MTYC 2012

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Montana Youth Conference

Joseph Olstad

Drained

Father in Heaven, I just want to ask again that you are right by our sides.

I've sat in a lot of sermons, a lot of seminars, I've listened to a lot of tapes, watched a lot of DVDs.

The most meaningful ones have been where I really heard you personally communicating with me and convicting me to go a step beyond where I have gotten comfortable.

And that's what I cherish and that's what I want for my friends here today.

I'm not sure exactly where everybody is, and I'm not sure exactly the next step they need to take, but I pray that you make that plain, and that they know it's from you.

Well, I received a letter some years back.

By the way, native Eurekans, you've heard this, so don't let the cat out of the bag, please.

Actually, half the illustrations I use you've all heard, but this is not so much for you as it is for some of our guests, though it's new.

I can honestly say the person who had written the letter no longer existed.

Strange enough, the letter was written to myself.

My seventh grade teacher had us all write ourselves a letter that she would deliver to us our graduating year in high school.

And I can't tell you, as I read the letter to myself reading it in 1995, having written it in 1989 or 1990, how different the person reading that letter was from the person who had written that letter.

It really would have made a good illustration, but I think I appropriately and ceremonially tossed it into the fire, if that can give you any idea what I had written to myself and encouraged myself and kind of laid out the purposes and aims for my life.

It wasn't anything worth much literary value, but it sure made 1 point, and that is the ability for us to change over time.

And it's 1 thing remembering kind of how you once used to be, it's another thing hearing a voice from the past talking to you how you used to once used to be, and that voice is yourself.

And you know that was a blessed change that happened with me, but I am sorry to say it works both ways.

And I kind of got the name of the title, obviously the antithesis of being filled is being drained.

And as I really thought, and I spent a lot of time thinking about this moment together with you.

And the impression that kept coming into my mind and I was formulating and praying what should I share is flashes of people I once knew who were so filled with God and over time have defected from the faith and can only be called ones that though were once filled with the truth once filled with the love of God, are completely drained out.

And you're going to find that the older you get, unfortunately, the more and more of those acquaintances you'll have to record in your mind and in your heart, in sorrow, by the way.

So I decided that I really am not going to focus on where you are now in your life, in a sense, especially for the young people that are here, but I'm gonna project you 10 years down the line.

That's what I really care about right now, is where do you think you're going to be a decade from now?

Well, it seems so long away, so far away, but it is not.

And if you're still in the faith, and I pray you are in 10 years, there will be good reason that you have stayed in the faith.

And if you are out of the faith in 10 years, there will be bad reasons that you left.

And when I say bad reasons, people leave for a multitude of reasons and I'm not about to enumerate them all.

But there's gonna be some, and I know this is not emphasized so much, and this is where this sermon is going to be a little bit unique.

You will have left, and if I were to ask you in 10 years, because I've asked people why they've left, and I've never heard a good answer.

Not that something really serious didn't might have might have happened but I never heard good reasoning on why they left.

In other words when you listen to it it almost wouldn't take someone real psychological to know that the reasons you're giving me right now for why you have left are not good ones, are not good ones.

Misinformation sometimes, And that's kind of the saddest 1 of all.

I know there's 1 popular Christian speaker and he's on a secular campus, he teaches sociology, and he talks to youth, he used to be once on fire for the Lord, and he asked them and he said, So, and this is kind of the sociological perspective, once they've left and say, you know, I really don't have anything to do with that anymore.

And he said, please tell me, tell me the God that you are rejecting.

That's a very interesting question to ask it and frame it like, please tell me the God that you have rejected.

And he says, by the time they get done describing this God that they no longer follow, he puts his hand on his shoulder and says, Congratulations, you know, because the first step in coming back to God is to reject all the false idols and the misperceptions about God and the God you just described is not the true God.

So you're well on your way, if you're willing, to finding the true God now that you've rejected the false 1.

