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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Christian Martin Weekend

Christian Martin

The Battle for Love and Influence: How Satan Targets Our Godly Impact

So today we have the opportunity to share this time in the Word of God, and then this afternoon, we'll also spend some time together.

And I'm looking forward to our fellowship meal after the service today.

So before we begin, let's pause and pray that God will show up in Himself to us as we open His Word.

Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

And just now, Lord, we invoke your presence and we pray that the Holy Spirit would come and abide in each 1 of us.

May the Holy Spirit also speak through me.

May the Holy Spirit reveal Jesus through me.

May you tune our hearts, Lord, to listen to that still small voice convicting our hearts.

When I, as a young pastor, I was a youth pastor at Battle Creek Tabernacle, invited a young graduate from Andrews University named Heidi to go for a walk with me 1 evening, little did we realize that that short walk would end up being a three-hour experience of spending quality time together.

It was not something we anticipated, it just happened.

And after that evening I knew that something clicked.

We gave ourselves undivided attention And that was the beginning of growing in love together.

And as we filled our love tank, as we discovered our love language, as I took time to be with her and as we shared life together and our tanks filled, so to speak, our relationship began to blossom.

It blossomed in the abundance of the overflow.

And as we had that experience together, as we journeyed together, I realized that we were not just experiencing life together as 2 individuals, but I began to understand the meaning of enjoying life more abundantly.

I began to more clearly understand the words of Jesus when he said that very thing.

He said, I have come that you may have life, but that you might have it more abundantly.

You know, there's no doubt that there is a place to know about the life of Jesus.

And I would venture to say that all of us here living in this country, this nation, this Christian nation, being in a Christian campus, All of us have heard of Jesus, of course.

We know that he is God who became a man, born in Bethlehem, a citizen of Judea.

We know he grew up on the east side of Nazareth.

His public ministry began when he was about 30.

It lasted around 3 years leading up to his crucifixion.

He resurrected and now he's in heaven and he's coming back.

And now we'll go to heaven and we'll live forever with him.

And so to know about him, it's necessary, it's good.

He wants us to know Him more abundantly, out of the overflow, as we intimately fill ourselves with his presence.

And when that happens, something begins to click.

Because I've discovered, I discovered that as I, as I spent time getting to know Heidi, and we devoted time to fill each other's love tank, it wasn't until the overflow that it enriched our lives.

It wasn't until we experienced the overflow that we began to enjoy our relationship more abundantly.

You know, when you go to sleep at night thinking about how good God has been to you.

And you also discover how good and gracious He has been.

I'm not sure it's advancing, but maybe you can help me out When you wake up rejoicing to be alive in his presence Something's clicked Something is happening when you hear about somebody receiving Jesus as their Savior for the first time and you get teary-eyed something's clicked when you see someone baptized and you get a lump in your throat and you feel like singing Something's clicked when you sense a real need to agree with God that you did wrong and it feels so right To do it Something's clicked when you pray Lord I don't know what to do, but I know you do, and I will choose to put my trust in you, something's clicked.

And so when you grow in love with Jesus, You just know it.

It's not just Jesus who sees your heart's desire to want to know him.

The enemy knows it too, because he studies you.

And he knows, He knows by outward appearance, by observation, he sees the fruit of your growing relationship with Christ.

And he will do whatever he can to destroy it.

You know, ever since we've been singing since Cradle Roll, This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

And then that stanza comes and it says, don't let Satan do what?

You're supposed to say, don't let Satan, it out.

We've been learning that, singing that for a long time.

But for too many of us, Sadly, Satan has blown it out.

And that's because he comes to isolate, he comes to separate, He comes to distance the hearts of the fathers from their children and the hearts from the children to their fathers, from their fathers.

He comes to bring, He comes separation from our God.

And He comes to distance the hearts of our spouses from each other.

He comes to distance the hearts of disciples from their fellow disciples in the body of Christ.

He comes rather to entice us to occupy so much time and things that distract us from Jesus to occupy so much of our waking hours that to live from the overflow is virtually impossible.

Heidi and I spent hours together and in doing so, we devoted time necessary to be filled.

And when we got to the overflow, we begin to enjoy life more abundantly.

Satan knows that if he could distract and keep us occupied, that will never come in our lives.

How To Avoid Being a Good for Nothing Christian

And today as we open the Word of God, we want to ask Him once again to join us in the meditation of His Word.

Because anytime, anytime we engage our thoughts with the content of the Word of God, something happens, something happens.

And the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writings of the Bible will move in your mind and heart and bring about transformation.

