GYC 2017: Arise

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Lineage #KnowYourHistory

Adam Ramdin

1. The Reformation’s Dangerous Idea

This message was presented at the GYC 2017 conference, Arise, in Phoenix, Arizona.

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

I'm sure you've been welcomed several times in the main hall, but it's good to see you here As we begin the workshop sessions here at GYC As we start I like to begin with the word of prayer and then we'll get started Father in heaven we pause to thank you for your goodness to us.

We thank you Lord for the privilege that we have to study together, to look in the past, to examine where we are today.

We thank you Lord for the privilege we have to be members of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We thank you Lord for the heritage that we have and I pray Lord that as we spend these moments together we ask for your Holy Spirit to be our guide, to be our teacher, to illuminate our minds.

I pray that you would speak through me as well.

As you know my name, you can see on the screen, my name is Adam Ramdin.

From England, I work there as the North England Conference.

We have 2 conferences, a North and a South.

I work as a North England conference youth director.

And so I've been doing that for a couple of years now.

It's a privilege to work with young people in the position that I have.

The workshop that we're doing this week is called Lineage, Know Your History.

How many of you have seen the lineage videos that we've released this year?

Most of you have seen, not all of you, okay.

It's a series of videos that we released this year, 48 in total videos on church history.

The thinking behind it was, I was working as youth director, was that a lot of the young people today, not just young, older as well, but a lot of young people today have lost a sense of, or we have lost a sense of our identity.

And that's fueled in some ways by the fact that we're not really studying like we used to as a people, and we don't really know our heritage and where we come from.

So we created a video resource called Lineage Journey, which is a series of videos based on history chronol...

And each of the videos were just 5 minutes long.

We've kind of finished this year's series now.

But it took people on a journey from Constantine all the way up to about the year 1800.

And the idea was to give people a snapshot as to where we've come from.

We put them on social media as a video resource.

So it's something that's there free to see on our website, on YouTube, and on Facebook.

If you haven't seen them, check them out.

We also have a booth where we have some DVDs as well.

I'll introduce some of the team later on.

We've got some photographers on the team, some videographers on the team, and so I'll introduce a few of them later on so you can just kind of see who they are and if you've got any questions for them, you can see them at the booth later on.

So The first workshop that we're doing today is entitled, this 1 here, is entitled The Reformation's Dangerous Idea.

We're just looking at a few of the broad themes of the Reformation and what were some of the ideas that it was founded on and how were these in a sense dangerous or going against the grain of the church culture at the time?

The second 1 we've got, which comes just after this, is called Faith and Formulas.

We're gonna be looking at kind of how the progression of belief changed from Luther to John Wesley and how us Adventists, where do we get our heritage on faith and so on from, what we believe on salvation.

Then we have a workshop called A Hill to Die On.

Then we have 1 called The Foundation of All Freedoms.

And the last 1 is gonna be called Swaying the Future.

If you look at the screen there, you'll see a map.

And that map tells you what the religious persuasion of Europe was around the year 10 to 1100.

And so you see kind of there's a line there, and then you see the words there, Roman Catholic.

So in all these countries here that we know today like France, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, you know, all of these countries, the religion in the countries, the official religion in the country was Roman Catholic.

You didn't have an option of, well, I don't really wanna be a Roman Catholic, I'd rather be something else.

You were born into a Roman Catholic home, that was your heritage, that was your birthright, so to speak, and That was the religion that you were born with and there were no other options.

It's almost like today, kind of the way we think about our national identity or our ethnic identity.

You know, if your parents are Korean, you are born as a...

You can't be like, you get to 10 years old, you know, I don't wanna be Korean, I wanna be Chinese now.

You are, you're Korean, it's fixed from birth.

That was the only option that was on the table if you were born in that part of the world, Roman Catholic.

And so you were born into a very Roman Catholic country, community, church, that was the only option that you had.

And so as you look through the Reformation, certain things started to change, and we'll look at some of these later on in this presentation but this was the church structure at the time.

The church structure was you had in Europe the Pope or you could say the world the Pope or in Europe you had the Pope.

Underneath the Pope, and this is still the Roman Catholic Church structure today, you had the Cardinals.

Underneath the Cardinals, you had the Archbishop.

Underneath the Archbishop, you had bishops.

And then underneath the bishop, you had the local priest.

Then under the priest, you had the poor, lowly church members.

