GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Adventist Apologetics: Complex Issues, Adventist Answers

Andy Im

1. The Adventist Worldview: What’s Shared

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

Alright, we'll give it another minute or so as people are walking in and trying to get to their meetings.

By the way, just as a show of hands, how many of you for you is this your first GYC ever?

And how many of you have been to 2 or more GYCs?

Are you enjoying it thus far, by the way, for the newcomers?

Well, it looks like it's about time, and so we'll go ahead and get started.

Just before we have a word of prayer, I want to share a little bit about who I am.

I work in the Department of Campus Ministries for the Michigan Conference.

Some of you may know it by Campus, the Center for Adventist Ministry to Public University Students.

I work with Israel Ramos, who actually founded GYC, as well as Justin Kim.

They're both colleagues that we work together.

And also, some of you may also know Siku Tako.

And so we have a really, a privilege to work together.

By the way, I have up here my contact information.

If you have any questions or comments in regards to anything you hear, feel free to send me an email.

And I may not answer it that day, but I'll certainly get to responding to you.

So just want to make note of that before we move forward.

We work with around 7 or 8 major public campus secular universities in the state of Michigan.

It's a work of in-reach, right, strengthening the faith of our Adventist students, but also a work of outreach and trying to impact those campuses with the everlasting gospel.

And so that's a little bit about who I am.

Let's go ahead and get started so we can delve right into this very important topic, the Adventist worldview, what's shared.

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

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the privilege to worship here and to learn together.

We thank you so much for the morning message.

We thank you so much for getting us here safely.

And as we begin the seminar season, just wanna pray that your Holy Spirit would flood not just this seminar, but every seminar, and also the Reaches Beyond when those who listen to it on AudioVerse and other venues, We just pray that your spirit will speak not just to their hearts, but also to the very minds.

We want to ask this in the name of Jesus.

So our topic for this morning is the Adventist worldview, what's shared, meaning what we share in common with other Christians.

And my emphasis is going to be stressing the importance and the need of developing a worldview and being intentional about that.

And what I mean is to establish a belief system, right?

Have a system of belief that forms your worldview.

And we're going to discuss today the agreements we have with Christians broadly and then move towards what an Adventist worldview might look like.

I want to point your attention to a book that I was reading.

And this individual, his name is Bill Wichterman, he said he lost his faith at an evangelical college.

He lost his faith at an evangelical college.

And Bill Wichterman is actually a congressional chief of staff for 1 of the congressmen.

He said that his professors failed to relate biblical understandings and assumptions to the subject matter that was being taught.

And so, for example, when you teach subjects like English, when you teach the humanities, the social sciences like sociology and so forth, what he stated was the professors failed to relate scripture to the content that they were learning in these other disciplines.

Oftentimes it's very natural to do that in the sciences, but it was not done in those classes in particular.

And that's a problem, because it's in those classes that you begin to formulate a sense of identity, a sense of meaning, and your place within the world and your calling in it.

And so he ended up becoming an atheist because he came to the conclusion that Christianity had no intellectual foundation.

Christianity had no intellectual foundation.

But praise God, he's not an Adventist, but he ended up studying his way back to God and he read authors like C.S.

Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plottinga, William Craig, some of the popular apologists that are out there.

He studies his way back to God and eventually became a Christian.

And Nancy Peercy spoke with him and shared his testimony to her.

I was reading an article in the Atlantic.

So You have this Christian foundation that interviewed college non-believers, okay, about how and why they left religion and some surprising themes emerged.

And by the way, this study was conducted from your small, local community colleges all the way on up to the Harvards and the Yales and the Stanfords of the world.

And it's very interesting, some of the conclusions that came out of the study.

If you notice here, Phil, 1 of the things he says is that church became all about ceremony, hand-holding, and kumbaya.

By the way, is there anything wrong with Kumbaya?

It has a lot of meaning to me as a kid singing Kumbaya.

It was just ceremony, hand-holding and Kumbaya.

He said with a look of disgust, I missed my old youth pastor.

