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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Being Adventist

Mark Howard

Born Adventist or Born Again?

So what I want to do this weekend is I want to talk, the series is called Being Adventist, and I'll tell you where I'm going with it after we pray.

So let me begin with a word of prayer, and then we'll dive into tonight's topic.

Gracious Father in heaven, I do thank you so much for your word of truth and Father, for your faithful people the world over, for those who have come tonight, for those who will be watching who couldn't be here, for those who will listen and tune into this later.

I pray that what's presented here may be something that would give us inspiration and also Lord clarity and purpose and resolve for the role you've called us to as a church at this time in Earth's history.

I pray that your Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, would give us an understanding, not just a theoretical understanding, but a practical understanding in your truth, for we ask and pray it in Jesus name.

So, being Adventist, I initially, I put this series together, there's a few reasons why I chose to do what I'm doing this weekend.

And it's morphed quite a bit as I've processed it, and it may morph later on as well.

You're getting this kind of new thought process.

There are a few things that prompted what I'm sharing tonight.

Number 1, my own experience growing up in the church and out of the church.

If some of you have heard me speak before know that my mother and father were first generation Seventh-day Adventists.

They received Bible studies and came into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

My mom and dad got divorced and I moved in with my, well, I lived with my mom part of the time and my dad part of the time, but my mom and my stepdad ended up leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church during the Desmond Ford crisis, and that was about the time I was 15 years old, all the way to the time I was about 26 years old.

And so I had that experience growing up in the church, going to Seventh-day Adventist church school.

My brother was in the academy, never went to academy, ended up going to public high school myself.

And so that time in the church and out of the church.

And that experience, you'll understand as I go a little bit further, my own experience in the church now to the church, why I chose to join the Adventist Church later on in my 20s, because I looked at other churches, and why I'm still here.

That's 1 of the reasons that prompted this evening's message.

The second thing is the narrative in the church for the last several decades, and this is my perspective, that has attributed all the current problems in the church to the once widely held belief system of traditional Adventism.

And I'll explain when that narrative is as we go on and you'll know more about what I'm talking about.

But that narrative, which I believe is a false narrative that's been carried on for decades and has done irreparable harm to our church is 1 of the reasons I'm speaking on what I'm speaking on this weekend.

And finally, the effect of this false narrative on my own grown children.

I have a son who is 25 years old and a daughter who is 18 years old.

It's like, wait a minute, where was the birthdays?

My son is in law school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

My daughter is in her freshman year at Southern Adventist University.

So they're grown up, they're out of the house now, and they're at a point in their life where they're really having to grapple with personal decisions.

And it's different growing up with a religious belief system.

And then when you've got to make it your own, there's some things.

And the effect of this false narrative on my own grown children and their or some of your generation.

Those are the things that have prompted what I'm sharing this evening.

So I want to start with what I'm calling a false narrative.

Pastor Cameron DeVager, who I work with, has called this narrative, this story, the Third Reich of Adventism.

This is the Adventism I've been hearing horror stories about since I was baptized in 1994.

To give a practical example, so you know a little bit about what I'm getting into here, I want to share a part of an article that was written by a prominent Adventist pastor who at the time of the article was the editor of the NAD Best Practices newsletter.

Best Practices was a newsletter for pastors.

I'm telling you that to say that to share a quote is like yeah some guy off on the fringe somewhere thought something sometime.

This is somebody who was writing regularly with this mindset to give pastors, Adventist pastors, the best practices for ministry.

When you're in that position, what you say has a widespread influence.

Okay, just to give you an idea, and so this is a piece of what he said in this particular blog article.

This is a blog article from Spectrum Magazine, October 2014.

Now he was responding to a book, and there's so much I can't say, just from a standpoint of time, but there was a book that was defending last-generation theology.

And last-generation theology, I've spoken here before, it's a term I don't like, It's a term coined by people who don't believe in whatever they're calling last generation theology.

And so when you have a title like that, and I've spoken on this before, there's all kinds of...

Once you affix a label to something, then there's all kinds of things that just kind of get sucked into that label.

And so then people say, hey, do you believe, and if you don't know the label, and somebody says, hey, do you believe that we can overcome sin before Jesus comes?

And you're like, well, yeah, I think that's what the Bible teaches.

Well, you believe in last generation theology.

If you don't know any better, and then what happened is you just got lumped into this whole package of whatever.

I don't even like to use the term because I just don't like all the appendages that can be added to it.

But this particular, and this is 1 of the examples, so there was a book that was trying to defend last generation theology.

So this is a book review, I believe, an editorial that was written by this minister.

