GYC SE 2011: A New Beginning

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Devotional Life

Jeffrey Marshall

The Undoing of the Saints: A Testimony

Dear God, my prayer today is that we all in this room can be a blessing to each other.

I very much appreciate you being patient with me in my struggles.

I very much appreciate you not leaving me, but you pulling me on to become stronger, but also to find strength in depending on you, God.

And I pray just now that everyone here can see a testimony of depending on you and what I have to share.

Complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

There's a phrase a very dear friend of mine heard in a dream And as he's dreaming this dream, it was unlike any other dream.

He's actually flying in the sky and it's at sunset.

The sun is quickly setting and he sees thunderhead clouds, those big clouds that come right as a storm is actually coming and the lightning's starting to strike.

He's flying through the sky in something like an airplane, though he didn't really notice the airplane.

And as he's flying, lightning starts to flash, and he's approaching these thunderheads, and he starts to fly in amongst them, kind of like a maze going through these thunderheads.

And it gets dark fast and as the lightning starts striking more and more, he sees that this lightning is very different than the lightning that you would typically see because this lightning is actually flashing scenes of earth's history onto the clouds.

He sees it flashed scene from the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve fell.

He sees it flashed scenes from Noah's flood.

He sees it flashed scenes from Abraham's life.

Goes through the entire Bible but does not stop there.

His heartbeat starts really beating as if he's in danger of being hurt.

And these scenes go on from outside of the Bible.

He goes on to see scenes from World War I, the assassinations that began that.

I specifically remember him stating that.

Up until our present day, he keeps seeing these scenes and his heartbeat is just beating incredibly fast as if he is in this huge danger.

And he comes out of the bottom of 1 of these clouds, granite in a storm, and he's flying towards Earth.

And as he's flying towards earth, knowing that death is about to come upon him, he sees a large group of people that he's about to hit and he comes down and all of a sudden the scene changes.

And now he's a soldier marching in formation with a large group of soldiers.

They're all dressed in their regalia as a soldier would wear for a parade, not for necessarily combat.

And as they're marching, he hears the phrase again, complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

But his heartbeat is up higher than it was when he was in the clouds, as if they're actually in battle shooting at other people.

He has that emotional feeling, but they're just marching as if in a parade, and he continually hears this phrase repeated, complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

And he can't figure it out because the tension in his dream is just very, very heavy.

And he's expecting something big to happen.

And as it gets to that point, His view raises from above the soldiers and then everything makes sense.

He sees the group of soldiers he was with, though it seemed large when he was with them, it's actually a smaller group, dressed in regalia, marching in 1 direction, opposing them, marching beside them as a much larger group, clearly the enemy marching the opposite direction.

And the group of soldiers he was with, people on the edge close to the enemy, would change direction as they marched, join the enemy and their uniforms would change to join that of the enemy.

And he hears the phrase, complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

First time I heard, my friend actually came to my room, room 234 in Talledge Hall, and told me He just had this dream.

He says, I feel like I have to tell you this.

And when he told me this dream, it didn't just bring chills.

It almost brought tears, but it brought me to my knees because I knew that that phrase was the story of my life.

I had grown up with the pats on the back from my principal, and in grade school and in academy, we need 10 more just like you.

But I knew in my heart of hearts that I didn't have what I wanted to have in my walk with God.

And it was scaring me, because I knew the right things, but why couldn't I have the right experience?

So complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

I looked up the word complacency, and I'll read it for you now.

The definition is self-satisfaction, especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.

Self-satisfaction when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.

I believe that we as Seventh-day Adventists can actually be very close to dangers.

Very close to dangers that we don't even realize because we can have all the right information and not being applying it to have the right experience.

To have that depth of experience that we say we have.

We have to ask ourselves the question, do we have it?

Because if we don't, complacency truly will be the undoing of the saints.

I'm going to give you something of snapshots of my own experience, of my life, similar to my friend flying through the clouds in his dream, seeing snapshots of basically the great controversy throughout Earth's history.

And as he saw that, I'm gonna give you snapshots of my life to show you about the complacency that I've experienced and the struggle that I've had and how I was being pulled into that, how God pulled me back another direction.

1 snapshot to kind of help you understand maybe a little bit more of the danger of complacency.

I was in academy, I was over at our chaplain's house, and somehow I was in his, he had an office and I went into his office and we were talking or something, I don't remember, I was looking through his books kind of just having a look and I saw 1 that was really weird The title of it was Mein Kampf.

I did not know that I was pulling off the shelf Hitler's repertoire of his perspective on things that happened in World War I and what was going on in Germany.

Mein Kampf, by the way, means, does anyone know?

So I open up this book and I start to read.

I do not remember where I was at in the book.

I just remember being shocked by how logical the man was.

Because he was saying something racist and I do not remember who it was.

He did not like, I mean, he didn't like anybody pretty much except the Aryan race.

Most of us in here would, I don't think any of us in here would really be too good on his ultimate terms, you might say.

But as I'm reading it I was shocked by the man's logic.

