GYCSE 2017: Rooted

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GYC Southeast

Plenary

Doug Batchelor

Walking Through the Storm

Our theme this week is we're talking about being rooted.

And it's based upon a passage that you'll find in the book of Colossians, and they may be putting that up on the screen.

Colossians 2, and there it talks about, as you therefore having received Jesus Christ, the Lord, so walk in Him.

Rooted and build up in Him and established in the faith, as you've been taught abounding in it with thanksgiving, beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ.

So our theme is really being rooted in Christ.

You want your roots down deep because if the roots of a plant are not down deep, a windy day can blow it away.

I always like to begin with an amazing fact.

I was wondering what was 1 of the worst storms in history.

And it so happens that it's modern time, November 11, 1970, I remember this.

They had the Bohola cyclone in Bangladesh.

It produced a devastating 20 to 30 foot high storm surge.

As a result, the massive flooding killed somewhere between 300, 000 and 500, 000 people.

There was 1 town, Tazimuddin, had 167, 000 people.

And we've certainly had our share of storms recently just in the last couple of months.

Not counting what's happened around the world, just in North America, we've had a couple of record-breaking storms.

The hurricanes, of course, Maria and Harvey and a few years ago Katrina.

You out here may not know, I'm amazed I look at the news sometimes and it seems like politics fills the news.

And there was only a few fleeting stories that talked about what just happened in California where we had record fires, 5, 000 homes were burned.

2 of our church members in Granite Bay, it's a suburb of Sacramento, had their homes burned up.

And 1 of our church members had 21 family members in their home because they'd been evacuated from the fires.

A lot of people had to leave with just...

If you had 90 seconds to get something out of your house, what would you grab?

It was amazing to me how many people, first thing they went for was their pets.

I mean, I can understand that, but hopefully they didn't have any kids if they were thinking like that.

But yeah, these folks really, some of our families, they just lost everything.

A lady used to be secretary for Joe Cruz many years ago, 30 years ago.

And she and her husband passed her for 64 years worth of sermon notes.

He kept them the old-fashioned way and all their things.

Her faith is so great, she was saying, this is so exciting.

It's like, you know, before the Lord comes, we're going to lose everything.

But they weren't worried so much about the stuff.

As a matter of fact, they told me 1 interesting story.

They said, you know, the things all just got charred, the house burnt down, but there were some stacks of papers that were so deep that the fire hadn't burned all the way through these thick stacks of tracks they had, gospel tracks.

And the neighbors came back to go through their homes.

They said, our gospel tracks, the wind picked up, it was blowing our gospel tracks all over the burnt neighborhood talking about the end of the world.

She said, you know, we're gone and we're still witnessing.

But we've seen some tragic fires and it was record breaking.

Thousands and thousands of square miles that were burned.

You know, Jesus said there's going to be storms in the last days.

Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I'll liken him unto a wise man who builds his house on the rock.

And the rain descends, and the flood came, and the wind blew, and beat on that house, and it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock.

But he Who hears these words of mine and does not do them?

It's like the foolish man who builds his house on the sand, and the storm knocks his house down.

Now, you got the wise man, then you got the foolish man.

But do you notice even though 1 is building on the rock and 1 is building on the sand, 100% get the storm.

The Lord doesn't say, and if a storm comes, He says, when the storm comes.

Now that's something, especially for the young people that are here right now, I want you to know, You're going to run into some storms.

And we're not talking about weather tonight.

And some of you maybe have encountered some storms.

All kinds of storms that you might be going through.

And the Lord sometimes allows these storms to get our attention.

You know, 1 of the big questions I often get when these storms were coming 1 after another, people were saying, you know, why is God doing this?

And I wrote a note and had some quotes in there that explained that God may allow it, but it's the devil that brings us destruction.

God will sometimes withdraw His protection.

It's God's angels, Revelation says, that are holding back the winds of strife.

But when we reject God and His angels, then the winds blow.

Even in the story of Job, it was the devil that went forth from the presence of the Lord and he brought the fire down and he brought the tornado.

And these bad things happen and they call it an act of God.

But God sometimes allows the storms because we learn through them.

Now, we're going to look at 1 particular storm in the Bible tonight.

It's mentioned in the Gospel of John, Mark, and Matthew.

They all share different aspects of the storm.

Now, just to give you the background, Jesus had performed His miracle where he fed the multitude and they were so impressed.

You know, there are 5, 000 men, not counting all the women and children, so, you know, there may be 50, 000, 20, 000 people had been miraculously fed by this little boy's lunch.

And they realized that the Lord has the power to feed an army.

An army marches on its stomach, and they said, let's make him king.

And the disciples sort of liked the idea of let's prod Jesus into being the Messiah.

And he thought, oh, no, this is getting out of hand.

Rooted In the Truth

So our message tonight, we're going to be talking about rooted again.

