Wes Peppers

GYCSE 2018: Focused - When All Else is Blurred

Plenary

GYC Southeast

Faith Only

Father in heaven, tonight as we talk about faith, I pray that you would stir our hearts.

I pray that you would open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to the truth that you have for us.

And sometimes, Lord, the truth is cutting.

But I pray tonight that if you cut, you will bring healing as well.

That you may tear us down so that you may build us up.

And I ask tonight that you would just speak to our hearts, Lord, that you would convict our hearts, that you would change our hearts, and you would cause us to put our complete trust and faith in you.

So we look to you tonight, Father, and we ask your special blessing.

I want to begin by telling you a story, and I was going to tell you a story about Lauren.

I just put this slide on just a few minutes ago, but I changed my mind.

I'm going to tell you about Lauren tomorrow night.

But tonight I want to tell you about Andrew.

And Andrew, not this Andrew that was up here with me, a different Andrew, but Andrew was a young man that I met who came to an evangelistic series of mine.

And Andrew was an atheist, And Andrew had no interest in the Bible whatsoever, but he had nothing to do, so he thought he would come to my evangelistic meetings.

As I was preaching the Bible night by night, this young man became very convicted about the truth that he was learning.

He saw that there was concrete evidence for the faithfulness and the truthfulness and the validity of the Bible.

And he began to open his heart up to God for the first time in his life.

And he decided as the night, by night passed, that he was going to give his heart to God, and he was going to follow the truth that he found in the Scripture.

And his initial reaction was so full of joy, and so he went to his parents who were of another faith.

And he talked to his parents about the decision that he had made.

When he told them that he was gonna follow the Bible and its truth, they said to him, if you follow this faith and you abandon the faith of your family, we are no longer your family.

We will not claim you as our son anymore.

And if you try to come back to the house, we will kill you." And they were serious.

And so he knew that he had a decision to make.

And he told his workplace about the decision he had made.

And he requested to be off from work on the Sabbath.

And they said, sure, you can have off every Sabbath, but you're not going to work here.

They said if you decide to do this, we're going to fire you because we have 10 people that would like to have your job and they'll work whenever we tell them to work.

He went to his friends and he said, look, I found a new hope.

I found something that has turned my world upside down and it's renewed my heart.

And it gives me the great joy and peace that I've always wanted in life that nothing else could satisfy.

They said, we don't want to be around you anymore.

So all within a matter of weeks, this young man was losing his family.

And he was losing his friends to follow a Christ that had set him free in every way he had always been hoping and looking for.

And at the end of that series, I could tell you the full story and it's really miraculous.

But he found himself in a situation where his health was bad and he, he went to the hospital and they actually locked him in the hospital because they said you can't leave because you could die at any minute.

They said, the surgeon's not going to be here until next week, so you need to stay right here.

And so on the day of his baptism, he actually climbed out of the hospital from the second story and he climbed down out of the window and he slid down the gutter or whatever it was, and he came to be baptized.

And it made me ask the question, what would cause or why would a young man in his early 20's give up everything that he had in his life to follow Christ and to follow a faith called the Seventh-day Adventist faith?

What would cause him to give up all these things to follow that when so many young people in North America who were raised in this faith are doing everything they can to get away from it?

Why would he be giving up everything to run towards it when everyone here that I many not everyone but many that I know here are giving up everything to try to get away from it?

And that really puzzled me and I thought to myself why is that the case?

There are so many young people I know that have been out there in the world who are knocking down the doors of the church to get in, and there are those who are often raised in the church who are knocking down the doors of the church to get out.

It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me.

And the answer that I came up with is this.

Somehow we have forgotten the simplicity of biblical faith as an Adventist people.

And we need to have a return to a simple, fundamental, biblical faith.

I know the word fundamental is taboo in this day and age, but really the word fundamental, all it means is somebody who really believes in the Bible and takes the word for what it says.

Somebody who actually believes what the book says and doesn't think it's a bunch of fairy tales.

And I think there are lots of tithe-paying, church-attending, Sabbath-keeping Adventists who think it's all a fairy tale.

The Bible tells us that this day would come.

2nd Corinthians chapter 11 verse 3 says, but I fear less somehow as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

I believe today that we have made Adventism very complicated and very complex, when in reality, it's very simple.

I believe that we've made faith very complicated, when in reality, it's very simple.

And you know, we're always as a church trying to to quote-unquote get new lights.

