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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Looking for Interested Hearers

Don't tell me we don't live in a religious nation.

Some of you have lived in secular places.

Let me tell you, the United States of America, especially the Southeast, is not 1 of them.

But as I look at Revelation 7, verse 9, John is showing a crowd so big, you cannot count them.

Here's the verse, Revelation 7, verse 9, I looked and behold a great multitude, which no 1 could number.

Just a few verses before, he's talking about the 144, 000.

Now he's talking about a crowd, We can't even number this crowd.

Of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, before the land, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands.

Friends, here John is shown the triumphal saints of all ages.

That's a crowd so big you can't count it.

The Bible doesn't say the work fizzles out.

But it ends up with a crowd so big, you and I can't count them.

You remember the story when God said, hey Abraham, wake up.

Come out of your tent, come down to the river.

I want you to scoop up a handful of sand.

That's right, that's how many descendants you're going to have, Abraham.

How many stars are there in the sky, Abraham?

Friends, the studies look nothing like the promises of God.

So either God made a mistake with the message he told us to preach in these last days and the audience he told us to go to, or maybe there's a problem with the studies.

Now, I'm not against academia, but I just have 1 question.

How often in thousands of years of human academia have the academics been infallible?

Students, there's a reason your biology textbook is in its 67th edition.

Things that we have assumed to be true, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

You know, for the longest time, we accepted as fact that men had more teeth than women for years.

Aristotle was praying around in front of his class, and he just made the statement, men have more teeth than women, and for hundreds of years, nobody stopped to count.

Look, I like education, get all the education you can.

The problem is when you start taking yourself too seriously and you start to put complete faith in your own results.

I think we've all seen, sadly, those individuals who kind of reason their way out of the church and they say, this is impossible.

It says, always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth, because spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

Human academics have always been prone to make mistakes.

So if it comes down to what God asks of my life and what God asks of my church and what God asks of all of us, if it comes down between choosing that and what the experts are telling us, I'll tell you which is a safer bet.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands how long?

If you have to make a choice, the choice is obvious.

Not once in 2, 000 years have Christians had to apologize for what is found in the pages of the Bible?

We've had to apologize with how we behaved.

We've had to apologize for things we've done.

But we have never, ever had to apologize for the promises of God's word.

So if you have to make a choice, the choice is obvious.

Any study that contradicts the word of God is just flat out wrong.

Because I've seen millennials, I've seen Gen Xers respond to our message.

I've seen college graduates and PhDs, blue collar, white collar.

I mean, we could go down to some of the well-known evangelists that you know.

Clifford Goldstein, the Sabbath School lesson.

Not gonna work, lives in a cave, pushing out society, give up.

John Bradshaw, top radio jockey in New Zealand.

Ron Halverson, a gangbanger from New York who gave his heart to Jesus at 17.

Sean Boonstra himself was in college as 1 who hated history.

He just consumes history because it's all about what God has been doing with his people all the way through.

I mean, folks, do you believe for a minute that God is in heaven this morning, gathering the angels and saying, Gabriel, get a pen, get a paper, come on over here, I made a mistake.

I didn't see this post-modern, secular generation coming.

I gave the church the wrong message for these last days.

But we sometimes or somehow got this idea that the work is up to us.

We think that Jesus gave us this assignment.

Guys, I want you to go make disciples of every nation, language, tongue, and people, and then he left, he went to heaven, left us saying, but how?

As if Jesus were just to respond back, I don't know, you figure it out, I'll be back later.

We think it's up to us to figure out how to do this.

And as a result, we've been making some incredibly stupid mistakes along the way.

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Looking for Interested Hearers

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