Now, the verse that is our theme for this series is found in Colossians 2, and I'll read that to you again, beginning with verse 6.

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him, established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.

And beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ, rooted in the truth." I like to begin with an amazing fact.

You know, tallest tree now is about 365 feet.

You might be thinking that all of the tallest trees have always been redwoods, but that's not the case.

They had a tree in Australia that they say was 400 feet tall and there was a Douglas fir in British Columbia that was cut down that was measured at 500 feet.

So how deep are the deepest roots in the world?

Well, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the deepest roots are found in South Africa in Arsgad.

I know there's some people here laughing at me right now because I can't say that.

They reach 400 feet below the earth's surface.

If you want to survive a storm and you're a tree, you need good roots.

And it's not only that you're rooted in the earth, you want to be rooted, and it'd be great if those roots are wrapped around a rock.

We had a little heartache in the Batchelor family about a year ago.

You know, we've had a cabin up in the hills for 40 years, moved up there selling firewood a long time ago, and Kids grew up, you know, our oldest is 41 and youngest is 21.

And kids all grew up, had a big oak tree in the front yard, hundreds of years old, right up on a hill.

And it was a great tree for a swing because you'd swing off the hill and you'd get really high because you're, you know, up above the drop-off, ladder going up, treehouse, built a zip line into the tree.

We did everything you can do with a tree with that tree.

And you heard that we had a drought for years in California.

It ended last winter with just record rains and also snow.

And our friends called and said we got some bad news.

That big oak tree in the front yard fell over.

Karen and I were just up there a few weeks ago and we started turning it into firewood.

Got to be really careful where you cut because it got nails everywhere from all the little tree houses and things.

But the roots were out there in the loose ground, and evidently some termites got into it.

And it looked good above ground, but it had some disease in the roots.

You not only need roots, you need roots that are deep, you need roots that are wrapped around something, you need roots that are healthy.

Now it's 1 thing when you first come to the Lord you got a lot of questions and you're evaluating different ideas and there's different points of view and at some point I think it was C.S.

Lewis that said you need to stop, you know, evaluating the truth and settle into it.

You need to put your weight upon what you believe.

You can't be living a life of faith if you're not rooted in what you believe.

And that's all going to be based upon the truth.

The first of the Psalms, Psalm 1, Blessed is the man or the woman who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly or stands in the path of sinners or sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord." That's the Word of God.

And in his law, he meditates day and night.

He will be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth fruit in its season, whose leaf also will not wither, and whatever he does will prosper." If you want to be fruitful, if you want to be prosperous, then You need to be rooted in the Word of God.

That man, that woman is going to be blessed.

Do you know how to defend what you believe?

Romans 11, 16, And if your root is holy, so are the branches.

If you want to have a holy, healthy fruit and branches, you need healthy roots.

You know, according to Barna, I'll tell you a little trivia.

I was at a meeting in New York City back during the last election and now President Trump was then candidate Trump, invited a bunch of evangelical leaders to a meeting in Manhattan and myself and Dr.

Carson as far as I know were the only Adventists that were there.

I'm part of a committee of religious broadcasters that are always working on maintaining freedom in broadcasting and we were invited to this meeting to find out, you know, if elected what would be your response to religious liberty?

And I'll tell you, it was quite an assembly.

Carson, Jim Dobson, just Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell Jr., and just everybody.

I've never seen an assembly like this before.

During lunch, I won't even go into the meeting and interview, but during lunch I just sat down with somebody that looked like a nice fella and began to talk and found out it was George Barna.

He was sitting by himself and he's the famous researcher, Christian researcher.

And just a wonderful gentleman, I thought, what an opportunity.

And in the course of our conversation, I talked about the trends of what's happening to Christianity in North America.

Because the culture is defining what we believe more than Christ.

America used to be pretty much a Judeo-Christian country, but that's shifting.

And where Christianity was growing in the last 40 years, it's been declining.

Roughly 70% of Christian college students going off to college end up leaving their faith during their first year on campus.

The Barna Group reported on the spiritual involvement of 20-somethings.

Only 20% of students who were highly churched as teens remained spiritually active by the age 29.

Are you hungering and thirsting after God?

A lot of seed falls on the shallow ground.

And you know what Jesus said in Mark 4, verse 5?

Some of the seed, good seed, but it falls on stony ground where it didn't have much earth.

And immediately it springs up because it had no depth of earth.

And when the sun arose, it was scorched because its root withered away.

You need to have your root in good ground.

Psalm 80, verse 8, God said, He brought a vine out of Egypt.

He cast out the nations and He planted it.

You prepared room for it and caused it to take deep roots.

When God brought the children of Israel into the promised land, He gave them a land flowing with milk and honey and He caused them to be rooted in the land so they could stay there and they could fight off their adversaries.

Now as a springboard for what we're talking about tonight, I want to take you to a very interesting exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

During the trial of Christ, And this is found in John 18, 37.