And we'll go to GYC's And we'll go to other youth and young adult conferences and we're always wanting to hear somebody tell us something new.

We're always wanting somebody to kind of tickle our ear and give us some sort of cool thing that we haven't heard before.

But the reality is, we're getting our ears tickled, and we're hearing all kinds of things that these speakers will tell us, and yet inside our faith is dead.

We are like Jesus described the Pharisees.

And we sit and listen to sermon after sermon after sermon.

Our hearts are growing harder, in fact, with every sermon.

And before God shows us anything new, we must bring into practice and experience what we already know in theory.

And the evidence that we don't know this message as well as we should is that we are still the people we shouldn't be while talking about the people that we should be.

We sit around and we talk about it and we think about it.

Sometimes we talk about the people that we should be so much that we just give up on it because we think it can never be accomplished.

We think that it can never be a reality in our lives.

But I want to tell you today, the word of God says something different.

The Adventist pioneers, most or many of the Adventist pioneers were either the same age as you or younger.

And they were standing up and they were proclaiming the truth to people who had been in the church for 40 or 50 years and other Christian denominations.

Many of them went forward by faith and they were studying the Bible and God began to reveal to them powerful truth that was begun to transform their lives.

Where is the spirit of the Adventist pioneers today?

It was 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 year old people up into their upper 20's.

Somebody that was 25 was considered to be a veteran.

They were considered to be the old man of the group, or the old woman of the group.

And these are the people that found and formed our church.

And today, many Adventist young people could not even give you 5 texts on the Sabbath.

The Atheist Who Found God

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the great privilege that we have to be here together with you.

And we ask your blessing to be with us, to draw close to us, to help to open our eyes and our ears to everything that you want us to know.

And Lord, everything that you want us to be.

So draw close, we pray, in a very special way, and let your spirit speak to our hearts.

As I mentioned, I didn't grow up in an Adventist home.

My parents were not Christians, And we didn't go to church very much.

But my grandparents actually were Christians.

My 1 set of grandparents were Methodists, and my other grandparents were Church of the Nazarene.

I used to go with them to church a little bit when I was young.

And my 1 set of grandparents, they were actually in a gospel singing group.

And my grandpa sang, and my uncle played piano, and they had a couple other people in the group, and my grandmother played the drums.

Now, you can imagine grandma sitting back there and my grandma was literally probably about this tall and she's back there playing the drums as they would travel around the Midwest and do concerts for people.

I actually learned how to play the drums by watching her And so I haven't done that in a very long time, but I did know how to play.

Anyway, as I was growing up, as you heard, my last name is Peppers.

And as I was growing up, I had fire red hair.

So you can imagine, I went to public school.

My first encounter with Adventist education was when I started working on my master's degree at Andrews.

I didn't go to Adventist elementary school.

I didn't go to Adventist Academy or Adventist College.

I graduated from a state university, so I had many experiences in the public realm but none in the Adventist realm.

So you can imagine growing up in a public school, having the last name Peppers and having fire red hair, how that went over.

Fortunately, God gave me some form of mercy because as I was growing up, I was always the biggest kid in my class and so most of those kids, whenever they would call it out, I would catch them on the playground later in the day and take care of it.

And so, you know, I at least had some form of help.

So as I grew up, my relationship with my dad was not very good.

My dad was not raised in a loving home and he didn't know how to communicate love.

And so, often times he would just yell and scream and he would be off doing his own thing and I really never connected with him very much.

And so that made things kind of difficult in our home and I'll tell you a little bit more about that later on.

But as I was growing up and I got into high school, I became a big football star, and I was very much involved in football and sports.

And there's actually a Bible text that I wanna share with you that really correlates to my entire life.

If you have a Bible or if you have it on your phone you can turn to it and it is in Jeremiah chapter 9 verses 23 and 24.

Jeremiah chapter 9 verse 23 and 24 the Bible says this Thus says the Lord let not the wise man glory in his wisdom Let not the mighty man glory in his might nor let the rich man glory in his riches but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me that I am the Lord exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight, says the Lord." Now in my life, especially in my younger life, these 3 things were really the core of my life.

The Bible said, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom.

Well, when I was growing up in high school and in college, I was often at the top of my class or at least in the top 10%.

I rarely ever studied but I would always seem to do well on my tests.

The teachers really liked me and when I got into college I was usually on the dean's list or the president's list and I just literally gloried in my wisdom.

