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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Mark Howard

Nothing to Wear

Wow, this is like the good old days of Adventism, a big branch Sabbath school.

When are we going to have the Advent Hope Seventh-day Adventist Church?

A couple of amens, and I don't know, is that a bad thing to say?

Anyway, I'm glad to be here this morning.

I was told that I need to remind you that we also will be meeting this afternoon at 04:00 in Cutler Hall.

And we've been talking about character, and I'm gonna review a little bit this morning after we pray.

The Emanuel Institute of Evangelism, people have asked me about the school and if we have materials, audio materials and things like that available.

On the back table, you'll find cards like this, talks about our program, has our website on there.

You'll find audio sermons and other soul winning resources, which every 1 of you I know is looking for.

Because Jesus called us to be fishers of men.

And anyway, those will be on the back table.

I wanna start with a word of prayer if you'll bow your heads with me, please.

Heavenly Father, Father, we are grateful to be in your presence on this Sabbath morning.

And we pray, Father, for a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit to influence our hearts and minds today as we meditate upon this crucial subject of character.

Last night our topic was the controversy over character and I don't have a lot of time this morning to get into it.

It's crucial to understand that the controversy in heaven began with Lucifer seeking to distort the character of God.

And that controversy continues on as well as the distortion.

We saw the battle, the war in heaven between Michael and the dragon.

The dragon is a symbolic name there in Revelation 12.

We would expect Michael to be a symbolic name as well.

The name is a question in both the Hebrew and the Greek.

It means, or the question is, who is like God?

And I believe that the controversy in heaven was over that very thing.

And of course we see Satan there in the garden trying to get Eve to doubt God's goodness, God's intentioned well-being for his creatures.

Did God really say you couldn't do this or couldn't do that?

And we find that Lucifer trying to put the attributes of his character upon God.

1 of the things we looked at last night is that Satan from the beginning and we took a lot of this out of the chapter in Desire of Ages, it is finished.

And if you have not read that chapter ever or even recently, it's 1 of the most important chapters that you can read and know.

It brings to view the conflict and what the final contest is going to be over.

And in that chapter, Ellen White brings up that Satan from the beginning sought to divorce God's justice from his mercy.

And so in his distortion of character, at first she says that he tried to make God out to be such a God of stern justice that he couldn't afford to be merciful and yet uphold his law.

And 1 of the points that we made, a crucial point last night that I need to reemphasize this morning, is that your understanding of the character of God, the character of God that you worship, is a character you are going to have reproduced in you.

If you have the wrong concept of God in your mind, you're an idolater.

Idolatry is not about worshipping a stone.

Idolatry is about making a God that's just like you the way, just the way you want.

And whatever representation you have, or no representation, You could call him Jesus Christ, but if you put on him the attributes of any other God than the true Jesus Christ, the biblical Jesus Christ, then you are, in the words of the apostle Paul, preaching, learning, teaching, believing another Jesus than the 1 the Bible teaches.

And what you're going to do is you're going to, your character is not going to be transformed into his image.

You're trying to transform him into your image.

And so this understanding of what God's character is like is crucial because we're to be transformed by beholding his character.

We want to make sure we're beholding the right character.

The devil knows it better than we do and so he's tried to distort that character and 1 of the key things was to separate justice from mercy.

So we find it played out in the Old Testament.

We find it played out in the days of Christ with the Pharisees, where they couldn't understand how Jesus could go around healing people that in their mind were being afflicted by sickness because of their sin.

That was the mindset of the Pharisees, you remember that?

The disciples, hey, Jesus, why is this man blind?

So for Jesus to come and heal somebody was to intervene and interfere with the just judgment of God.

That's because they couldn't reconcile justice and mercy.

God could be just, they could see that, but he couldn't be merciful and just at the same time.

We find Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners.

How can you be merciful to tax collectors and sinners?

And then we read in that same chapter of Desire of Ages, I believe it's page 762, that when Jesus died on the cross and made it clear that God could be merciful, then the devil decided to come up with deception number 2.

And that deception was no longer that God's justice precluded his mercy, but that God's mercy overthrew his justice.

And so then the Christian world now teaches that the very thing that should have established in the minds of God's people, his law, is the thing that they claim did away with the law.

The cross shows that God in his mercy doesn't care about how obedient we need to be.

And that plays out in many different ways that we fleshed out last night.

1 that I would emphasize is that Satan has led the world to believe that the law of God has been done away with and that All that's needed from God's people anymore is what we termed last night a general casual obedience, not a careful obedience.

You know, it's okay to obey God, but let's not go overboard.

It's okay to say we ought to worship God, but we pick the day.

It's okay to say we ought to give to God's cause but we pick the amount.

It's okay to say that we ought to dress different from the world but we determine how we're going to do it, not somebody else, not the Bible or anything else.

This is the reverse, this is the flip of the deception that the devil was urging before the cross.

The irony of it is that Christianity today, we think our first and biggest job still is to fight the Pharisees.

And the problem today in the minds of God's people, even in the minds of God's people, is we can't reconcile the prerogatives of justice and mercy.

We can understand mercy, but we can't understand justice.

We say, I don't understand how he did that.

I wouldn't have done it that way if I was there.

And the point we made last night, and I want to emphasize this morning, is that God understands.

And in the life of Jesus, we see the perfect blend of God's justice and mercy in character.

Jesus didn't treat the Pharisees different from the woman caught in adultery because he loved them less.

But Jesus understood that sometimes the most just thing that God can do is to show mercy.

And there are other times that Jesus understood with divine wisdom that the most merciful thing that God can do is exercise justice.

It's always a perfect blend, whether we see the blend or not, that is the character of God.

And the devil would have us on either side of that.

Hey, he can have you patting on your back because you're so loving and you're not as critical as those other judgment law-based legalists in the church.

Or he could have you on the other side saying, hey, I'm faithful and I'm not like those liberals.

Devil doesn't care which side you're on, as long as you're not on God's side.

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Nothing to Wear

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