Goes on to say, Phil, this now atheist, was once the president of his Methodist Church's youth group.

He loved his church, he loved his pastor, and most of all, his youth leader, Jim.

Jim's Bible studies were particularly meaningful to him.

He admired the fact that Jim didn't dodge the tough chapters or the tough questions.

We're gonna be dealing with some really, really tough questions.

What do you do with the claims that God committed genocide when he commanded his people to wipe out the Canaanites?

And oftentimes what we do, and I don't want to say too much, is we sweep those under our holy rugs, right?

And then we have these built-up angst that builds and builds.

And a lot of times it reaches a point, a threshing point where we can tip over to the other side and become atheists.

So it's very important we don't dodge these tough questions and chapters.

He didn't always have satisfying answers, Phil says, or answers at all, but he didn't run away from the questions either.

By the way, this is, was published in 2013, not too long ago.

Goes on to say, this article, as the narrative developed, it became clear where things came apart for Phil.

During his junior year of high school, the church, In an effort to attract more young people, wanted Jim to teach less and to play more.

Friends, now let me just say this as a qualifier.

We need to have fun to build community, but it can't be the be-all and the end-all of church.

Difference of opinion over this new strategy led to Jim's dismissal.

He was replaced by Savannah, an attractive 20-something.

Again, is there something wrong with being attractive?

You see, I don't have that problem, and so I don't have that struggle, but There's nothing wrong with being attractive, right?

But notice what the emphasis is here, is to teach less, to play more.

2. The Adventist Worldview: What’s Distinct

Alright, well let's go ahead and get started in a few moments here.

If you weren't here for the first presentation we covered, really I should have called it the Christian worldview because we shared what we have in common or what we share with our evangelical brothers and sisters as far as a worldview.

This session is going to be dealing more with what's more uniquely Adventist, Right?

And there's some additional components that we add on in terms of formulating one's worldview.

And before we have a word of prayer, I do want to share that some of the aspects or components of the worldview, the Adventist worldview, will actually be covered in more detail in our panel discussion that's going to take place on Friday and also on Sabbath where we're going to discuss recent attacks on the Adventist understanding of the remnant and also final generation theology.

And so, I'm really excited about that because we have a really good group of panelists.

And so just keep in mind that those 2 sessions are really in addition to what we cover here today or this morning.

So anyway, let's go ahead and start with a word of prayer and then we will delve right into this.

Heavenly Father, We thank you so much once again for the gift of the Word of God.

We thank you for also the gift of the Spirit of Prophecy, the Word of God, and also for giving us minds that are able to comprehend the truth and the words and the concepts that you would have us to understand and to know.

We also want to pray for your spirit to be with us to impact our hearts and our minds and help us to understand the things that you would have us to understand.

All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about the Adventist worldview and aspects or components that are more distinctive.

Now, so we're coming at this from the perspective of a worldview.

So I'm not going to be addressing every doctrine that is distinctive from other denominations.

And the other thing that I might mention is I want to provide a broad overview of an Adventist worldview, not every particular doctrine.

The Adventist doctrines and beliefs that make up the key features of the Adventist worldview are going to be assumed.

So in other words, because this is a topic, or this discussion involves a worldview discussion, I'm not going to prove every single point with a Bible text and so forth.

You can find, if you have questions on that in other sessions, in other meetings, you can go to AudioVerse, But that will not be my personal objective this morning.

So as we start, I just want to mention also that, well let me just go ahead and begin.

So let's start with a little review, right?

We looked at Nancy Peercy and this individual, this congressional chief of staff who lost his faith at an evangelical college because his professors failed to relate their subject matter within a biblical construct or within a biblical frame of mind or perspective.

Okay, so Bill Wichterman left the church, ended up coming back, he read his way, studied his way back to Christianity, reading C.S.

And I really appreciated his experience because it mirrors an experience similar to my own.

I, at 1 point, lost my faith attending an Adventist institution.

I ultimately received my master's from Southern Adventist University, both great institutions and God is doing amazing things through those institutions.

