John Diel

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Righteousness:  What Does It Look Like?

Our theme this year in GYC Southwest is Christ our righteousness not I but Christ.

We would like to dig deeper into this theme called righteousness by faith.

Where I believe it was written in Spirit of Prophecy that not 1 in a hundred truly understands the principles of righteousness by faith.

We have speakers such as Doug Batchelor, Dwayne Lemon.

We also have speakers who have experienced righteousness by faith, like Sister Verna Santos, who had gotten out of the lifestyle, of alternative lifestyle, who no longer has a desire for the same-sex gender.

And I'm really excited with the lineup that we have.

But we're here at this moment, and I invite you to please bow your heads with me.

I'm gonna kneel down as we seek the Lord in prayer as we dive into the topic.

Our dear Father in heaven, we thank you so much, oh Lord, for an opportunity again to worship you.

Sometimes we make it a point that worship is not relational but worship is really an experience with you.

But Father, you know that we are nothing but dust, sinful human beings.

And so as we ask before we open your Word, we ask that you please cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

You forgive us from our sins and that you give us wisdom.

Open our hearts and minds to the message.

I pray, O Lord, that you would empty me of self, of self-dependence.

And I'm not asking that you just, that you only empower me.

Thank you for hearing and answering our prayer, for we ask in Jesus' name.

By the way, I forgot to put a little plug in.

You know, Pastor Lozano, when he was here and sharing testimonies, I said, man, they're really the Marines of mission work.

And I don't know how else I can promote it, but please come.

Come and maybe God is calling you to be 1 of those missionaries and He would put a burden upon you when you listen to the testimonies that He will be giving.

It only takes maybe 1 testimony to set that spark in our hearts and get the fire going.

Maybe you can search him more, but let's get to the message anyways.

Righteousness is 1 of those topics that is very, very, that has been, what's that?

Righteousness is just like perfection and there are a lot of misconceptions about it.

In the Bible it says in Psalm 37 verse 29, the righteous shall inherit the land and dwell therein forever.

Righteousness and being righteous is 1 of those things that Christians try to attain because righteousness is something that we need in order for us to be in heaven.

Righteousness is something that we had lost in Eden and in order for us to get back it is something that I must have and I need to have in order to be in heaven with God.

Also in 2nd Peter chapter 3 verse 13, if you have your Bibles with you turn with me there.

2nd Peter chapter 3 verse 13, the Bible says here, nevertheless we according to His promise look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.

The new earth and the new heaven that God promises to us is a place where in dwelleth righteousness.

It's a place where all the inhabitants are righteous.

And I don't know about you, but whenever I see my own righteousness and I compare it with maybe a person, especially Jesus Christ and His righteousness, I seem to have a sense of unbelongingness.

And so if we don't have righteousness, and The new heaven and the new earth is a place where in dwelleth righteousness.

If we're filled with unrighteousness, it would be a place of unhappiness for us.

So righteousness, what does it look like?

And that's what we're going to dive in today.

I hope that by the end of the service, we would remove some of the misconceptions on what righteousness is by looking at what righteousness looks like, and by God's grace, have an understanding on how to attain or receive this righteousness in God.

Let's turn our Bibles to Psalm 119 verse 172.

And in Psalm 119 verse 172, the Bible says, I feel like I'm not giving you enough time to go through your Bible, it's just I have a lot to cover and I want to make sure I cover everything so that There is no misconception after the presentation.

But in Psalm 119, verse 172, the Bible says, My tongue shall speak of thy word, for all thy commandments are righteousness.

The Bible speaks righteousness as equivalent to God's commandments.

As a matter of fact, I mean, what's this?

Righteousness is connected with the commandments of God or the law.

In fact, God's commandments are righteousness.

Let's turn our Bibles to 1st John chapter 5 verse 17.

And in 1st John chapter 5 verse 17, the Bible says here, all unrighteousness is sin and there is sin not unto death.

