<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Norman McNulty

Just Like Jesus

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you for this Sabbath day that you've blessed us with.

We pray that your spirit would be with us in a special way, that we would have a deeper understanding of the love of God for each 1 of us, and that it would change our lives so that we would be representatives for you.

Well, I'm thankful to be here this Sabbath.

It's my last week to be a resident, so I'm glad for that.

End of 4 years of neurology residency, and I'm thankful for how God has been with me over the last few years, and so I'm just thankful to be here with all of you and to share with you what's on my heart today that God has impressed me with.

I would invite you to turn with me to 1 John 3, verses 1 and 2.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.

Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.

Beloved now are we the sons of God, And it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." Step back for a minute and think about what a privilege it is to be called a son or daughter of God.

That God loves us so much that He gives us the privilege to be his children.

Now I want to read a passage from Desire of Ages, which is 1 of my favorite books.

It's from the chapter entitled The Divine shepherd, and if you've ever doubted God's love towards you, I would encourage you to read this entire chapter.

Here we are told, however much a shepherd may love his sheep, he loves his sons and daughters more.

Jesus is not only our shepherd, he is our everlasting father.

And he says, I know mine own, and mine own know me, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father.

The only begotten Son, He who is in the bosom of the Father, He whom God has declared to be the man that is my fellow, the communion between Him and the eternal God is taken to represent the communion between Christ and his children on the earth.

And this is 1 of Ellen White's most profound statements, I think, in all of her writings.

Because we are the gift of his Father and the reward of His work, Jesus loves us.

Heaven itself can bestow nothing greater, nothing better, therefore trust." And so my burden for each 1 of us today is that we gain a deeper sense of God's love for us and that it would inspire us to manifest love towards God in the way He shows His love towards us.

And so that's what we're going to look at today.

I'm so thankful that God loves us, that He gives us the privilege to be His children.

And in our first passage we just read in 1 John 3, it talks about the manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us.

Now last Sunday was Father's Day, and all of us have a father.

Whether we like that fact or not, we all have a father.

And today I'm going to tell you bits and pieces about my father and the things that I learned from my father that taught me more about the Heavenly Father.

And I hope that whoever your father may be, and many of you here are fathers, that ultimately we will turn to the Heavenly Father to see God's true representation of what it means to be a father to each 1 of us.

So In 1 John 3, we see that it's a wonderful privilege to be a son or a daughter of God.

And growing up, I counted it a privilege to be the son of my father.

Grew up in Michigan, moved to Bakersfield, California when he was 15 years old.

He was born into a family that was Nazarene and his mother was a Nazarene minister, which is a very interesting background, and he actually planned to go into the ministry.

And he started off at a Nazarene college, actually at the time it was Pasadena College in Pasadena.

It's since moved to Point Loma in San Diego, but he started off there, intending to become a Nazarene minister.

And somehow he had such a fear of public speaking that he decided not to go into the ministry.

And so he changed his major and became an English major, and that wasn't really for him either, and somehow he ended up as a Nazarene over at La Sierra, took pre-med, and eventually became a physician.

Now along the way, and for all of you out there who are physicians, or really anything, this is a good example to all of you.

There was a physician in Bakersfield, California by the name of Marion Barnard.

Marion Barnard happens to be the father-in-law of Lewis Walton.

He's since passed away, of course, Marion Barnard has.

But Marion Barnard was the family physician for my grandmother, who was the Nazarene minister.

Barnard somehow got his foot in the door with my dad and started giving him Bible studies and my dad ended up going to medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico and Dr.

Barnard called down to the Adventist church in Guadalajara, found out who the Adventist medical students were, and had them befriend my father, and they continued Bible studies, and my dad eventually became baptized.

Now that just shows you the amount of commitment and how proactive this physician was in winning souls for Christ.

And it's a rebuke to me sometimes because I've never, I don't think I've ever gone to that kind of a level of commitment to save 1 soul.

But that just shows you the type of person Dr.

And as a result, my dad came into the Adventist message.