This is what he says in this little piece of a quote, ''The Seventh-day Adventist Church of my childhood was so legalistic that people were gasping for any breath of hope, that there was more to their faith than a lifetime of stern, joyless hypocrisy, died even darker with the terror of imminent eschatological collapse." In other words, last the events, it's my religious experience, it was joyless, it was so legalistic, there was no breath of hope.

And on top of that, There was all this talk about the end times Jesus coming and everybody's gonna get wiped out right imminent Eschatological end times last day what that means collapse And with no assurance of salvation at the end of it.

So all that you had to endure, and still there was no hope of salvation.

That was the Adventism he says I grew up with.

And he concludes by saying the old Adventism collapsed not because of questions on doctrine.

Oh, so the book was not, this book was not on last generation theology, but it was on questions on doctrine, some of the history there.

And so his response, of course, the implication, not the implication, the explicit statement in the, I guess the book itself was making the point that questions on doctrine made an impact in our theological teachings.

And his response is, something needed to because our teachings were so bad.

And this was the net effect of this is what I went through, this stern, legalistic, joyless experience.

Now I shared this particular quote, I could share a hundred like it.

I share this quote because it's representative of the narrative.

When I say the narrative, I'm talking about this picture that's painted of what Adventism was, and that was the picture right there.

And I share that quote not because it's isolated, but because it's representative.

Throughout my ministry, anytime I share a quote like this in a big crowd, inevitably somebody comes up and says, Pastor, that's just the way it is.

That's how it was when I grew up in the church.

And to this very day, as I've mentioned, this dark age of the church is cited as the reason for every problem that currently exists in the church.

So I don't want to, I'm not having a political discussion, But it's interesting to me today how every problem that exists has to be attributed to the last guy.

And the next guy always does that to the last guy.

But there are things in the Seventh-day Adventist church, it seems that every problem in the church, and maybe this is just more in the level of administration.

And when I say administration, I mean pastors, teachers, professors, theology professors, seminary, the bulk of it, in fact, the Seventh Avenue Seminary released a book called God's Character.

And, you know, they were rebutting what's called last generation theology.

It was an NAD personal ministries weekend.

And we were having a meeting and a guy came in and he held that book up, and he's like, everybody needs to get this book and read this book.

And what's funny to me is, in many of the chapters, when a person would say, you know, and there are a lot of straw men arguments in the book.

I hate to say it, but a person would say for proof, I know this is all true because and they would give their testimony of their experience growing up in the legalistic joyless church because of the our doctrines because of the way the church was you know so strict stringent about lifestyle issues and things like that And I always get that response that yes, that was my experience too from somebody.

And so this is the reason why the young people are out of the church today.

This is the reason why evangelism doesn't work today.

This is why our members have no assurance of salvation today This is why our schools are struggling for funds and enrollment today And any other challenge and every other challenge that exists in our church today is because of this third reich of adventism So here's my dilemma This era and and and just to be clear this is the You know this particular pastor who wrote the article, and many of those who, whether they be from the seminary or whatever, who have weighed in and said, yeah, this is what the church is like.

They're the generation that's in leadership in the church.

They're the generation who hold responsible offices in the NAD and the GC and what have you, many of them.

And as I said, it's the generation I grew up in.

The Debilitating Drudgery of Adventist Doctrine

Gracious Father in heaven, we are so thankful for the Sabbath day.

More than this, Lord, we're thankful for the truth you have revealed to us through your Son, Jesus Christ, and entrusted us with in these last days.

I pray, Father, that this time we spend this morning in worship, in study of your word, will be time that will draw us closer to you in such a way that the people we come in contact with in this coming week will know that we have been with Jesus.

Also, I forgot to mention, the Emmanuel Institute is something that we used to do with a late training program in Michigan that actually was folded into the work in the conference office.

I am the Associate Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Director in our conference office.

A number of you are familiar with that because Pastor Cameron and I do a program every week called Talking Points, which is a review of the Sabbath school lesson and highlighting the key points, giving some ideas and teaching tips to teachers and students and anybody who's interested in the lesson for that matter.

So now that that's out of the way, I want to talk about just a little review of last night's message last night's message was called born Adventist or born again and It addressed how much of today's leadership Those in my generation share a similar testimony of how the church they grow up in grew up in offered no assurance of salvation a faith in the words of 1 leader of endless demandings and scoldings that's how he described his growing up as an Adventist all these rules and all of this got to be doing this and got to be doing that we talked about that that subject a little bit last night, and identified that there's a different perspective to the truth when you're not converted.

There's a different perspective to spiritual rules when you're not converted.

When you've not yielded your life to Jesus, the church may feel a lot more oppressive than it is.

1 thing I hear a lot from young and old that have not yet committed to Jesus, they say, ah, when I go to the church, it just, they're so judgy, I feel so judged.

Are you familiar with the text in Proverbs that says the wicked man flees when no 1 pursues?

