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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dave Steward

Reconciliation: The Sin Problem and The Solution

It's a high privilege and a distinct honor to preach the word of God.

In John 12, 32, where Jesus himself said, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.

Can we bow our heads for that and ask for that blessing from God?

Dear Heavenly Father, we gather today on your special holy day to worship you.

Lord, I ask that every heart would be open to the leading and convicting power of the Holy Spirit this morning.

May the words that I speak come from you.

September 11, 2001 was a day that the world came crashing down for a very good friend of mine, John Meyer.

John was a physical therapist right here in Loma Linda.

On September 11th, he was not in New York City.

He was actually at a hospital that day to talk to a doctor.

John had been losing a lot of weight and he had trouble keeping his food down.

And he went in for a diagnosis and he'd been putting it off.

Is it just me or does it seem like some of the worst people to go to a doctor are people in the medical field?

Anyway, on September 11, 2001, John was informed that he had a terminal disease, stage 4 stomach cancer.

The doctors told him he only had 6 months to live.

He actually died a month later in the hospital.

And he left behind a young wife and a one-year-old son.

My own father died in 1992 at the age of 50.

My father had Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS, myotrophic lateral sclerosis.

I never knew what that was, except until we watched my father's life ebb away for 4 years, and then he died.

Kind of starting with grim news here, aren't I?

I do have a question for you this morning.

What would you do, how would you feel, What would you think if today you learned that you had contracted a terminal disease?

Well, I do have some grim news this morning.

We have something far worse than Lou Gehrig's disease.

We have something far worse than stomach cancer.

We all have been inflicted with a deadly destructive disease called sin.

It's the worst disease the universe has ever known and you know what?

Do you know why God hates this disease so much?

But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear." God is not so much interested in punishing sin as just getting rid of it.

You see, The real issue here with sin is that it separates us from God.

We are His children and sin destroys that relationship.

Because really, ultimately, sin is a relational issue.

It's interesting, when you look at the Bible, and you look at the earth without sin, really, that's only the first 2 pages of the Bible.

Then the Bible in symbolic perfection ends the same way it begins.

The last 2 pages of the Bible are the earth without sin, after sin has been eradicated and destroyed.

Depending on the size of your Bible, the remaining 12 to 1400 pages all deal with what?

Not the earth without sin or the earth without sin.

You see, we're living at a time when the earth does have sin, and the middle of the Bible, the bulk of the Bible is all about the sin problem.

Today I want to talk about the sin problem.

Kind of starting off with bad news, but I certainly don't want to end with bad news.

You see, the Bible doesn't just talk about the sin problem, it talks about the solution to the sin problem.

Shouldn't we have grounds to be rejoiceful because of that?

If the doctor told my friend John, we have a medicine, we have a cure for your stomach cancer, we would have all rejoiced.

So today I want to talk about the sin problem and the solution.

I also want to talk about the only doctrine that is unique to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We do have a lot of doctrines from the Bible that not a lot of other Christians hold, such as the Seventh-day Sabbath, as taught by Scripture, such as men sleep and women sleep when they die, such as hellfire is not eternal torment by a cruel unjust God, but a temporary way of God eradicating sin forever from the universe.

God doesn't want sin to hang around forever, does he?

But other Christian religions hold these same doctrines to be true.

There's really only 1 doctrine unique to this church, and it also ties right in to the mission of this church that God raised up, Not a thousand years ago, not 500 years ago, God raised up this church for a very special purpose at the end of time, the time we're living in right now.

The heavenly sanctuary is the unique doctrine, And tied within that is the investigative judgment.

Judgment sounds like a real ominous word, doesn't it?

I work in Riverside as a prosecuting attorney.

I see shootings, murders, gang rapes, and the list goes on and on.

And the word judgment, when you go to court, does have an ominous tone to it.

Because for someone to be judged, they have to be first found guilty of a crime.

But I really like the lesson quarterly this quarter, and I hope that you study all the lessons.

It doesn't just talk about 1844 and the judgment.

What's the first word in the lesson quarterly?

The judgment isn't good news for everybody, is it?

Just like hearing you have a terminal disease is not good news.

That's why this Bible, the middle part of the Bible, the bulk of the Bible that I mentioned, talks all about the solution to that sin problem, that disease.

What was the very first message Jesus preached according to the Gospel of Matthew?

It's the same message John the Baptist was preaching.

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Reconciliation: The Sin Problem and The Solution

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