sense that such could happen, you realize it cannot be contained.

Try as you might, it slips through your fingers.

We might say that, we might ask, I should say, that how is it that this preacher who's saying that life is meaningless could find his way into Scripture?

How can such a book be a part of such a holy canon?

Such sentiments are hardly Christian, right?

Some would argue that such writing is merely the philosophies of an aged king.

After all, he appears to be giving his views on life.

The whole text at some level can seem somewhat secular, like something you might pick up in the self-help section of Barnes & Noble.

Christian Service

Cory Reeves

Mills River SDA Church

A Cause to Believe In

We don't need the study guards right away, so you can raise your hand and still pay attention to me, I hope.

The Saturday Evening Post in 1968 posted an article on draft Dodgers.

This isn't a baseball team, unfortunately.

These are people who decided not to go into the draft, right?

I'm going to share with you a few of the stories out of the article, and I'm going to read a little bit of the story, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the story.

I had to change some of the words because it was 1968 language in there that probably wouldn't be appreciated today.

So, just so you know, there were over, estimated over 15, 000 Americans that were listed as delinquent by selective services.

And I think that number was probably even higher than that, because some of them got out of it afterwards.

1 young man who made his decision under duress is 22-year-old Michael Miller.

And some of these names have been changed, too, so that might not have been his real name.

He was a student at Penn State and the City University of New York.

Miller developed such strong convictions about the U.S.

Involvement in Vietnam that he refused to cooperate with the Selective Services.

Even though he has a physical disability that probably would have kept him out of the Army anyway, he decided to go to jail.

And his father, a bombardier in the American Army Air Corps in World War II, called him a communist and kicked him out of the house.

Then his wife, who he married later, who was pregnant, told him that him going to jail again would be unfair.

Miller genuinely grieves about this permanent exile from the United States, and he missed out on his sister's wedding.

He missed his parents' anniversaries, his sister's children.

He missed out on so much not being able to come home.

Another story is a gentleman who now lives in, or did live at this time in 68, in Toronto, John Phillips.

He was a tall, blond, 22-year-old Quaker from Iowa.

Phillips' passivism is founded in his religion, and ordinarily he would have had little trouble obtaining the conscientious objector classification he had applied for, but he bewildered the 5 farmers on his rule draft board.

He was the first objector they had encountered, and they didn't know what to make of him.

They called him a coward and a communist.

Phillips says, and when they learned I had covered the Alabama Civil Rights March as a photographer, they said, so you went down there to help them, but you won't fight for your country.

I told them I would gladly go to Vietnam as a photographer.

There was nothing I could do so I wouldn't have to kill.

And for the first time in my life, I broke down and cried.

Phillips filed an appeal and went so far as to report his physical, he had to report for physical examination.

He spent the night in the barracks at Fort Des Moines, where the other draft, with other draftees, until he was stopped by an officer, until this group of kids were stopped by an officer, the other, the other recruitees actually held, started holding him down to shave his whole body.

He married his fiancée, another Quaker, and immediately they went to Canada.

She became a social worker and he became a photographer.

1 more story, and this one's Michael Whittles, who is 28 years old and a successful artist in Philadelphia.

Whittles never a peace activist or protester during his high school years in his time at Philadelphia College of Art.

He joined the Army Reserves and was assigned to a quartermaster company in 1962.

His 6 months of active duty at Fort Knox, Kentucky were uneventful and he was a good soldier and promoted to squad leader.

He took heavy weapons training and it wasn't until 1 of his commanders said this gun will punch a fist-sized hole through your enemy It was then he realized he didn't want to have any part of that He said he didn't want to kill people.

He didn't realize, I guess going through training, that that's what they were going to go do and that he was a conscientious objector at heart.

Finally in June of 1965 he actually filed for legal advice because they were ignoring his pleas.

He painstakingly filled out another application in August of 1965 and turned it into his company commander.

6 months went by, Whittles heard nothing.

Though he kept writing to all the higher and higher reserve echelons, in January of 1966, he just stopped going to his reserve meetings.

And he actually started returning his paychecks.

In March, the application was turned down and then he was demoted as a punishment and was ordered to report to Fort Knox for 45 days of active duty.

His commanding officer, who he tried to explain everything to, demanded he put on his uniform.

And when he didn't, getting down here, sorry, They sent him to a small jail cell.

They gave him more direct orders, put on your uniform.

When Whittles respectfully refused, he was taken to a stockade where the sergeant told him, we've had your kind here before and we are going to break you.

He was stripped of his shirt, shoes, and socks and locked in the box, which is a 6x8 isolation cell, with nothing in it but a Bible and a steel slab for a bunk.

The 2 guards kept him standing up until 2 a.m.

When they sent him to take a shower, when he got back to his cell, his blankets were all gone.

It was a cold night, but the guard said, you don't want that blanket, it says U.S.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Unveiling the Ultimate Love Triangle

46m

Happiness By Faith

51m

A Cause to Believe In

53m

Disappointed but Not Discouraged

32m

Daniel 4

42m

07 Your Mercy Reaches Unto the Heavens

19m

The Prince of Pride, Part 2

28m

Midnight to Dawn

28m

07 Understanding Theocracy

28m

Love Covers a Multitude of Sins: Thoughts on 1 Peter 4:7-11

1h 3m

Preparing the Ark: Lessons from Noah’s Faith

1h 4m

07 Your Mercy Reaches Unto the Heavens

30m

Sound Doctrine