The story goes that my Nazarene minister grandmother came to the office for the first time after my dad became baptized, and Dr.

Barnard said, so what do you think of your son becoming an Adventist?

And she looked at him and said, well, I probably feel the same way that you would feel if your son became an Azorin.

So my grandmother never fully accepted my dad's decision, but my dad was willing to take a stand for the truth no matter what.

And the Lord always blessed him for that.

And growing up, my dad taught me to love the Lord, to spend time with him every day, and to study his word.

And 1 of the things I'll always be grateful for is that when I was maybe 12 years old, he had me memorize 5 verses for each of the pillar doctrines of our faith.

Sabbath, sanctuary, spirit of prophecy, state of the death, second coming, and the health message.

And I've always had those verses, You know, when you memorize things when you're young, you have them right at the tip of your finger the rest of your life.

And so I was always thankful that he encouraged me in that way.

And in many ways, he gave me an identity to follow after.

We all have, as I said, all of us have fathers, and all of us receive an influence from our parents.

And if you think of our parents, really it's typically our fathers that give us a sense of identity, who we are, where we're going, what we should be doing.

And it's our mothers who round things out.

And fortunately, I had a very godly mother as well.

I tell people who know me well that I'm a toned-down version of my father, which is hard for some people to believe, that someone could be more intense than me on certain issues.

But I can thank my mom for at least being a little bit more toned down, because if you've met my mom, she's probably the most gentle person you'll ever meet in your life.

And so I'm thankful for both of the parents that I have.

But, you know, in this world, humanly speaking, there are imperfections and limitations that come from the relationship with our parents.

And some of you know that my father developed multiple sclerosis way back in 1982, he was first diagnosed.

And I was about 5 years old at the time, I had no idea what that was all about.

And he did pretty well for the next 15 years.

Of course I'm a neurologist, so I could tell you all about multiple sclerosis.

But obviously, the fact that my dad had multiple sclerosis probably was influential on the decision that I made to go into neurology.

And for the first 15 years, he had relapsing remitting MS.

His left leg would go out, and for 6 weeks, he wouldn't be able to walk.

And of course, that's very scary when you're 14 years old and your dad's a physician and he's supporting the family, mom staying at home raising the kids, and then dad has an attack, his left leg goes out, and then you start to wonder where's the money going to come from?

How, and it was definitely a test of our faith and a trial of our faith during those years.

I graduated from an academy in 1996, went on to college, and by then my dad had definitely started to deteriorate.

He was about 57, about, yeah, about 57 when he was disabled from his job as a physician.

He just couldn't keep up with what he had to do.

So in 1997, he basically retired, stayed at home, and whenever I'd come home from college, he would be there.

Again, these are the human imperfections of the world in which we live.

For those of you who are familiar with multiple sclerosis, you get plaques in your brain, and it messes up the way that the brain can transmit information.

It's like getting a big pothole in the road, and you try to go around the pothole.

Well, eventually the potholes become so big that sometimes certain information just can't get around those those plaques and Some things were embarrassing we'd go to church And he would be talking out loud and you could hear every word that he said while the speaker was preaching and I'm sitting next to him saying, Dad, stop.

And he would just laugh at me and keep going.

Back to Menu

Just Like Jesus

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

The Way of Love

The Way of Love- Part 2

46m

The Sower

The Sower: Seed of Sanctification

36m

AMEN 2012 Plenary Sessions

Growing in Grace and Experiencing Repentance

50m

Jed Lee - Creation

Creation: How Did Jehovah Create?

1h 14m

Plenary

The Seed and the Wayside Soil

1h 13m

Exact Proof the Bible is Accurate Using Time Prophecy

57m

Portland

Love in the End Times

37m

Enough Excuses

1h 5m

The Parables

The Two Sons

40m

WYC 2012 Morning Devotional

Fruits and Gifts, Part 3

48m

How Soon is Soon?

49m

Abraham: Father of the End-time Faithful

Father Abraham: Father of the Faithful

26m

Sound Doctrine