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CORE Evangelism School

A God Worth Knowing

Dee Casper

01 The God Who Hears and Knows

02 The Problem of Evil: Does God Care?

03 The Faith of Jesus

04 Are We In This Thing Alone?

05 A New Covenant Experience

06 Bad Religion

07 The Reminder of Your Value

09 A Matter of Life or Death

10 Unquenchable Love

12 A God Who is Always on Time

13 The Gospel in Types and Symbols

15 Last Church Standing

16 An Abundant Life

18 Why God Won’t Leave

19 Jesus Understands

17 A Voice of Reason

14 The Coming Crisis

08 Building a House for My Wife

11 A New Birth

Oh sweet Jesus, I thank you that you did not just come to die for us.

And I pray that we would see that clearly this evening, and that you would change our entire perspective of the Godhead and how much they truly are for us.

So why this matters to me, I, soon after I met Hannah and her family, about a year after that, in 2016, I had been in ministry for about 5 years, 5 or 6 years, after my baptism, after going through processes like many of you are going through, of hearing new things and weighing it out, counting the cost, making my decision.

And I was doing ministry and God was blessing that ministry, and I say this in a humble sense, I'm not snapping my suspenders, in fact I'm not wearing any.

But not that he would snap them, but he does wear suspenders and he pulls it off very nicely.

But I had a ministry that people would say is going well.

I was teaching in an academy setting, investing in high schoolers, and I was working in a media ministry.

But there's a problem with ministry going well and success in ministry.

We can kind of get a feeling that I kind of understand Scripture.

I'm starting to get some basic understanding.

It's super deep and super, you know, intimidating, Scripture is, but like God is so good to help us understand things.

What I came to understand after meeting a friend of mine who became a friend at that stage, I came to realize through a conversation with someone that I knew more about Jesus than I knew about myself.

And this can happen in ministry, that it can almost feel as though we're so focused on telling other people about someone else that we maybe don't take the time to look in the mirror and look at our own lives and look at what's going on.

And as I shared in my testimony a while back, a couple of weekends ago, I went through a home where divorce happened and then my mom had a horrific bout of domestic violence that she went through.

Not at the hand of my father, the guy she married after my dad.

And that trauma really messed me up for most of my life.

Was just struggling through all of these things.

And as I went through those experiences, I told people while I was in ministry, It's a miracle of God's grace.

I don't have a bunch of baggage from what happened to me as a kid.

And I honestly believed that, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

I knew more about theology and the Adventist message and about the character of God and of his lovely son Jesus, than I did about myself.

It wasn't chance, it was the hand of God.

Someone told me about this book, a friend of mine that I went to Bible college with.

He said there's this guy who came to speak at our church, it's called The Hidden Half of the Gospel by Paul Conniff, he teaches at our school.

And he spoke at the academy earlier this year at Blue Mountain Academy.

But he said, hey, Paul did share this stuff at my church, it's amazing, you should read this guy's book.

And my thought was, yeah, yeah, I'll read it for somebody else because I don't have any baggage, I thought.

2 years later, I'm living next door to 3ABN, a large television station that is part of our denomination, and the same friend said, hey, Paul's coming to a show at 3 p.m.

So I have him over for dinner at my place, and the guy starts dropping this mental health stuff from scripture in ways I had never heard before.

Like This guy was looking through the lens of scripture in ways I had never thought about, through the lens of mental health, and he was blowing my mind.

The problem is when you're really comfortable with stuff that blows people's mind, you talk about it like it's just air.

I mean, maybe some of you feel like that with me this week.

Like, this guy's saying stuff so fast, but like, I have no idea what you said 10 minutes ago.

I'm still scraping my brains off the ceiling from that last thing you said.

And he did that to me as someone who was a minister of the gospel, and he made a statement.

He said, Every addiction we have in our life is us seeking to escape the pain that we're feeling and to numb the pain that we're feeling.

And I remember thinking to myself, that's the most profound thing I've ever heard in my life, first of all.