But when I was there, I was at the seminary, I just want to share this struggle that I had.

When we started and began studying the process in which the New Testament canon, the books that we have in the New Testament, how they were formulated, the historical process in which the New Testament came to be the New Testament, It was presented from purely a historical perspective.

And so as you look at it from a historical perspective, you look at various individuals that formulated lists, you know, and some of the lists you have, you have 1st John, 1st and 2nd John included, but, you know, but the Gospel John is excluded.

And then you have further on down, another church father includes certain books and omits others.

And so when you study and look and observe the historical process by which the New Testament became the New Testament, I started having a lot of doubts.

Like it seemed altogether a very human process.

Where was his providence in the formulation of the New Testament canon.

And I had a lot of questions, I had a lot of doubts.

And I'm not blaming the professor or whatever, I was just going through a time also on a personal level where I was struggling with things.

And so all these things ended up where I ended up leaving the seminary for a little while and I lost confidence in scripture.

And when you lose confidence in scripture, it's a very scary, scary feeling.

And I felt very lost, and I didn't know where I could place my confidence in, all the things that I had learned as a young, from a young boy all the way to my time there was all called into question.

And it took several years, several years for me to find my way back to God.

And I'm not going to go into that whole story, it would take up this entire session, but I do praise God that he ultimately brought me back.

And it wasn't, it was intellectual, there were intellectual components, but it was also very much a heart thing.

And I praise God that he did ultimately bring me back.

And by the way, if you do have questions and struggles with the authority of scripture and the reliability of scripture, the trustworthiness of scripture, there are a lot of materials out there that you can go and find.

1 place I would highly suggest that you go and make it a favorite on your webpage is the BRI, what's called the Biblical Research Institute.

It's a segment or organization of the General Conference.

It's essentially the theological wing of the General Conference.

So if you Google Biblical Research Institute and Seventh-day Adventist, their website will pop up and there are a plethora of materials there that deal with subjects like the 1 that I have brought up here and many, many others.

And I would highly encourage you to go there and read that.

By the way, not many people actually know about the Biblical Research Institute.

And 1 of the challenges, and if there's anyone from the BRI and the General Conference listening to this, what we need to do is a better job of engaging the resources that our church has and making it more easily accessible to the common person like you and I.

I know about it because I love theology, I study theology, I read about it all the time, and so the BRI is a place that I go to and read a lot.

The BRI has a booth here and there's all the resources that are offered.

Okay, so Jonathan Walter has just mentioned that the BRI has a booth here.

They deal with hermeneutics and worldview and other theological issues that I would highly encourage you to read and go to.

We also looked at this Christian foundation that interviewed college non-believers and how and why they left religion and these surprising themes that emerged.

We found that they had attended church at 1 time, these atheists, but for some reason or another, they had left church.

1 of the reasons stated was that the mission and message of their churches were very vague.

And I do believe that we as an Adventist church, and I'm including myself there, we can do a much better job in connecting the dots, right?

In connecting the dots, in providing a worldview that's comprehensive for our young people, and we need to do that at the academy level, the high school level, and also especially at the college level.

1 of the reasons why I believe that you have many of these mission colleges like AAFCO, like ARISE, you have PEACE in England, You have SALT, all these mission colleges.

1 of the reasons why they're so successful is I believe that they're filling that niche.

You go there, you really are immersed into Adventism.

It's kind of like, How many of you have been to a mission college before?

Isn't it like, and I worked at Weimar, I taught at Weimar for a number of years, and AAFCO was located there, and how they described it was it's like, you know, putting your mouth over a fire hydrant and then turning it on.

Because you're just like wallowing in Adventism, right?

But when you come out, I mean, you are ready to change the world, right?

You're enthused, you're inspired, you wanna do the work of God, and the Michigan colleges are fulfilling that role.

Campus, The institution for which I work for, that's a part of the Michigan Conference.

We also have a ministry that does that, but our particular audience are students that are seeking to win souls on public campuses, on secular campuses.