He could ask a question and logically connect things where we could all say you know what he makes sense.

It makes sense to not like, And I don't even remember which group of people it was.

I think it was either black people or Jewish, not Jewish people, it was gypsies.

Gypsies are black people that he was particularly criticizing.

And it really scared me because I'm a logical person.

I wasn't thinking of myself as the next Hitler.

But the very idea that my line of thinking could be similar to Hitler's was a scary thing.

So now I'm going to take you back to the beginning of my life, another snapshot.

I was 8 years old, lived in Dalton, Georgia, just south of here, down 75.

My dad at church 1 Sabbath said, you can invite a friend home.

My mother and sister were gone and so he said, you can invite a friend home, and they can spend the day with.

I think he's kind of thinking, then I'll be entertained.

And then that'll relieve him of whatever.

He can do whatever he was going to do Sabbath afternoon.

But so I go and get my friend, and I bring her to my dad, I say, this is who I want to bring home today.

I mean, he said I could bring a friend home.

The Binding of the Saints: A Pattern

Dear God, I pray that your presence be experienced in this meeting today.

Thank you for how you've blessed in the past and just now.

Because you've blessed, especially because you've blessed, Without your further blessings, we're done.

We just have to have you in order to be successful in the things you've called us to.

The previous session, just to give a little bit of an overview, I talked about my own experience with complacency.

And the title of it was The Undoing of the Saints, but the full phrase is, complacency will be the undoing of the saints.

I explained that I was the good guy that got the pats on the back and told, you know, you're just wonderful and all this stuff.

You know, I wanted to be good, but I wasn't good.

And that was very much a struggle for me.

And God gave me a passage in the Bible that's become my favorite verse and it's changed my life.

It's John 14, 12, which Jesus says that, in essence, He says that we'll do greater things than him because he's going to the Father.

It's very Adventist, it's very humbling, it's very much a call to action.

And at the end of this entire dialogue that ends in the longest prayer in the Bible, Jesus prays something that's a bit of a mystery.

That the believers actually, that those who believe on Him through the Word of His disciples will be 1 with Jesus.

It's at the end of the longest prayer in the Bible.

And we briefly discussed that you can get very much off the right path in the concept of being 1 with Christ, or the last phrase of that prayer is in John 17, 26.

Probably you're familiar with some of the controversy surrounding spiritual formations and such thing and rightly so.

And I just used Kellogg to back up that we do need to be very careful with what we mean when we say I and The are having God in us because Kellogg went down the route of pantheism and ultimately helped create the science.

He was 1 of the fathers of creating the science in America that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.

Hitler was not a guy that did not use logic.

So now, going from a testimony, we want to go to looking at what does it mean to be made 1 with Christ?

It's easy to say, and we all can raise a hand and say, yes, I want that, but we don't want to go bad routes, but we want this experience.

So what does it mean biblically to be 1 with Christ?

And that's what we're gonna be exploring today.

A key thing that Dwayne Lemon will point out, I believe he pointed out this morning, a key thing that we all should keep in mind is understanding where we are in prophecy.

It's easy for us to kind of dissect a walk with God, to dissect Adventism, to put the Sabbath over here and the state of the dead over here, and to put prophecy and Daniel and Revelation seminars and stuff like that over here, but actually there's an incredibly beautiful unity between all of them.

And as was pointed out this morning, what gave Jesus so much power was he understood his place in prophecy.

He in fact said, this has been fulfilled in front of you today.

I want everyone to turn in their Bibles to Revelation chapter 10 and verse 7.

This comes At a real critical point, at least for a Seventh-day Adventist, we tend to believe that the seventh trumpet is a message that we are to give to the world.

We believe we live in the time of the seventh trumpet.

Revelation 10 verse 7 says some interesting things about this.

It says, But in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, the mystery of God will be finished as he declared to his servants, the prophets.

I want us to look at what is this mystery, this mystery of God, Because it doesn't just say the mystery of God will be revealed, it says it will be what?

So this mystery of God is going to be finished during the time of the proclamation of this seventh trumpet.

We live, we understand that at Seventh-day Adventist, we live in the time of the declaration of the seventh trumpet.

What is this mystery of God though that's going to be revealed?

Colossians chapter 1, verse 21 through 29.

It says, And you who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now he has reconciled in the body of his flesh through death to present you holy, blameless, and above reproach in his sight.

If indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard, which is preached to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, became a minister.

So he's in essence saying, you've been kind of split apart, but you've been, but you've come together as a result of the gospel.

It says, I now rejoice in my sufferings for you and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his body, which is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God which was given to me for you to fulfill the word of God." Next part, "...the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints.

To them God willed to make known that they are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

You study this passage and Christ is saying there's a gospel that's made possible by the death, basically the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

This gospel has brought us together, was made possible by Christ, but the mystery of the gospel then is Christ in us.

It's in the Pauline writings as well, and we'll see it in the next seminar and actually another book of Paul's.

But the mystery of God then is Christ in us.

That during the time of the seventh trumpet that this mystery of God will be what?