I had the ability to score high on academics.

And so that was something that I really took a lot of pride in.

The Bible says, let not the mighty man glory in his mind.

Well, when I was in high school, I mentioned that I played football.

And I'll just give you a little bit of background of that.

I'm going to show you some pictures here.

This is my wife and my son and my daughter.

And that's my wife and my daughter and my son, Levi.

But as I was growing up, I played football.

So when I was a freshman, I weighed about 205 pounds.

Now I don't recommend this, but football really consumed my life.

And I wanted to, my ultimate goal in life was to be a college football player.

And then I wanted to be a high school teacher and a football coach.

And so when I was a freshman, I weighed 205 pounds and I was the biggest freshman in the class and I was the only freshman to letter in football and very, something that happened to me between 9th and 10th grade was something that I really think impacted the rest of my life.

So between the 9th and 10th grade, my football coach told me that when he was playing college football, when they could not afford steroids, that they would go down and they would buy something called calf starter.

And I don't know if any of you grew up in the south but if you know what calf starter is, it's when a mother cow gives birth to a calf there's something called colostrum which is the first milk.

And colostrum is high in fat, high in protein, high in carbohydrates and will really allow that calf to grow very quickly and it puts the meat and it gives it all the vitamins and nutrients it needs to grow and to establish itself so it doesn't get sick.

Well, oftentimes when cows will sometimes give birth, they will also, sometimes the mothers die.

And so we have this man-made colostrum or sometimes if the cow can't feed.

So they had this stuff called colostrum or calf starter that was in a powder form and it's not intended for human consumption.

But nonetheless, I went down to the feed store between my ninth and tenth grade year and I said, hey I need a bag of calf starter.

And the guy said, wow you must have, you know, you got cows?

And I said, well not really but something like that.

And so I bought the calf starter and I began to take it.

And so from the summer of my ninth grade year to my tenth grade year, I gained about 25 pounds and I was growing very quickly, becoming very strong.

My junior year, I weighed about 250 and then my senior year in high school I weighed about 265.

Now by the time I was a senior in high school I was very dedicated.

I spent a lot of time in the weight room and I was bench pressing 450 pounds.

I was squatting 700 pounds and leg pressing 1800 pounds.

So I was, I still, not that I, I don't really, I tell you this with all my heart, I don't really care, but I still hold the county weightlifting record for our school and for the whole county.

And so I was very big, I was very strong, and I was very fast.

And I was the best football player that our school had ever had.

And I was the first player to ever have the opportunity to get a college scholarship to play college football.

So there were a number of things that actually impacted my life when I was in high school and I'm going to tell you just a couple of them.

Number 1, when I was in ninth grade, I began to hang around some of the older guys in the school and the juniors and seniors, and they would begin to invite me out with them to do a camp out or whatever for the weekend.

And that's where in ninth grade I was handed my first beer.

And so I began to drink some beer, I was handed my first joint, I began to smoke some marijuana, I was handed my first cigarette, and I started dipping Copenhagen and Skoll and all that kind of stuff, I used smokeless tobacco.

So by the time I was in 10th grade, it went, I had previously just on the weekends gone out with my buddies to go drinking, then when I was in 10th grade it got to where I would start bringing the alcohol to school with me.

I would have a bottle of liquor in my pocket, and as the teacher would be writing something on the board, during class, I would pull out that bottle and I would take a sip of it.

And I became, you know, I was often be drunk even during school, but my teachers never really knew it.

But other students knew it and I became known as the school drunk.

And so it became really out of control when I was in 10th grade.

I developed an alcoholic behavior and my coach finally found out about it and he sat me down and he said, hey listen, you have an opportunity that no 1 else in the history of our school has ever had and if you don't change the way that you're living then you're never going to accomplish that.

He said, you're going to throw your life away.

So between my 10th and 11th grade year, basically out of sheer willpower, I stopped drinking and I really focused on my school and I really focused on my football.

So by this time, There were quite a number of universities that were looking at me.

Here's me as a senior with the other seniors.

Here I am on the all state team, this is the Birmingham News right there in Alabama.

The year tells you my age, I'm not that old, not even 40 yet.

The Word Only

Dear Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the great privilege we have of being here together with you, and we just ask, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would come now, would work on our hearts, Lord, and speak to us, and Lord, that our hearts may be open to the truth that you have for us, that we would be changed, that we would be transformed, that our lives would be something new, something alive, Lord.