Well, This isn't limited to young people.

There are people all through the ranks who have never fully committed to Christ.

And if they haven't, their view of religion and their feeling about spiritual things is not gonna be positive.

In an attempt to provide more assurance, the church for the past several decades, as long as I've been in the church, I'll tell about that in a little bit, has attempted to provide a more grace-based approach, playing down Adventist distinctives or even writing them off, and adopting a more simplistic just love Jesus and know he loves you approach to religion.

I'm glad for a person to have assurance if they've accepted Christ.

But I'll tell you that what has resulted unfortunately is multitudes in today's church having assurance without ever having committed their lives to Christ.

I'm going to tell you something God loves Everybody who's going into the lake of fire as truly and as equally as he loves those going to heaven But they've made the choice Not to be with him There are multitudes who have an assurance without ever having committed their lives fully, I should say, to Christ.

A generation that uses the term relationship with Christ more often, but spends less personal time with Him than any previous generation.

And finally, a generation that knows less about the biblical reasons for the Adventist faith than any that has gone before it, yet sees itself as advanced in understanding.

A generation who, in the words of the Apostle Paul, has a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

I resonate with this quite a bit because I think back to my experience.

Now I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

There were some good folks who gave my mom and dad Bible studies and so they became first generation Seventh-day Adventists.

I lived with my mother and my mother and my father got divorced.

I lived with my mother and my stepfather who ended up leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church when I was about 14, 15 years old during the Desmond Ford crisis.

It doesn't matter if you know that history or not, but that was in my experience.

I had my time growing up in the church and then I had my time out of the church.

Interestingly enough, 1 of Ford's big draws in Adventism was to give people more assurance because our doctrine primarily of the sanctuary robbed people of assurance.

That was a mindset then, it's a mindset now.

We're gonna talk about that a little bit more.

And so I was out of the church for many years when I was in my mid-20s, I got baptized.

I was not baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

In fact, I don't know if I should say this, but I've never been baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I joined the church by profession of faith.

Through my experience, there were actually several pastors that I asked to baptize me and something got in the way every time.

And then by the by the time I got it, I ended up in ministry and it's like, what do you do now?

Like, by the way, I'm getting baptized this weekend, folks, Come to your pastor's baptism.

But anyway, I didn't get baptized in the Adventist Church.

I was going to the Adventist Church, but I was baptized on the same day as my wife Stephanie was and my brother Jim was.

Now my brother Jim works in the General Conference.

He's been out here, perhaps you know my brother Jim.

We were baptized on the same day of April 2, 1994.

And we all told the pastor, listen, we want to be baptized, but we do not believe what the Seventh Day Adventist Church teaches about jewelry.

We don't believe what the Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches about coffee.

We don't believe what the church teaches about LNY.

And I've had people say, well, yeah, why don't you do, we ought to do more of that?

How do you baptize somebody into Jesus without baptizing somebody in the teachings of Jesus, but here's the challenge?

There's too many evidence who really don't understand whether those things are actually teachings of Jesus or not talked a lot about that last night, that too many Seventh-day Adventists, and I say Seventh-day Adventists because I'm in a room of Seventh-day Adventists, but the reality is, across the Christian spectrum, denominationally, many people grow up in a church and they just believe what they've been told.

They've never actually studied out what they believe for themselves.

And so we have a generation, as I mentioned, that has a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

Now I was baptized, not as Seventh-day Adventist.

The church I was attending in those days, ironically, was a mission church designed to win the young people back to the church.

That was kind of the tenor of how they were gonna win people back And that was cool with me as a young person.

I wasn't into any of that because keep in mind listen I Just thought when I told the pastor I don't want to get baptized into those certain things and accept those certain beliefs.

I just thought I knew better than him or the church I Just thought my opinion it the ironic thing is this I realized it wasn't that I disagreed with church doctrine it's just that I thought my doctrine was better than church doctrine because everybody has doctrine doctrine just means teaching so it's funny today in fact the late pastor Richard Ophelia used to say when he said you know when I hear 7 they having to say well I'm just I'm just not into doctrine.

He says, what they mean is they prefer Baptist doctrine to Adventist doctrine.

And I, in my mind, knew better than church.

But as I said, I came to realize later on that even as a church, the church I attended, We weren't really down on doctrine, we just had our own doctrine, as we preferred.

We had a zeal for God, not according to knowledge.

Go to Romans 10 with me, I want you to just see that in the Scripture.

Romans chapter 10, and then we're going to try to fill out some of this this morning.

The Bible says, Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved For I bear witness I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God But what?