So that was the church structure they had in Europe.

It was pervasive across the whole of Europe.

Now as the Reformation would progress, there will be different church structures that would come up.

Later on you get the Episcopalian church system which was based, which originated in England with the Church of England or the Anglican Church.

Then you would later on get the Presbyterian church system, Congregational church system, and then you have the representative church system as well.

Just quick question, which 1 of these do we have?

Well, there are some parts of our church system that are very much like the Presbyterian system.

However, it would be incorrect to say we are Presbyterian fully, because ours differs slightly.

I would say that we're more of a representative church system than we are Presbyterian.

We're definitely not Episcopalian, and we're definitely not congregational.

Congregational is when you have a, I don't know, just 1 single standing church, and that's their only structure.

Kind of like a lot of these TV preachers, they are congregational.

They just have 1 church, there's no structure, all the money comes in there, and they get all the money, and that's it, congregational.

We fit more down here, though it's got elements of this in it.

But at the time in Europe, the 1200s, 1300s, that was the church system that they had and that was the church system that people were born into and what they saw.

Now, what was 1 of the, when you think of the Reformation, you think of some of the ideas of the Reformation, some of the ideas that stand out.

Now, as I share these ideas or what some of these dangerous ideas are, you're gonna look at the title of dangerous idea, then you're gonna look at what the dangerous idea is, and the overwhelming response in your mind is probably gonna be, duh.

Like, how can you consider the Bible is the ultimate foundation for all Christian belief and practice to be a dangerous idea.

As a Christian today, that's just normal, we would say as, you know, a heritage, as Adventists, as Protestants today, that's just normal.

But at the time, if you go back to the 1300s, that was extremely revolutionary, was extremely dangerous.

2. Faith and Formulas

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

Good afternoon, good morning, good morning, good to see you all.

The second presentation we're doing today is entitled Faith and Formulas.

So before we start, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer as we get into it.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the privilege we have to gather and study together.

I pray you'd bless our time, may your Holy Spirit be here in our midst, we ask in Christ's name, amen.

We're gonna be looking at some of the history behind what we believe as a church today, or what I believe the Bible teaches on the different beliefs on salvation.

Now, in order to do this, we're gonna go on a journey to Germany.

We'll start in Germany, then make our way to Holland, and we'll finally end up in England.

So Germany, does anyone know what this building is here?

So this was the house that Martin Luther was born in.

That was the church that he would have been baptized, or we would say dedication today, but back then they were baptized, infant baptism, would have been in that church just behind.

So you go to his birth home, it's called, there we go, we have a German speaker here.

Martin Luther, that's where he was born, his birth house.

If you go into his house, you can see different parts of his simple house that he lived in.

That would have been his bedroom, they reckon, but not his bed.

It's just kind of a bed reconstructed as what beds on that period would look like and that would have been his dining table or something similar to that and that's the church where he would have been baptized as a baby.

Luther was baptized into the Catholic Church infant baptism is what they practiced back then and as he grew up he grew up in a very poor house.

You may have read the stories or heard the stories how when he was traveling to school, he would sometimes have to sing from door to door to raise a little bit of money so he could buy his lunch at school or before he would get there.

His life was quite poor and it was not that easy.

Then as Luther got older, he decided he wanted to become a monk.

And so he went to a town which was about an hour from where he was born, the town called Erfurt.

Today you can go to that monastery, you can actually spend the night there, you can rent a room and spend the night in that monastery.

If you go to this monastery, they've got the rooms there that are kind of, some of them are, I guess what you'd call a hotel now.

But also, they believe his bedroom was this 1 up here.

Also, while he was here in this monastery, he was a very devout monk.

He once said, if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

And it was while he was in this room that he looked over at the wall and saw on the wall a chain.

And as Luther writes, he says, I had heard about the Bible, but I had never seen 1.

That's like going to study to be a minister at Andrews Seminary, University Seminary, to be a pastor in the Adventist church, and you get to the theological training center to be a pastor, and you're like, I've never seen a Bible.

So he sees a Bible for his first time in this room It's chained literally chained to the wall With like a big hard cover and a chain attached to the wall And so he goes and starts to read this Bible.

The Bible was in Latin but even reading in Latin and reading this Bible would change the world.

He would read it several times, you know, would read through it, and as he read the Bible, you know the Bible says in Psalms 119, verse 130, it says, the entrance of your words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple.