The Bible says that we are dead in our trespasses, but that Christ has the power to make us alive again.

And so I pray tonight that as we begin this week, as we begin this GYC Southeast, that our hearts would be reaching out to you, that we would be longing for you, that we would be desiring you, and that you would be found by us, Lord, because our hearts are open to receive the beauty of everything that you have for us.

So we ask, Lord, to draw close to us tonight, speak to us in a very special way.

Pour out your spirit upon our hearts and cause us tonight to make a decision for you.

A number of years ago and back in 2008, I was preparing for a mission trip.

I used to work at Amazing Facts, and I taught Bible classes there, similar to, very similar to SALT here.

If you haven't gone through SALT, I wanna encourage you to do that in 1 of your semesters here at Southern.

And I was teaching at Amazing Facts, the Bible school there, and at the end of every session we would take students on a mission trip.

And this particular year we were going to go to Honduras.

And about a month or so before the mission trip was to take place, I actually had some strange sensations in my stomach area, and I had this, kind of just this warm sense, it was just a weird feeling that wasn't normal, and it continued for several days.

And so my wife told me, she said, hey you should probably go to the doctor before you go on this mission trip.

So I went to the doctor and he said, oh it's just some kind of little minor infection and I'm going to give you some antibiotics and you should be good to go in about a week to 10 days.

So off I went on the plane down to Honduras and we landed and and I was going to preach 19 nights for an evangelistic series and I had a team of students that had just graduated and they also were preaching evangelistic meetings.

And so as I continued in the trip, the pain that I had, or actually the strange sensation that I had, began to turn to pain.

And It was very difficult to focus on my sermon.

It seemed like almost every hour the pain was getting worse and worse until I hardly could stand it.

There were times when I would work on my sermon through the day and I would be laying on my bed just kind of doubled up and doubled over and it was a very interesting thing because the pain was so severe as I mentioned it was difficult to concentrate And yet I would still somehow manage to get my sermon prepared.

And then in the evening, I would go down, we would take a 45-minute drive down into the town where I was preaching, and I would be sitting in the church going through the preliminaries, and My pain would be so severe I could hardly stand it and they would go through all the song service and all the announcements and all that stuff and then when I would get up to preach all the pain would suddenly go away And I wouldn't have any pain and I would preach that sermon and I would call people to make decisions to follow Jesus and that people would would choose people were raising their hands and and Then at the end of the night I would go to the back of the church to shake the hands with the people and I'm not kidding you that when the last person would shake my hand and go out the door, the pain would start again.

The next day I would get up, and the same thing, I'd have that pain, work on my sermon all day, drive down 45 minutes, sit through all the preliminaries with the pain, stand up to preach, and the pain would go away.

When I finished shaking the last hand, the pain would start again.

Now, somebody would say, well, that just seems to be a coincidence, and you know, somebody has a right to say that, but it happened 19 nights in a row.

And by the grace of God, almost 30 people gave their lives to Jesus and were baptized during that series.

Well, I knew that something was wrong, so when I flew back home for Christmas, I called up my doctor and he said, well, after the first of the year, we'll get you into a urologist.

I noticed that I had a little knot in my groin area that was, you know, it was not very big, but that thing continued to grow and it was actually a tumor.

And so in just, not even less than 2 months, that thing almost got the size of my fist.

And so when I got home, he gave me the number to the urologist.

I called the office, and they said, yes, we have your referral and we'd like to get you in.

They said, but it's going to be about 3 months before we can get you in.

And I thought, man, I don't have that long to wait and I'm in a lot of pain every day.

So I said, okay, you know, whatever you can do.

So I hung up the phone with them and I began to pray.

And I said, Lord, I don't know what's going on here.

I don't know what the problem is, but you do.

And if this is going to be something that is serious and I need to get in to see this doctor, you're gonna have to intervene here.

Back to Menu

Presenter

Wes Peppers

All Recordings

Faith Only

55m

The Atheist Who Found God

42m

The Word Only

1h 1m

8. Faithful AND Fruitful

1h

7. The Peril of Novelty

1h 6m

6. The Two Witnesses of the Two Witnesses

57m

5. Black Magic & Resurrection Power

57m

4. A Love That Deceives

57m

3. When Righteousness Becomes Sin

1h 2m

2. The Adventist Atheist

55m

1. Adventist Culture or Adventist Faith

57m

Freedom in Slavery

38m

Sound Doctrine