And so we want to ask that he will do that for us today as we take time in his word.

And so as we begin, let's go ahead and bow our heads together as we offer a prayer.

Father, once again, we just pause to acknowledge you.

I pause to ask that you would please speak through your word, that as we meditate on it, that it would be truly living and powerful as you say it is.

We believe it, you said it, and we pray Lord that we would leave this place with food for thought, that we would have something to digest and to ponder and to really wrestle with and put it into practice in our lives.

We pray it would be kept Simple yet something that will impact us profoundly.

And so we thank you Lord for answering our prayer.

So the message of my talk this afternoon is how to avoid being a good for nothing Christian.

You know, the year was AD 28, and his name is Jesus.

Please come with me to the Gospel of Matthew.

You have your Bibles, And so come with me to Matthew.

Matthew, the first gospel of the New Testament.

Teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of diseases among the people.

And great multitudes followed him from Galilee and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

This is the setting, the context of Matthew chapter 4.

And in the fifth chapter of his gospel, Matthew writes that there on the mountaintop, surrounded by thousands of people, Jesus spoke to the multitudes.

And he spoke words, rather we could say he spoke, he preached a sermon that later would become known as the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Mount.

And there again in the fifth chapter, we see him deliver this message.

And it was delivered to give his followers a proper understanding of the nature of his kingdom.

He's presenting some radical teachings, right?

And people are captivated by his teaching.

And Jesus makes mention here and there about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the Father, the kingdom.

And so he now begins to speak a little bit more directly about the nature of this kingdom.

Because evidently some people have been confused or they've started to ask several questions.

And so Jesus begins to describe his kingdom, and particularly the character of the people of the kingdom of heaven.

If you were to just kind of scan through the Sermon on the Mount, you would discover that he presents a people who glorify God with their good works, people who go the second mile and love their enemies, people who do good to please God, a praying and fasting people, people who lay up treasures in heaven, people who do not worry or judge, people who ask, seek, and knock, people who build on the rock, etc.

And if we were to summarize the Sermon on the Mount, the entire thing, in 1 single sentence, in a single sentence, it would be something like this.

How converted Christians who are bound for the kingdom of heaven ought to live.

The entire delivery, the Sermon on the mount.

And he outlines the characteristics in a series of blessings known as the Beatitudes.

There in chapter 5, the first what 10, 11, 12 verses, we find the Beatitudes.

And in the final beatitude, verses 10 to 12, Jesus describes the attitude that the people would display towards the citizens of the kingdom of God.

The world, the people, the world will react to the people of the kingdom.

And now in the verses that follow, Jesus proceeds to flip the script.

That is to say, he describes the influence of the kingdom upon the earth or upon the world.

And so again, he speaks about the world coming after God's, the people of the kingdom with persecution and whatnot.

But then Jesus speaks about the influence the people of the kingdom can have on the world.

And so 1 metaphor he uses to describe this influence is salt.

In verse 13, Jesus himself said, you are the what?

I mean I'm expecting every single hand to go up.

I mean, I gotta have a little salt on the table.

And 1 of the most common expressions in just about every single home around the dinner table, the most common expression that tops the charts would be, can you pass the what?

You know, salt has been an important ingredient for flavor for millenniums, for millenniums.

It's literally where we get the word salary.

The word for salt in Spanish is sal, sal.

And so We get the word salary from that word, same root word.

And it's been an essential part of religious ceremonies.

I lived in India for a while, going to Hindu temples.

I mean, salt is used for various, various things, whether we realize it or not.

And human culture dating back to the ancient Egyptian, salt was so, so common.

And in fact, most of us have interacted with salt, Even in the last few hours, since we woke up this morning, you have interacted with salt, whether you realized it or not.

We use it to make leather, pottery, soap, detergents, rubber, paper, glass, plastics.

Yeah, salt is something that we find everywhere.

We can simply distinguish foods between whether they're sweet or salty And we spread it across the roads, maybe not here in Southern California, no.

But in many other places, salt is used often.

And I even have a device, it's like a shotgun, that kills flies, and it shoots salt, a pinch of salt, and it knocks out the flies.

My wife is not a fan of that shotgun, that salt gun, because as you can only imagine, 1 little press of the trigger and spreads salt all over the floor, and she's not too fond of that.

And without even mentioning the trillions of salt that sits just not too many miles from here In our oceans, covering 70% of the surface of our planets.

And 1 particular body of water, can you guess where I am in this picture?

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Christian Martin Weekend

How To Avoid Being a Good for Nothing Christian

Transcript

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