So by definition, sin is unrighteousness.

And we know from 1 John 3, verse 4 that sin is the transgression of the law.

If all unrighteousness is sin, then all unrighteousness must be transgression of the law.

If we flip that and say all righteousness then is keeping of the law.

A man asked him, Hey, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

However, misconception comes whenever we relate righteousness with keeping the commandments.

That's where we sometimes miss the point.

Whenever we say that, oh, righteousness is keeping the commandments, what we start to do is check myself whether I'm in line with the commandments of God.

And the way I would check myself is, you know, I would ask myself, is what I'm doing breaking the Sabbath?

Is hiking something that gets me too tired, therefore it's not resting, so am I breaking the Sabbath?

Is not giving tithe on my gross income, but rather net income, stealing.

And we start to have this long checklist and we say that righteousness is basically that thou shalt not.

Am I guilty of killing myself if I eat cheese?

And then we begin to have, I mean, we do have this long checklist.

And actually people come up, I mean, I don't know, people probably have come up to you and have come up to me and sometimes they ask whether what they're doing is in keeping with the commandments.

They want to make sure, you know, that they have the checklist.

There are people that have come up to me, what can we do during the Sabbath?

And oftentimes, we have misconceptions of what righteousness really is.

If we find something, and actually before I ask you something, and oftentimes when we have this view, what we do is if we see something in our lives that is not in line with the checklist that we have, what we do is we launch a campaign against whatever that thing is in our life and we strive to remove it from our lives and once we have removed it, we say, Oh, 1 more sin down, I'm more righteous.

Is righteousness merely an omission of sin?

Is righteousness merely removing something out of my life?

Is righteousness not killing, not stealing, not committing adultery, not having any idols, not coveting?

Many of us for a long time now have thought that that is righteousness.

And many of us are, maybe some of you here are striving to remove things out of your life.

Or maybe there are people here who sees many, many little things that I need to remove.

Matthew Priebe

Without This Animal You Will Die!

What we'll be talking about is some fairly high concept creation science issues in today's program.

And that is only going to continue with this 1, because the last program of the evening that I'm doing now is extremely advanced in terms of the material that I have assembled.

I have gone to a huge variety of sources to get the information of what we will be talking about this evening from just a range of different places.

If I was doing this as a regular paper presentation to a symposium of some sort, I would have the paper with hundreds of footnotes from all the places that I have gathered information from.

That is not available to a public speaking presentation like this.

The information I'm coming to you with is accurate because I can't footnote it in the presentation and say, here, look it up.

But this is all cutting-edge information that has been put together over the last few years in various scientific circles and various disciplines.

And so I'm going to be coming up with information and statistics that are gonna shock you.

And you're gonna go, that's not real, that can't be right, but it is real.

And so this is something that we're really talking about majorly important issues in this last program.

Father in heaven, we ask as this last Vesper program starts, as we finish out this Sabbath day, to again look to you for our inspiration and guidance as we try to understand your world and what you have put in it for us to discover and learn from.

Is nature a simple display of a few basic components that are all alike?

Or is nature found to be far more complex than we ever dreamed possible?

When God created the universe, he made a construction that we can only begin to comprehend with our limited knowledge.

So perhaps we can focus on the earth and try to understand 1 small speck of creation.

When previous generations tried to comprehend our world, they found such intricacies that they often resorted to superstition to explain the mysteries.

Modern science has delved deeply into the lives of plants and animals and the ways they interact.

But instead of reaching the end of the mysteries, science has only uncovered new questions that lead to even more mysteries.

In fact, science is as far from solving the intricacies of nature now as it was a century ago.

God made life more interlocked than seems possible.

Plants and animals and the world that supports them are meshed together in a web of interactions.

We have found that every form of life is dependent on another form.

If we pluck 1 thread of life, we find it attached to the rest of creation.

Plants require both animals and other plants.

Animals require both plants and other animals.