So during the time of the seventh trumpet, the time that we now live in, we are to experience what?

It goes on in Colossians, he says quite a bit more about it.

It says, for I want you to know that a great conflict, what a great conflict I have for you and those in Laodicea.

We most identify ourselves with what church?

And for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh, that their hearts may be encouraged, being what?

Knit together in love and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding to the knowledge of the what?

So the idea of Christ in us it's going to have as a byproduct what?

This is John's, I mean, excuse me, Paul's driving force.

Christ died, was buried and resurrected, and made possible the mystery of God, which is Christ in us.

And he's saying that we will be knit together, we will become 1 as a result of this.

And Revelation predicts that this will happen in a complete fashion during what?

So your devotional life, your experience with God is not just something you do every morning so that you can have a good day.

Your devotional life is supposed to be the prediction fulfilled for the time that we live in.

It should result in oneness with God that knits you together with other people.

Now we all know that's a great theory, But can it really happen?

Of course I believe it can really happen.

But when we look around us, we can oftentimes get discouraged, right?

Because we don't see it happen like we think maybe it should or like we would like to see it happen.

We want to see something to join where we see that happening, but we see our church oftentimes being what?

Our job is not, as I talked about in the last seminar, our job is not to critique the world around us.

The Life of the Saints: A Love

Dear God, I ask that your Holy Spirit be here just now.

I ask that we experience something of what it's like to be 1 with you.

Just in this seminar today, help us to have good conversation.

Help us to see the ideal that you could have for us as it truly is and not as man tends to make it.

We recognize that we cannot do anything good or have anything good but that you give it.

The concept of the mystery of God being God in us is not limited actually to 1 little place in the Bible.

You can find it in Ephesians, and Ephesians is a fine place.

Ephesians is a fine place to talk about marriage.

We're gonna spend most of our time today in Ephesians actually.

But I wanna set kind of a precedent for why I believe that this model can spin off into Eros, or can spin off into the love between a husband and a wife.

It says, "...which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will." Okay, we talked about the mystery of God being, the concept of God being in us.

So the mystery of his will is his desire, Christ's dying request to be in us.

The mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in himself that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times he might gather together in 1 all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, in him.

In him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.

So this is basically saying at the beginning of Ephesians that there's purpose in going about writing this is that we'll have this experience of the mystery of God being made 1 in a way that actually comes out in, you could say in addition to testifying, glorifying God.

And that's Paul's impetus, that's what he's passionate about.

He describes in Colossians He's chained to it.

Another place in Ephesians, I believe it's Ephesians 3.

It says, For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the Gentiles, if indeed you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me for you, how that by revelation he made known to me the mystery.

Okay, so there's once again talking in the mystery as we established last time is God in us.

So the mystery, as I have briefly written already, by which when you read, you may understand my knowledge and the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets.

Okay, so he's saying throughout Ephesians, it's very much a theme of this mystery of God or this oneness with God being revealed.

And we're going to spend a lot of time in Ephesians today.

We're going to move now to 1 verse because I want to establish something.

We're going to spend a lot of time in looking at the model for marriage, the model for agape, God's love coming out in the experience between a husband and a wife comes from Ephesians.

Much is said, it tends to be controversial, but in my opinion it's controversial because it's not understood well.

And when we understand it well, I believe today you're gonna find this to be very beautiful, perhaps for many of you even shocking.

But let's, first, I'm not making up the idea that God's love comes out in the love between a man and a woman.

That's not like this little idea that Jeff thought about back in some corner and is now out proposing.

There's 2 books in the Bible that actually do not use God's name.

Something interesting about Esther, I'm told, I haven't actually read this in the Hebrew, but I've been told by many people, that at the middle of Esther, there's a chiastic kind of thing that happens, which means that at the center, when this is what I've been told, once again this could be incorrect, I probably should have validated it, but I've heard it quite a few times by people that tend to be scholarly and all that.

In the very middle, when Esther says, if I perish I perish, The first letter of that phrase spells out Yahweh.

So the theme of Esther is that God is kind of this unseen, maybe not out there overtly, but he's very much affecting the circumstances of life, and especially the people who are dedicated to him.

So grammatically, it's actually reflected in the text, if in fact that is true.

What I can speak much more deliberately to though is the second book that doesn't use God's name directly.

Everyone will turn to Song of Solomon chapter 8 verse 6.

It says, Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm.

For love is as strong as death, jealousy as cool as the grave.

It's flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame.

Okay, we read that and we're like, okay, you know, love burns, love is a burning passion.

We're like, that's really cool, that's really beautiful.

Some people know that to be very accurate.

There's something very amazing about that, is the root word for vehement flame is connected to the same word as the glory of God.

So when It's saying the flame, it's like a fire.

It's not just saying that the love between a man and a woman is just this burning in your bosom.

It's saying that this is like the flame of Yahweh.

And so the passion, literally the passion, and the Song of Solomon's a very passionate book, Literally the passion to be shared between a husband and a wife is to be something of the flame of God, the burning of God.

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GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Devotional Life

The Binding of the Saints: A Pattern

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