Not according to knowledge for they being ignorant of God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness Have not submitted To the righteousness of God for Christ is the end of the law for all Righteous for Righteousness to everyone who believes now there's so much I could say on this and I can't get into the breaking down the whole passage today, but I will say that When we talk about doctrine again doctrine is teaching Christ is a doctrine Have people say well, let's not focus on doctrine.

Let's focus on Jesus Everything we know about Jesus is a doctrine.

In fact, if you look at our 28 fundamental beliefs, 1 is specifically stated, the Father, 1 is stated, the Son.

Whatever a person believes, the teachings they believe on something is, constitutes a doctrine.

Notice it says, they being ignorant of God's righteousness sought to establish their own.

I want you to notice the root word there of righteousness.

The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology

Okay, well let's dive into this afternoon.

1 more thing about this morning and this afternoon's topic.

I'm giving a bird's eye view of something.

I'm trying to touch on, this morning I wanted to get on more of an overview of the significance of Adventism, the unique contribution to the gospel picture, the great controversy scheme, that kind of thing.

And inevitably, when you try to cram that much into a small space, you can't really explain everything in the detail you'd like to.

This afternoon I'm going to be doing something somewhat similar with the last days and last day events.

I entitled this, The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology.

I mentioned to you that I am the father of 2 grown children, a daughter who is 18, a son who is 25, who have grown up in the church as a pastor's kid.

And I can tell you that even growing up in a pastor's home, when you talk about the last days, there are just, because It's not all in the home.

You go to school, you go to Adventist boarding school, and you go to this and that, and you're talking to your friends, and you hear this here, and you hear that there.

And the ideas that circulate about the last days.

In fact, I have a young man in the Lansing area who is working with the Lansing Church currently as a Bible worker, who is a theology student.

And he brought up some questions to me that I'm going to touch on this afternoon that come up when we talk about the last days and the judgment and specifically his question was about the judgment of the living.

And when he brought it up to me, I thought, are you seriously asking this question?

And maybe, I don't know, maybe you've never heard this before.

Maybe you're like, I've heard that same thing.

There's a quote that Ellen White makes that people base this on, but there's this concept, because Ellen White talks about the judgment of the dead and the judgment of the living.

And so there's a concept out there that, Because Ellen White says, we don't know how soon we're going to switch from the judgment of the dead to the judgment of the living.

And so there's a concept that says, perhaps, because in the judgment, obviously, I'm being a little facetious, you're going through the books in alphabetical order.

And so perhaps, Simano, you're good, because you're after me, because I'm an H and you're a T.

And the mindset is, perhaps your name has come up in the judgment already.

Maybe we're in the judgment of living and your name came up, and maybe you just got judged out.

Nothing you could do now would ever make a difference, you're lost.

That's a real concern and thought that some people have, and they think that somehow we taught that in Adventism.

That's a little bit of a terrifying thought.

So the terrifying tyranny of Adventist eschatology.

Before I go any further, I want to ask the Lord to bless our time as we study this afternoon.

Heavenly Father, I want to thank you so much for your goodness to us all, for your love and your mercy in giving your Son, Jesus Christ, to die, to sacrifice for our sins, and then to ascend as our high priest.

Our guarantee, our surety, the 1 we can put our full confidence in because He who has begun a good work in us will complete it unto the day of Jesus Christ.

He is the author and finisher of our faith, He tells in Your Word and we thank You for that.

Now Lord, I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit to give us understanding in spiritual things this afternoon.

And Lord, work through my thoughts and words, that they may be concise enough to give clarity and hope and inspiration to those who have come this afternoon and those who are watching online and those who are listening later through AudioVerse and other platforms.

We just thank you for hearing and answering our prayer, Lord, for we pray it in Jesus' name.

Now I have to tell you again, I mentioned it this morning for those who, well, whether you were here or not here, I'll reiterate that my mom and dad were first generation Seventh-day Adventists.

And so I grew up from, probably from my, I don't know if they came in, I think they came in right before I was born actually.

So I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church.

My mom and dad ended up getting divorced and both remarried.

I lived with my mom and my mom and my stepdad left the Seventh-day Adventist church in my teen years.

So I grew up going to Adventist elementary school and about the time I graduated from eighth grade and was getting set to go to the Academy then We my mom left the church and we moved to a different location and I started going to public school and then was out of the church for many many years and I remember of course when you go up Adventist at least in those days and Probably any days because part of Adventism is prophecy and last days and Jesus coming and the signs of the times, There would be those periodic conversations I would have with my oldest brother.

Now, my oldest brother went to the academy, and we would go out on the weekends and hang out a lot.

And then I remember many nights where we'd come home, and we'd sit out in the car, and we would talk until the wee hours about the last days.

And you'd have these colorful, like, what's it gonna be?

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Series

Being Adventist

Born Adventist or Born Again?

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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