Both plants and animals require the minerals, gases, and weather that the planet provides.

And we have found that the same is true of us.

Humans are more dependent than we realize on the complex interactions of all life around us.

Often we assume that we are so advanced in technology and civilization that we are now immune to what happens in nature.

But with each new discovery and each new interaction found, we find that we are actually depend on a great many other forms of life for our own existence.

Rather than being impregnably secure, humans are actually on a knife edge of survival, relying on a host of other organisms for our very existence.

This is no surprise, as God has created all life to be dependent on other life.

So what are the interactions that we need to survive?

Is it really true that without a particular animal, we would die?

We would be well advised to discover and protect the animals we need to keep us alive.

In this program, we will examine those processes God has established on Earth that maintain human life and the individual animals that make those processes work.

We might be surprised which are the most important animals to our survival.

Of course, everything we see today on earth is God's backup plan.

The perfect world of Eden was a very different place than what we see now.

No death, disease, danger, or competition existed.

When sin began, almost every aspect of life had to change.

God had to totally remake his original creation.

Without drastic intervention, life on earth would likely have ceased to exist.

So we should remember that the nature we study today is not God's original plan, but rather his temporary way of dealing with the crisis of sin.

Also, it should be noted that everything I say here is a simplified version of the complexities existing in nature.

To go into excessive detail would take more time than we have and needlessly confuse the issue.

There are exceptions and subtleties to every area we will examine.

The first area we're gonna look at is pollination.

Without plants, the survival of most animal life is impossible.

Plants produce the oxygen animals must breathe.

But there is a second major service plants provide, food.

Even predators depend on plants to feed their vegetarian prey.

So whatever keeps plants alive is obviously crucial.

Plants grow from a seed, reach maturity, and then reproduce the next generation.

Plants usually reproduce by cross-pollination.

This gives plants diverse genes that keep them healthy.

Some plants, especially conifer trees, let the wind blow their pollen randomly.

But most plants use animals to spread their pollen to others of their species, including most food plants we eat.

70% of flowering plants need insects to pollinate them, including 2 3rds of our crops.

Plants attract specific animals to their flowers, place pollen on animals, and gather pollen brought to them by animals.

So now we will examine animal pollinators, for they must do the job of pollination or we will die.

Bats pollinate many desert and tropical plants.

They drink nectar from night flowers and carry pollen on their fur.

Birds that drink nectar do the same thing with day-blooming flowers, but relatively few birds or mammals pollinate.

Of the other vertebrates, only some gecko species regularly visit flowers and carry pollen, especially in jungles.

We were just down in Queensland in Australia and found a tiny little gecko crawling around through a large group of flowers and just moving around through the entire flower, that was his entire home.

And that was a very elegant example of the gecko pollinators.

The vast majority of pollination is done by the insects.

Bees and other wasps either visit many varieties or are specialized for a single species.

We all know that honeybees industriously drink from flowers, but native bees, usually small, are actually much more important in keeping plants thriving.

Localized bee species are the backbone of healthy habitats.

Some bees, such as bumblebees, vibrate their bodies at a specific frequency to loosen pollen grains for collection.

Certain plants, such as tomatoes, require this buzz pollination for existence.

Beetles come in so many forms that it's no surprise that a large group are pollinators.

Tiny beetles are often abundant, all working hard feeding themselves and keeping their food source successful.

We think of flies as biters and spreaders of disease, but only a few species do so.

Most drink nectar from all types of flowers.

Flies have scent detectors on their head and large eyes with color vision to help them find flowers.

Taste receptors on their legs and feet let flies taste the flowers.

We know now of over 1, 100 plant species pollinated specifically by flies.

So when it comes to our food, clothing made from plants, and the very air we breathe, We depend on the great insect world in all its many forms.

This is why pesticides have been so dangerous.

For every harmful insect species killed, many more harmless and beneficial species are also destroyed.

Every insect form lost will mean the plants that rely on them will be lost too.