And so that's part of the work that I do at campus.

And we have a one-year program that we also offer on a yearly basis.

But that's 1 of the reasons why these mission colleges are so popular, because perhaps in many of our schools and institutions, the mission and the message is vague.

And I would highly encourage you to attend 1 of these institutions if you want to get more grounded in our distinctives and in our message.

I've kind of adapted a quote that we read earlier and put it from an Adventist perspective or reframed it.

The purpose of Adventism is about saving souls.

So I kind of switched that around a little bit.

But it is more than that, or it includes more than that, or something else should be incorporated into that.

And that is, it's also about rescuing minds.

You know, the concept of the sealing, a very uniquely Adventist concept, the sealing, is a settling into the truth to a place where you cannot be shaken or moved.

It involves a heart transformation, but also an intellectual appreciation of the truth that you're learning and gaining.

3. The God Under Your Rug: Why the Old Testament God Appears So Mean?

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much once again for this time as we discuss issues in the Old Testament attacks that are leveled by prominent atheists that you committed genocide and that some of the killings enacted are harsh and arbitrary.

And Lord, as human beings who want to see and desire to see you as a God of love and 1 who has mercy and is long-suffering.

Lord, help us to come to grips with some of these things.

But at the same time, Lord, where we have shortcomings, we pray that you would give us sufficient faith on which, or evidence on which to base our faith.

Put your divine thinking cap on our heads and help us to grapple with these things.

As I just stated, this is a very, very challenging topic.

I know every 1 of you are probably in here because you've read the Old Testament and you've read some texts where you found to be very, very challenging.

And most specifically, claims that only an evil God would commit the so-called, and I call it so-called genocide, that we see in the Old Testament or the claim that is made that it is genocide in the Old Testament.

And certainly I have done enough study where I can do a presentation like this.

Having said that, I want to share that it is also still challenging for me in dealing with some of these concepts.

But the Bible does provide, I believe, sufficient evidence on which to rest and hang our hat on, that God did do some of these things in the Old Testament and yet He can retain the character of an all-loving God that we know him to be.

We're gonna start off by looking at some of the arguments that are leveled at the Old Testament God.

And it's coming in the shape of what they've termed, I don't know if they've termed it or others have termed it, but there's 4 individuals who fall under this category, the new atheists.

1 of them died recently, I think several years ago, Christopher Hitchens with cancer, but they are the new public popular face of atheism.

And so here you see Richard Dawkins, and I just want to read this statement.

This is something that I think all of us have to consider, this, in terms of what he says here.

He says, isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their mom and dad, right?

And it always just happens to be the right religion.

If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece, we would all be worshipping Zeus and Apollo.

If we had been born Vikings, we would be worshipping Wotan and Thor.

Well, through childhood indoctrination, right?

And I think he raises a really good question that we shouldn't be Seventh-day Adventist Christians simply because mom and dad are, but because we have ourselves intentionally studied out some of these issues for ourselves and have come to the conclusion that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is the remnant church.

And I believe that every 1 of us need to do that.

Christopher Hitchens, that's what he looks like.

We're not gonna take the time to read that.

He's just basically saying, hey, you know, atheists today can now say what we couldn't before because we would have had our heads chopped off.

But now Christianity is coming with all the rosy, smiley, mommy, daddy, kind of lovey-dovey kind of feel about it.

And so Christianity has changed because it's been forced to.

And that's something that he's sharing in regards to Christianity, and he's the 1 that perished several years ago.

Sam Harris, a philosopher from Stanford, he's 1 of the guys right at the forefront of leveling attacks.

We're going to look at a quote that he shares later on.

And these are some of the claims of the new atheists.

And we're going to start with Richard Dawkins.

And notice what he says, and every time I do this slide, I got to review what he says, because there are a lot of tongue twisters in how he describes God.

He said, the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

A petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak.

A vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser.

Series

Adventist Apologetics: Complex Issues, Adventist Answers

6. The Final Generation (Panel Discussion)

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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06 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

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