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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Wes Peppers

Adventist Culture Vs. Adventist Faith

Father, tonight, we are so thankful to be in your presence.

We ask your spirit to come, to move and shake our hearts tonight.

We ask that your righteousness would be planted in our hearts, and that you would minister to us tonight, Father, that your Spirit would draw close in a very, very special way and that you would convict us of the things that need to change in our life.

You would convict us of a deeper need of Jesus, that We would have an Adventist faith and not simply an Adventist culture.

We ask You, Lord, to draw us towards You.

And Father, that You would transform our hearts, that we would be truly converted.

We would not just assume that because we've grown up in this culture that we're okay, but that Lord, we would earnestly and diligently seek after you, that our hearts, Lord, would be 1 with you, that we would forsake our sins, Lord, and that we would be holy and completely Yours.

I remember when I was pastoring 1 of my churches a few years ago, I've pastored several different churches now, and there was a young person who was actually the daughter-in-law of a very famous Adventist.

And I won't say who that person is, but this young lady and her husband who was the son of the very famous Adventist, and if I mention his name you all would know him, so I'm not going to mention it.

They both had gone to school at Andrews University and they got married and then they moved to where I was pastoring and that's where they got jobs and they settled there and they were coming to my church and I had some conversations with this young lady.

She was 23, 24-ish and she told me that even though she grew up in the church, Even though she went to Adventist elementary schools, Adventist middle schools, Adventist high schools, Adventist universities, she really didn't know or understand what we believed.

She had no idea what prophecy really was, the prophecies we believed.

She had no understanding of the book of Revelation, really no understanding of our Adventist beliefs, our Adventist doctrines, other than she knew, you know, every Sabbath we went to church, but she said, even with the Sabbath, I don't really know that I could explain it from the Bible, don't really know that I've ever had it explained to me from the Bible.

She told me that prophecy put fear in her heart because she always thought that people were fear mongering whenever they talked about Bible prophecy.

And so she never studied it, her parents kept her from it, and so she really didn't know why she was an Adventist or why she really needed to stay.

And so I asked her if she'd ever really read anything about Ellen White, and She said, no, I've never read any of Ellen White's books.

She says, but I wrote my senior year a paper in a class that was actually against Ellen White.

And she said, I wrote about how, why, I didn't believe she was a prophet and all the things.

She said, I found all this stuff online, and I said, when she told me this, I didn't know how much she had read.

So at that point I said, oh, so you wrote a paper against her?

I said, so actually how much Ellen White have you read?

I said, oh, well that's very interesting.

It's kind of like the people that call Seventh-day Adventist cults and when you start to ask them what they know about Seventh-day Adventists they really don't know anything about them all.

Usually people that say, well, Adventists were cults are people who have heard that from someone else who heard that from someone else who heard That from someone else, right?

How many of you have been down that road and I always love to ask that question, you know for most Adventists when people say Oh, well, they're they're just a cult we tend to clam up and we go, I don't know what to say to them.

So I just, when they say that, I just smile and say, so tell me, what makes you think that Adventists are a cult?

So anyway, this young lady, she was very troubled in her heart because she had no peace in her heart.

And it was very interesting because we were in just the next couple of months going to have a revelation Bible prophecy seminar.

And I encouraged her, I said, look, why don't you come to the prophecy seminar and you're gonna understand the prophecies, you're gonna understand the beliefs, you're gonna understand about Christ, you're gonna understand what he's done for us, you're gonna understand everything.

And there was another lady in my church who really hated the Adventist message.

Sometimes I don't even know why people belong to the Adventist church when they actually don't like it.

There are certain online magazines that are closer to here than they are to Michigan, and I won't say which ones, but I read some of these articles and I'm like, like these people will bash the Adventist church.

It's like if I felt so badly about something like this, the last thing I would do is to continue to be a part of it.

I don't really know why, like I can't find anything Adventist like some atheist would be more in favor of Adventism than these people, right?

So anyway, this lady was in my church and she told me 1 time someone had nominated her for the Hadekenist job and she says, oh well I could probably never be the Hadekenist.

And she said, well because I don't believe in Revelation seminars and all those things.

You'd probably want your deaconess there to serve food and these kind of things.

And she said, I just couldn't do that because I don't believe in those things.

Well, I've been praying for this lady and this lady was the greatest thorn in my flesh in that church.

So I'd been praying for this lady, and it just so happened that when I was talking to this young lady about coming to the Revelation Seminar, this other lady was standing there too, and she always thought it was her job to protect people from my messages and the true Adventist message.

And so this young lady said, yeah, she says, I really think, I really feel impressed that I should go to those meetings.

And the other lady was like, you're gonna go to those meetings?

And she said, well, I think I better go with you too.

You know, she's gonna be her protector, right?

And so this young lady comes to the meetings, and night after night, she was blown away by what she heard.

She said, I never had any idea about these types of things.

We studied Daniel 7, we studied Revelation 13, we studied righteousness by faith in Christ as well in every message.

But we studied the prophecies and we studied Revelation 13, she said I had never had any idea that the United States was talked about Bible prophecy and never had any idea.

Revelation chapter 10, how many of you know what Revelation chapter 10 is all about?

That the Adventist church, the rise of the Adventist church is actually predicted in Bible prophecy in Revelation chapter 10.

She said, I had no idea why I was an Adventist, but now I know that being an Adventist is actually in the Bible.

And so then she said, I had a, She told me that she had a dream that Jesus returned to the earth and she was unprepared.

John Carcano, he's got a powerful testimony.

You should get him to come and give his testimony here.

So she had a dream that Jesus returned and that she was unprepared to meet Jesus.

And when she woke up from that dream, God overly convicted her that she should read the book, The Great Controversy.

And when she read that book, she said, that book saved my life.

And her whole life was transformed because of the Bible, because of Christ, because of prophecy, because of these books that are, you know, they're often, we call them the red books, But they're often the red books that often go unread.

And they sit on our shelves unread but unread, right?

So this story, this young lady basically produces the the springboard for our message tonight which is called Adventist culture or Adventist faith.

This young lady had a culture but she did not have a what?

She grew up in the church, she was raised in the church, she went to church all of her life, but her faith was lacking and there was a battle between a culture and a faith and we see that happening too often today and I believe today that as we are living in the time before Jesus is to come, that this is a great and terrible problem in the Adventist church.

That we have a lot of people who love a culture, but do not have any idea what a faith is all about.

And I think that it's 1 of Satan's last day sinister deceptions that will leave a lot of people unprepared for Jesus when he comes.

A lot of people who think that they're right with God, but in reality, they are lacking.

We're going to see that this is actually not a new thing.

This is not something that is just popping up at the end of time, but it's actually something that has always existed for a very, very long time.

So please go with me in your Bibles to Genesis 25.

Genesis 25, and we're gonna see an example of this right here in Scripture.

Genesis 25 and verses 31, I'm sorry 21 and on.

Notice here, the Bible says, Now Isaac pleaded with the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.

And the Lord granted his plea, and Rebekah his wife conceived.

But the children struggled together within her, and she said, If all is well, why am I like this?' So she went to inquire of the Lord.

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Adventist Culture Vs. Adventist Faith

Transcript

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