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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Nicole Parker

When God Says to Gamble: Worshiping the God of Relationships

It's wonderful to be here and see all of you.

Our family has been very much enjoying our time here in Southern California.

We're just very blessed to be here with all of you.

I'm going to share this afternoon on When God Says to Gamble, Worshipping the God of Relationships.

Now I realize that's kind of a confusing title, but I hope it will make more sense as we go forward with this presentation.

I'd like to start out by having you imagine for just a moment that you're looking at a map of the campus of Loma Linda University and you see this auditorium where we are right now.

It would be just like a little dot, right?

You and I would be even tinier dots, this little dot within this dot.

But then if you look at the map of even just the town of Loma Linda, the university is pretty small.

And certainly when you look at a map of California, Loma Linda is just a tiny dot, right?

Well, then imagine that you can zoom out a little farther, and you can see our planet.

California is suddenly very small, right?

And when you zoom out a little farther, you can see that our planet is really just very tiny When you look at it within our galaxy Then our galaxy is also pretty small, right?

I mean, we've got a solar system and then our galaxy and then out there even farther You know this universe that is just vast and immense and incomprehensible.

We have no way to imagine where the end of the universe is.

You know, my kids have asked me, well, mommy, what's at the end of the universe?

Well, if there was an end, what would be on the other side of that wall?

You see, we really can't begin to grasp how big eternity is.

It's just not something that fits into our minds.

My children want to know there's a beginning and an ending to everything, and there's just not to some things, including God.

Here is a God who rules this immense, incomprehensible universe, who has no beginning and no ending.

And when he defines himself in the Bible, he uses 1 word.

There are other words that God uses to define himself like light, but I think they all are kind of synonyms.

They are interchangeable with the word love.

God is love, and I find it amazing that the God who rules the entire universe would define himself using a relational word.

The God who rules the universe is a God of relationships.

Now I don't mean just dating relationships.

Of course everybody who's single is dreaming of getting married.

They say marriage is like a revolving door.

All the ones on the outside are trying to get in, and all the ones on the inside are trying to get out, right?

I've been married 12 years now to my husband, and I haven't regretted it once.

As they say, Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Graham Bell was asked once, have you ever considered divorce?

But I'm not just talking about relationships, meaning dating, marriage type relationships, but all relationships.

He says, here is the law that runs the universe.

Love God first, love your neighbor as yourself.

This was the law in heaven that Lucifer disobeyed when he said, I'm not gonna love God first.

And you know, there's this interesting statement that 1 of my favorite authors, Ellen White, wrote, she says, and this isn't a direct word for word quote, but she says that the concept of self-sacrificing love, Satan hates, its very existence he denies.

Now that, wow, that's really amazing to me.

So Satan's first accusation is that God is not actually loving, that he's actually selfish, that God is not love was the first lie.

That's what Lucifer believed and that's what he's been trying his best to convince every 1 of us to believe.

And believing that lie is what lies at the root of every addiction, every worship issue that we face.

That is the ultimate question that we have to answer because if he doesn't love me completely, then I'm going to look for someone or something else that can satisfy me outside of him.

And relationships are often that God that people flee to instead, relationships with other people.

We look for somebody to complete us, to make us feel loved and worthwhile when we don't find that in God.

And then we become immersionists, looking for someone to fill us.

And then of course we get burnt because that's a selfish relationship and it's innately flawed because selfishness is against the law of life So then when we get burnt, what do we do?

I'll never fall in love again, right and we see this terrible cycle going on in the music and the relationships of the world.

I'll never love, and then we become isolationist.

And then when that doesn't work, we're so desperately thirsty that we'll just grab whoever's going past and have another immersionist relationship, and back and forth we go, being burnt by both kinds of self-centered relationship, because we could not worship the god of relationship.

So that's what I'm going to talk about today.

That god says this god, this vast, immense, incomprehensible ruler of the universe defines himself with a relational word.

Then he sums up his character in a law that is the transcript of his character, and it says, love God first, love your neighbor as yourself.

Why would that be the 1 single thing that he measures?

Of all the valuable, important things that happen in this world and that we can measure things by, the 1 thing that God says matters is this nebulous, invisible thing called relationships.

You know, I look at all of you in here, and most of you I don't know, but all of you have relationships, and some of you have relationships with other people in here.

There are a couple of people in here that I have strong bonds with, but you can't see it from up here, can you?

None of you can look at me and see, oh, there's this strong, invisible connection between her and this person and that person.

You don't see it because relationships are invisible and yet they are the thing that the law of God says is important.

The 1 thing that he says he's going to judge us on, You are lawbreakers or law keepers based on your relationships.

Not just relationships with 1 another, of course, but relationship with God first.

But if we don't have that deep living connection with God, it's going to come out by polluting our relationships with others.

Our relationships with others will become toxic because our relationship with him is incomplete.

So God's entire law is wrapped up in this 1 thing, how we relate to him and to 1 another.

You look at, the Bible is full of this, right?

They're judged based on whether they treat others well, right?

And as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me or not to me, right?

But then we read 1 Corinthians 13 and we know it's not how you treat people that really matters, it's what your motives were.

Because if you give your body to be burned and you give everything you have to the poor, it's not gonna benefit you squat in the judgment, unless you did it out of love.

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When God Says to Gamble: Worshiping the God of Relationships

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