And so as Martin Luther read this, even though it was in Latin, it started to illuminate his mind and he started to see different things.

As he read the Bible, though, it wasn't an easy course.

It wasn't just like He found the Bible, read the Bible, and oh, he got saved.

As he read this Bible, he kind of, he struggled with a view of who God was.

He had all these thoughts running through his mind.

And there was someone that he met that really helped him out.

And if you've read Luther's life before, you know anything about him.

Kind of like 1 of those teachers that plays a student on their way, corrects the trajectory of their life, and sets them right.

And Stauppitz really helped Luther out with a correct, or, I mean, not like a fully correct, but a more biblical view as to what happens with a man and God in salvation.

And he helped Luther out on this journey and really corrected him to help to see God as being a loving God and so on.

This is the town called Wittenberg, or I'm not sure if you're supposed to pronounce it with a V as Wittenberg, you are, Wittenberg.

And this is the church, that door right there, where Luther nailed his 95 theses in 1517 on October the 31st.

Had the privilege, we were filming there in January of this year, and so most of the videos and pictures you'll see will be with green trees and whatever, but we were there when it snowed, and so you take what you get, and it just gives a different feel.

But anyway, that's Wittenberg, or Wittenberg, and Luther was a university professor there.

Now, while he was a university professor in Wittenberg, there was a dispute that arose between some of the theologians and churches in the area.

So what do you do when there's a dispute?

So there was a dispute, so eventually they delegated that Luther would go to Rome to have this dispute heard by the higher authorities there in Rome, and then he would bring back the answer as to what would be the case in this dispute.

So Luther went to Rome and this is obviously he wouldn't have seen this image in Rome because this was built after him but it's what we associate with Rome today.

Luther went to Rome and as he got to Rome, he says, as I saw the city of Rome, I lay prostrate on the ground and I said, oh, holy Rome, I salute you.

This is Rome, he's a Catholic, he's a monk.

3. A Hill Worth Dying On

Hope you had a good lunch and whatever else you did over the break.

Let's bow our heads for prayer as we begin our next presentation.

Father in heaven, Lord, we pause to thank you for this day, for the blessing of life, health, and strength as we meditate for a few moments on this on the subject of a hill to die on.

I pray Lord that you through your Holy Spirit would impress upon us the importance of our lives and where we stand in history we pray in your name.

Okay so our first presentation we looked at broad themes of the Reformation.

Second 1 we looked at faith and formulas, which was different, the progression of the belief on how we're saved through the Reformation and where we stand today.

You know, when we think of the reformers, what imagery often comes to mind?

It's imagery of people who actually gave their life for something.

They may have lived and then their life was cut short because of the stands that they took.

And so the question for us today is, you know, what stands do we or will we have to take and what are we prepared to stand for something at the cost of something very precious, even be it our life?

You know, when we think back on to some of the past and the history, We've talked about John Wycliffe a couple of times already, but I'll talk about him again.

Welcome to Lutterworth, the workplace of John Wycliffe.

Because there's a quotation that he gave that I believe stands out as kind of like a foundational principle that he lived by and many reformers after him lived by.

As I mentioned earlier you can go visit his church.

If you do go, go between the times of 10 a.m.

And it's always open every day and they just walk in and it's open.

Now, he was once asked if he would renounce.

And there was 1 time where he was on his bed and a room filled with all these other papist and papal people, And they wanted to get him to admit that he was wrong or to change his mind.

And there's a quotation that he gave that kind of really sums up in some ways the essence of Protestantism.

Where he said these words, he said, With whom think ye, sorry, with whom think you, he finally said, are you contending?

With an old man on the brink of the grave.

Truth that is stronger than you and truth that will what?

I mean this was a this is kind of the principle that many reformers lived by and I believe the early Adventists lived by and I believe the Adventist Church and God's people at the end of time will also have to live by this principle.

He said you think you're just battling with an old man with gray hairs on the brink of a grave No, he said you're battling with truth.

It's something bigger than me It's something stronger than just me and you're battling with that and this truth is stronger than you and 1 day is going to overcome you as well.

You see the lives that we live we need to live a life that's kind of we live for a bigger cause than just what we are.

There's something bigger than the Individual and there's something bigger than the church.

He recognized it wasn't just him as an individual There's something bigger out there.