Pilate normally would have just summarily said, oh yeah, I execute him, but he saw something different about Jesus.

He had probably seen a lot of criminals and This man did not look like a criminal.

The Bible says Pilate could see that he had been turned over for envy.

And then to make matters worse, as he's getting ready to act, a note comes from his wife and she says, do not do anything regarding that just man.

Building On the Rock

Good evening friends and for those in this part of the hemisphere, happy Sabbath.

We're very glad for each of you that are here both in the building and for those who may be watching on a number of venues, Facebook, Amazing Facts Facebook and GYC.

Now I'd like to start with an amazing fact.

1 of the most severe architectural failures in history was in 1995 and it had to do with the structural failure of the Sam Poong department store.

The store was averaging 40, 000 people a day were going through.

A very dubious contractor, Lee Jun, had built it, used substandard material, and after bribing some officials, he was persuaded them to build it on an area that they knew was a garbage landfill.

Engineers, when they tried to advise against it, he'd bribe them.

Then after they approved the plans, he said, let's add more stories to it, sell more space, make more money, and let's even add a pool.

And then when the building began to show signs in 1995 that something was wrong, it began to settle, gas lines were breaking, he went and evacuated the building.

Business was booming, didn't want to do it.

And then even after a ceiling on the fifth floor started to collapse, he said, well, let's wait until after the workday.

Some of the executives ran out of the building and they ordered people to move equipment that might be damaged out from under the cracks.

Well then there was a sudden catastrophic collapse.

937 were injured and it can be traced back to building on the sand.

It's very important when it comes to your life that you're building on the right foundation.

Jesus said, now we talked to you about where Jesus says in Matthew, wise men builds on the rock, foolish men builds on the sand.

Luke shares the same parable but he throws in a few other words that Jesus must have shared on another occasion Luke 6 47 whoever comes to me and hears my sayings and does them I'll show you who he is like he's like a man building a house who dug deep.

And he laid the foundation on the rock, and when the flood arose and the stream beat vehemently against that house, it could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock but he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built his house on the earth without a foundation against which the stream beat vehemently and immediately it fell and the ruin of that house was great as in when the lost will say the harvest is past the summer is ended and we are not saved oh what a horrible thing it will be to realize you had a chance to live forever and you blew it because you built on the sand of popular opinions.

You need to know what your foundation is.

You know at the heart of building on the rock is something very simple.

Your worldview describes your philosophy about life.

Where you came from, which will help define what you're doing here and determine where you're going.

You really need to have the answer to those questions.

There's a lot of popular theories out there.

Some are thinking, well, you've got the option that humans are just highly evolved naked apes that were just complex biological accidents.

Another option is that we're really kind of dormant gods that are traveling through a series of reincarnations until we're sort of reabsorbed by the divine essence.

I believe that for a while, reincarnation.

Or we are moral creatures made in the image of God with free choice.

Everything's going to sort of fall into 1 of those options or a variation of that.

What's your philosophy about where we've come from, why we're here, and where we're going?

He said that if you've got a Christian worldview, you'll be able to say yes to these 8 points.

Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and does he still rule it today?

Is salvation a gift from God that cannot be earned?

It's not just believing in Christ and God.

Does a Christian have a responsibility to share her or his faith in Christ with other people?

Is the Bible accurate in all of its teachings?

Now, after posing those questions, they did a survey and they found that only 9% of people who call themselves born-again Christians could say yes to those 8 definitions of having a Christian worldview.

So many other things are shaping the view and their foundation is turning to sand.

Your belief about what the purpose of life is is going to define every other belief.

What you think about death, sin, marriage, the Sabbath, the inspiration of Scripture, the words of Jesus, the 10 Commandments, family, health, everything is going to be connected with what is your basic foundational world view.

Now the false teachings that are given in this world, you know the world is being told that we've all evolved and this is what I grew up believing.

And I told you tonight that I would share a little bit of my personal testimony and I'm going to weave that into what I was going through in my trying to understand what is the purpose of life my world view and struggling to extricate myself from the false things I had been taught growing up.

It's really hard when you're taught something from your youth to suddenly come to the epiphany of saying, I believed a lie all of my life.

A little girl was doing a book report 1 day and she wanted to make a big impression.

Her book report was on Abraham Lincoln and so she stood up and she said Abraham Lincoln was born at a very early age in a log cabin he built with his own hands And so when you start to share your personal testimony, you know, there's always a risk you can become hypnotized by your own voice and elaborate a little too much.

So, you know, pray for me as I share because I really want to open my heart and just share with you what I've discovered.

Someone asked, how do you know your truth is true?

Well, I'm going to tell you how I came to that conclusion.

I was born with some unusual parents, total opposites.

So it's kind of given me an understanding.

My father was a conservative Republican redneck born in Oklahoma.

My mother was a liberal hippie Democrat born in New York City.

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