But the second thought was, where's the pain?

I never cried myself to sleep at night from that childhood trauma.

Now I was hardly functional in an academic setting and so forth.

I was just surviving life largely and numbing pain most of the time.

I literally had spent all this time in ministry, and I would have different interpersonal issues, but we all have those, right?

I mean, I'm assuming all of us have those, or maybe I'm the only guy who's got issues, but you know, we got that stuff, you know, we need a little, got some rough edges sometimes, you get a little prickly when certain things happen, and I was working through those, I was apologizing, but I didn't understand why I did what I did, and I didn't know what was really going on in the depths inside Until I met Paul and he had some videos he put on YouTube was a couple pastor friends and I was watching those as I was driving to Maryland to our world church headquarters to meet with some people and It literally as that what was going on as I was watching those videos it was literally like somebody yanked back a shower curtain and I saw myself exposed in a way I had never been before.

And for the first time in my life I realized there's a desperately lonely and broken man living inside of me.

And so this is something I'm very passionate about, what we're going to talk about this evening because it was helping me to better understand what the solutions were to what I was starting to see in myself.

We don't just want to focus on the negative, I got this, I got this, I got this, but we also are working through a process of realizing what's the solution.

And what I have come to be the solution of my own experience is that there's a Savior who can relate to my wounds.

There's a Savior who can relate to my pain and I needed that and I believe we all need that and this is going to provide us answers because when you leave these meetings and stuff happens and it's going to happen to all of us that we're gonna make mistakes.

We're gonna do things We thought we would never do again that happens sometimes and it's not over.

I want you to know that tonight I want to have a heart-to-heart conversation with you as someone who loves you has been sharing with you week after week after week.

Just because we make declarations and surrenders, that doesn't mean that your flesh goes away.

And there may be times, I hope it doesn't happen, as it says in 1 John 2, Beloved, I wish you didn't sin, but if you sin, you have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

So just understand when those things happen, I hope and pray to the Lord Jesus that you'll come back to tonight's message and remember that there's a God who's fighting for you, that there's a Savior who's acquainted with what you're going through.

He never sinned, but He suffered like you in all points as we have.

And I hope and pray that this can be a blessing to you.

This is why I'm so passionate about this.

So what I want to walk through now is the story of Jesus.

And you may hear some things you've never heard before.

I heard stuff I'd never heard before as a minister of the gospel as I started reading scripture through this lens.

All of these slides are gonna be in the Google Drive folder we've been sharing before and with the handout actually will give you a list of these things.

So I would encourage you to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

You can take notes if you want to, but we're gonna have to kind of go rapid-fire through things that Jesus went through with references.

You're gonna get every 1 of those references in the handout.

Okay, So I would encourage you to just take in what you're hearing and I'll give you the handout and if that's not enough I'll give you whatever you want, but just please be present.

Please don't be so distracted by writing and just try to take in what you're hearing because it's gonna it's gonna move fairly quickly.

So in Matthew chapter 1 we're looking through the life of Jesus now and things that he went through and his experiences that can relate to us.

Again, this evening's topic is entitled, Jesus Understands.

So in Matthew chapter 1 and verse 18, Jesus was conceived out of wedlock.

Series

A God Worth Knowing

19 Jesus Understands

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Purified and Preserved

1h

Plenary

Truth Only

51m

Plenary

The Faith of Jesus

49m

Everything Depends On

1h

What If I Fail?

52m

A God Worth Knowing

14 The Coming Crisis

1h 3m

Restoration 2023

The Zombie Apocalypse

1h 21m

Restoration 2023

The Mark of the Beast Like You’ve Not Heard Before

1h 17m

Keys of Revelation

19. The Last Faithful Daughter

1h 11m

The Purpose

40m

Personal Encounters with Jesus

5. Finding Living Water: The Woman at The Well

53m

Unlocking Prophecy

13- Making a New Start

1h 9m

Sound Doctrine