Areas in China that have lost insect pollinators now require humans to hand pollinate each individual flower.

Do we really want to take on the arduous job of pollinating our food ourselves?

Insects pollinate plants for free, and they are happy to do it.

Temporarily reducing mosquitoes is not worth losing our food supply.

In 1 case alone, 50, 000 bumblebees were killed after insecticides were sprayed in trees to kill the aphids.

The God Given Gift of Animal Architecture - Part 2

This morning, we did the simpler forms of animal architecture.

We did the tubes that are built around animals' bodies.

We did some of the structures inside wood that are dug out by animals.

Very simple, by and large, even though we started to get more complicated with plant nests.

Now we're really going to start to crank it up to get to see some of the really, really complicated structures that have been built by animals.

So now we're going to start looking at structures that are put together with mud.

It's kind of all kind of globular mud stuck to a wall, but this is actually an architectural form built by an insect.

This is actually their home for their young.

This is a type of wasp, and there's a number of different wasps that use mud to create their homes.

And what they will do is they will collect a wet pellet of mud, and then they will plaster it against a wall, smash it into all the nooks and crannies and then that will be the spot where they will have a nice chamber for their young to live.

In this picture you can see where the darker mud has been put down, that's the fresh wet mud and the other parts are drier where it's had a chance to solidify.

Now here is a chamber that has been broken open because it shows each individual chamber that has been put in by these various, the insects as they have divided up into chambers.

Each 1 of those chambers will hold 1 of their young, and their young will develop in there with whatever food that has been put in for them.

Now, a number of different wasps go out and specialize in catching spiders.

They sting the spider and immobilize it with their venom, and then they carry that spider.

And sometimes it's a very heavy burden to carry, to get it to where they need to plug it into their structure.

And so they bring it along, and here's 1 who has returned to her mud nest that she has previously constructed, and she works her way down to the end of it, crawls inside, puts her food source in there, and then lays her egg and then seals it off, and then her baby will be able to hatch and grow out of this in a way that will be very well protected.

You can see then these holes running down these tubes, that's where the individual larvae, once they're fully developed, break out of their chamber and then begin their adult life.

Some of them are extremely elegant insects.

These are the organ pipe mud dauber wasps.

And they're called this because they make these rows of mud that look like organ pipes.

And each 1 will come and get a different bit of mud from a different spot, and so you can get these different colors of brown and white and orange, depending on what mud they sourced it from.

And then this will be their very elegant structure that they put together.

Now potter wasps are a little bit smaller than the mud daubers, but they also use mud.

They attach it to a wall, and this is hollow inside here, and they will then put their pollen and nectar that they've gathered and stick it inside, and then they lay their egg, and that will be where their young grows up.

They even make a little rim around the outside that will help to divert any predator from finding the entrance to that particular opening and finding their way inside.

This is the size of a dime, so it's not very large at all.

And this is a large bird nest that is found in tropical areas, a large mound about a foot high, maybe sometimes 2 foot high, made by a flamingo.

And flamingos pile up all this mud into a pile and make a little concave hole in the top, and that's where they're going to lay their egg.

And then that chick will hatch out of that, and for a while, they will stay right on top of that mud tower.

And then eventually, they will come out and begin life on their adult way after that.

These are called chuffs, and they are found in Australia.

And we were just fortunate to be able to see these guys 1 time on our trip down there recently.

And notice the beautiful red eyes that these birds have.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Righteousness: What Does It Look Like?

45m

Without This Animal You Will Die!

1h 14m

The God Given Gift of Animal Architecture - Part 2

1h 16m

The God Given Gift of Animal Architecture - Part 1

1h

Taking God’s Name in Vain

30m

Come. Buy. Eat. Share!

29m

Spirit Now Live In Me

24m

Goliath’s Sword

44m

Looking To Jesus

1h

Always Giving

47m

This Is Good

37m

Building Altars

1h 26m

Sound Doctrine