Restoration 2017:  As He Walked

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Restoration Ministry

Anthony Baca

From Unbeliever to Great Achiever

My Father in Heaven, thank you so much for another day that we can come together to worship you and to study your precious Bible.

Father, I'm a man of stammering lips and so I ask that you would speak through me as you spoke through that donkey and that precious story in Numbers.

If you can speak through him, then I know that you can bless your people today through this vessel.

Please let Christ be seen, and as I share my experience with you and my journey with you and my personal testimony, different aspects of it, Lord.

I pray that you would be lifted up and that Satan would not be glorified in the process.

So guide my thoughts and guide my speech.

Let it be seasoned with grace and let it be choice in words.

See if the iPad and everything's working.

Today's message is entitled, this morning, From Unbeliever to great achiever, the power of God's word.

My theme for the weekend is, or for the day, is going to be the Bible, amen?

In the Bible, I have found something so precious to my soul.

And so all 3 of my sessions are gonna be circulating around the power of God's Word, the power of the Bible, and the Word of God, especially when practically applied to our day-to-day lives.

The theme verse for this weekend's presentations is found here in 1 John 2, verse 6.

He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.

There is no greater example than Jesus Christ Himself.

He is the greatest example of all examples.

And so if we want to know how we ought to walk.

And in Luke 2 verse 52, the Bible says that Jesus increased in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and men.

And so this morning what I want to share with you is how I began my journey to walk as Christ walked, and how I had my own increase in wisdom, more shrinkage in stature than anything else, not so much an increase in stature for those who know me, and favor with God and definitely favor with men.

And so that's what I want to share with you this morning.

Our first 1, we're gonna cover my atheistic years when I was an unbeliever, and for those that were here in November when I shared my testimony, I'll be sharing different parts of that testimony.

I'm sure you can relate with that, right?

It's not like you can condense your entire walk with God in a 30-minute segment, you understand?

And so we'll share some different aspects of that, of the atheistic years, and we're going to talk more about the power of God's Word, and how powerful it really is, and what it could really do for us if we would let it do the work that God intended for it to do.

And then I actually want to go through some stories, practical illustrations of how that word impacted my life in a very tangible and in a very real way, more so than theory.

Theory is nice, theory gives you an understanding, but it's better to see an experiment, isn't it?

I'll let you look at my life and to see the experimentation that I went through when I put God's Word to the test and allowed it into my life.

So our first point today, my atheistic years.

I wasn't necessarily an atheist my entire life.

When I was a child, my family took me to a Christian church, part of elementary and part of junior high.

Part of that experience was good, part of it was not so good.

The latter part was definitely the not so good part.

You see, as I was attending this church, 1 Sunday I came to the realization and I found out that the elders and some of the pastoral staff, ushers, had all been arrested that weekend.

And when I had come to this realization of they were arrested, and when I learned some of the crimes that had been committed by some of these individuals as a child that had a very strong impact on my mind.

And I remember in junior high, seventh and eighth grade, wrestling with these thoughts of what was going on or what had happened at our church.

And I remember thinking to myself, if the spiritual leaders who profess to believe in the Word of God, live and do these things, then it must be that they really don't believe in these things.

Does that make you follow the child's way of thinking?

Children are smarter than we think, you know, They really think things through.

And you can't really lie to a child, because they'll just stare at you and watch you, and they'll see what you really are.

And as a child, I would see individuals say 1 thing, but when I went to their houses, when I saw the results, I saw something entirely different and I became very disenchanted with religion.

I really didn't enjoy church anymore because to me it was just robbing me of my free time for something that no 1 at that facility even believed in.

And so when I went to junior high, excuse me, high school, I had, I took a biology class.

Now I didn't really do good in school, like David Machado's testimony last night, I cheated my way through school, it's a whole other story in of itself, but there was 1 class that did have an impact on me in high school and it was my biology class.

I remember my teacher, he kind of had an undertone with his lectures, you know what I'm talking about?

When someone that they're not, they're saying something without saying something, And he was definitely saying something without saying it.

And I remember I talked with him after school, and I said, based on what you were saying in class today, it really sounds like you don't believe in God, huh?

And he said something that stuck with me.

He said, if man acts like animals, it must be that they came from animals.

And as a child, the things, child, high school, you're children in high school, I'll admit that, I was a child.

So as a child, as a young person who was already wrestling with the actions of these spiritual leaders that I had looked to, to hear that it just made tangible, logical sense to me.

He didn't know this, but because of what he said, I became an atheist.

I never told him that because I actually got kicked out of that school not too long after that.

And they sent me off somewhere to try to do better in life.

And then high school and college, this is how I lived.

Titus 3.3 summarizes my life during this time.

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating 1 another.

You see, I was a very sinful individual at this time.

I won't go into the things I did because we don't need a glorified Satan, amen?

But I was on the inside especially a very very very wicked individual and the reality was I didn't care at that time.

It's not like I would wake up every day and say, man, I'm so messed up, I can't believe I do these things.

I mean, if I'm just chemical and gas and whatever, it doesn't really matter what I do anyways.

And so this verse really summarizes my life as an atheist.

But then something happened, something remarkable, something unusual happened, and that's God reached out to me.

You think of the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, he gave him a dream of an idol.

Now, obviously does God condone the worshiping of idols?

But it's interesting how he used an idol to reach out to a man who did worship idols.

And so God had a unique way to reach out to me where I was at.

And you can summarize it with 3 letters, HBO.

And for those that are here last time, I'm gonna touch on this a little bit again.

I saw a movie on HBO 1 day in September-ish 2006, and it went over scientific evidence for the existence of God.

Now I didn't know that's what it was doing or what it turned it off.

And the conclusion was, based on what we've seen, it's logical, it's rational, it's reasonable, it's intellectual to believe that there is a divine creator and I knew what that terminology meant.

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From Unbeliever to Great Achiever

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