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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Scott Mayer

Practice What You Preach

I wish my children could actually see you guys, because we're going through this season of practice, right?

I was a child that grew up and fought my parents the entire way, learning the piano.

I played for 8 years, first grade to eighth grade, told my parents, when I get old enough to make a choice, I'm never gonna play.

I wish more than anything I could still play.

And I actually made it, I'm a king of fake it till you make it.

I could play by ear, never really learned to play music.

I would go to my music teacher and I would say, I'm having a problem playing this particular piece, can you play it for me?

She thought I was practicing, but I wasn't a practicer.

This morning, we're gonna talk about Practice what you preach.

Thank you, by the way, for the update to the Ukraine.

I'm always pleased when I see our church being very active, especially in such extreme cases.

And my younger brother is actively involved in ministering in search and rescue type settings.

He's been to the Ukraine, and in fact right now he's in Israel.

And very, very interesting, He has this saying that he always says that kind of stuck with me.

You can live a few days without, or a few moments without air, a few minutes, but you cannot live a single second without hope.

And hope is what we are called to give to those around us.

So I hope and pray that you get a blessing out of this morning's talk.

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Dear gracious heavenly Father, Lord, this is your hour, this is your time, and so I just thank you for this opportunity to share some of the things that I need to hear, that I need to learn.

And Lord, as You use these words, may they be to your glory and your honor.

May we see a clearer picture of how much you love and care for us.

How many of you in this room right now can think of someone in your head that you don't like?

Are you laughing because there's really people in your life that you don't like?

This message that I wanna share with you this morning, I hope there's someone here today that will get a blessing from this.

What is the purpose of our Christianity and our walk and everything that we're sitting here laboring day after day, time after time, coming to church, all this energy, all this effort, are we actually living what we're reading?

And most of these things that I bring up this morning, I want you to just think about your own walk.

Do you really honestly practice what you preach?

I'm married to a woman and I love coming back to Loma Linda because this is actually where my journey back into Christianity began.

My wife was going through the dental hygiene program.

I was living in Los Angeles and the first few moments that I ever came back into the church was here in Loma Linda.

I grew up going to all of our schools and I made it out into the heart of Babylon, not California necessarily, just Babylon out in Los Angeles.

And I'll tell you what, I know firsthand what it's like to have 1 foot in the world and 1 foot in the church.

And God has had to work with me over the years, still working with me.

Do I practice what I preach through and through?

My wife is 1 of those people, you get what you see, or you see what kind of a person she is, even when no one's watching.

She will literally press the walk button to go across the street and wait for the walk sign, where it's like, me, I'm just like, there's no cars, let's go.

But she says, but the law says you need to wait for that sign.

I hope you get a blessing out of today's talk.

So let's talk about something for a second.

What if I wanted to work out which 1 of these would be someone I should choose?

Should I choose the guy that looks the part or maybe the guy that's able to wear the clothes?

We choose people that we think look that part, right?

If I wanted to invest money, and I really seriously had a choice between these 2 individuals, who am I more likely to say, well, I'm gonna trust this person over this person, why?

Because they look the part, or maybe they actually know the part.

How many of you know what the actual statistics are of marriage if you're a Christian versus non-christian?

Can somebody tell me what the statistic is?

I looked this up and I actually did a little bit of internet research.

And you know, statistics are always funny, right?

It matters like, you know, how you actually look at the data and this and that right?

I was actually more pleased when I looked up the statistics of going we've heard that the world is 50% your marriage is gonna make it or it's not right?

That's actually not really actually true.

In fact, they found that when they took those surveys and those studies, they were lumping in all kinds of faith no matter what kind of church you were a part of, if you believed in faith or spirituality, they threw that into the statistic.

And so what they were basically comprising with wasn't really representative to, well, are you a Christian?

And they found that it's actually really more closer to 1 in 4.

The study that was given really said that 72% of married people are actually still married to their first original spouse.

I found that actually really interesting.

And I was like, wow, 1 in 4, I would have really thought that the statistics were way worse.

And so if you hear people say, it's the same inside the church or outside of the church, This was kind of a graphic that was very interesting about which kind of faiths.

The 1 that's in the very center, I don't know if you can kind of see, it's sort of the middle blue 1 is the 1 that talks about divorced, and it went through all of the different ones.

Here's what I found that was really sad when I looked at this data.

And this was from, I think, Pew Research.

We actually in Protestantism are way worse than even some of the other faiths.

And I went, ah, but surely we're better in Adventism, right?

So I went to the internet and I said, I wonder what the statistics is inside the Adventist church.

And here's on our own Adventist website talking about the marriages and what that stat is.

And I found that, guess what, they studied in between 1993 and 1994, so all you millennials are safe, don't worry, this study was done before you guys were around.

My generation, they took a representative of the Pacific Union and the Colombian Union and all of these numbers comprised, they found that also 1 in 1 4 end in divorce.

So you're almost correct that it's the same as what we're experiencing in the world.

And the percentage inside of Adventism, actually, we're not even as well off as the Lutherans and the Nazarenes.

But you would think that we have more information, right?

What's the 1 thing that we tout as Adventists all the time?

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Practice What You Preach

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