There was an issue national rights I Mentioned it in a presentation this morning England was paying money to the Pope or to the Vatican, it was 1, 000 crowns a year, and he said, no, we as a sovereign country should not be paying money to another sovereign country for what?

And so they challenged that, and That was a huge issue that he stood for.

He also stood for justification by faith, and he also believed that the Bible should be in the language of the common people.

Many of us would look at those things today and say, well, that's fairly standard.

But in an age where nations didn't have a right to exist unless they had the Pope's blessing.

You've heard the story of the German King Gregory, I forget his name exactly, Gregory who wasn't going along with everything the Pope wanted him to do and So the Pope just put the whole country of Germany under basically a people ban.

He said, okay, until you listen to me, no 1 in your country can get married, no 1 in your country can have a funeral, no 1 in your whole country can get baptized as a baby, the church is shut.

And soon, the people said to the king, you better sort out whatever differences you've got, because in the Catholic belief, if you have a baby and they were born but not baptized and then they die, now we think today, well, we just bury them and pray the Lord will resurrect them.

In the Catholic belief, if they die before they're baptized, which frequently happened in medieval times, the child goes straight to hell.

So it was a big issue, and you can't get married outside of the physical structure of the church.

You know, as Adventists today, we may have a wedding on the beach or a meeting on the...

Catholic belief in the 1500s, you have to get married in the physical church by the priest.

And so when the Pope says you can't have weddings, you can't have baptisms, and you can't have funerals.

Like those 3 institutions of life shut the whole country down.

And so they were able to control countries by controlling the church.

And So John Wycliffe was like, no, no, no, no.

And so he was the first 1 that stood up for national rights.

And that's a common theme you see through some of the Reformation stories, where Martin Luther was kind of arguing for a stronger Germany, as opposed to Germany listening to everything the Pope told them.

Justification by faith, as I mentioned earlier, and the Bible in the language of the common people.

If you ever get a chance to go, 1 of my favorite cities.

Really, really picturesque and really just a nice vibe in the city.

You know, little cafe shops and people playing music and drawing pictures and very artistic place.

And I kind of like Czech Republic because they really do like their reformers.

There's some countries, particularly like in England, where the English people really have no idea.

You drive to Lutzer, they have no idea who John Wickliffe is and it's pretty sad.

Whereas I do like the fact that in Czech Republic they do see their reformers as national heroes from the past and so there's a big statue there in the Old Town Square and you can visit the Bethlehem Chapel.

He was a pastor there at the Bethlehem Chapel and 1 of the big things he stood for when he was the pastor of the Bethlehem Chapel, a key thing, he actually inherited it from the pastor before him.

The pastor before him said I want the Bible to be taught in this chapel in the local language that's the big thing and so when John Huss took over pastoring in this church he was inheriting a heritage where the Bible was taught in the language of the common people.

And so that was 1 of the things he stood for.

He also stood for many of the stances that John Wycliffe stood for.

And this is kind of how you have some of the synergy of the Reformation.

John Wycliffe was in England and he was a reformer there.

And then the Princess of England was from Bohemia or Czech Republic and so she came in contact with John Wycliffe's writings and then through a couple of relationships some of those writings made their way to the Czech Republic and so then what started in England carried on in the Czech Republic or at the time it was called Bohemia, and the Reformation went from 1 country to another.

And so these guys started a period of reform there in the Czech Republic.

To me this is a lesson, this is generation of what?

He took over this church here, which was 1 of the premier churches in the city of Prague, capital city.

Series

Lineage #KnowYourHistory

3. A Hill Worth Dying On

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Prophecy

02 Where We Are Now and What to Expect in the Future

1h 14m

On the Shoulders of Giants

You Died for That?

1h

Apologetics for a Secular Culture

Apologetics for a Secular Culture Part 8

2h

Identity Theft

4. Lessons From 1888

1h

Adventist Apologetics: Complex Issues, Adventist Answers

6. The Final Generation (Panel Discussion)

1h 14m

500 Years Later: Is the Reformation Still Relevant?

2. The Revolutionary Protest: Just a Misunderstanding?

1h 10m

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

6. Wondering After the Beast

1h

Why Am I a SDA?

1. Does the Truth Really Matter?

35m

GYC 2012 Seminar: The Reformers Speak to Today's Church

Last Generation Theology: A Different Salvation?

1h

Lineage #KnowYourHistory

4. The Foundation of All Freedoms

53m

Staying Focused

33m

Sound Doctrine