And another reason people leave, and I don't wanna sound hard-hearted, but I don't have time to really go into all the specifics.

And let's just clear it out of the way as far as the number 1 reason people usually leave the faith.

Even if your local church dynamites your house and kills all of your pets, and every 13th Sabbath during the year they burn you in effigy in the foyer, you should still remain the Christian Seventh-day Adventist.

Do you know that how and when, notice I said how and when and not if, you are mistreated by a fellow Christian is completely irrelevant to whether you remain a Christian?

It doesn't feel that way and I know that, but as far as just good, solid, sanctified reason, it is completely irrelevant to whether you remain a Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

And I want you to hear that this morning.

The issue of being a Christian in general and an Adventist in particular has to do with 1 word and the 1 word is truth.

There is either a threshold of truth among us that we stay as a Christian, you stay a Seventh-day Adventist, or there is not, and therefore you should go.

Almost simplistic when you think about it.

So I want to give you 3 little vignettes here of what I think will kind of seal some of the cracks on why people become drained out in their Christian experience over time.

And I'm gonna hit it from an angle you don't usually hear.

I know, trust me, all the things I'm not saying that you will be thinking, but I'm hoping you know that already and the fact that you're thinking of it tells me you already do, so I don't need to repeat it, okay?

Things about staying connected with the Lord, Bible study, prayer, church, fellowship, rejecting the world, Yes, I'm aware of all those things are gonna help, but I'm gonna hit it from something maybe you will not hear and not be reinforced within the 10 years that you're going to live through, but I think is vital and I think it's neglected.

So I've been looking forward to this opportunity to maybe plant some seeds with you now.

The overview, just so you know where we're gonna go today, is I really believe there needs to be a revival of the intellect among Christians, okay?

A revival of the intellect among Christians.

And let's focus today a revival of the intellect among Christian youth because the earlier you start the better position you're going to be in.

So let's frame kind of our topic is my desire that there is a revival among the intellect among Christian youth and that it's essential and it's non-negotiable.

When I talk about the intellect what I'm really thinking about specifically is learning to think biblically, learning to think theologically, and then this 1 you almost never hear of, and that is learning to think apologetically.

It has nothing to do with making a lot of apologies.

The first time I shared with a friend of mine, and I said, I'm learning about apologetics for the faith.

And he says, you know, I really don't think we have anything to apologize for being Seventh-day Adventists.

I said, brother, it has nothing to do with that.

Learning to think biblically, theologic, and apologetically.

Then I want to apply that focus of the intellect and what God wants to do with our minds and apply it to a reflection to help us resolve controversial theological issues.

I'm just going to pick 1, but it's the hot 1.

It's the hot button issue, because especially within the Adventist church, but it's not only in the Adventist church, I found out.

And that is the issue, well, let me put it this way.

If you're ever challenged to leave this community of faith on theological grounds, you're usually not gonna go and leave because you know what, I really can't accept this idea that God doesn't burn people for all eternity.

I really like to embrace a God who will burn and torture people throughout.

And People usually don't make that as the switch, okay?

It usually gets down to theologically, starting with the judgment, sanctuary, and those issues really almost immediately distill down to the issue of obedience, law, grace, and its interrelation with the gospel.

So it always comes down to the faith and works issue.

Even if you start sanctuary, you start judgment, you start legalistic advent, whatever, it always comes down to the issue of legalism, faith, grace, law.

That's where the bedrock of the controversy is and that's where we need to be the sharpest is there.

If you want to study theology, go there first because if you're going to be challenged, whether it's anti-adventist material or whatever, it will eventually get down to that issue.

So I want to apply using our minds to reflect in a way on that that is not so common to really resolve some of that.

I don't want you to just listen to the content of what I say, but kind of how I'm doing it, because that's what I really want you to do.

I mean, you're not gonna have me or a tape there.

That's what I'm encouraging you to do, to preserve the intellectual backing to your faith, and there is an intellectual backing to your faith.

Lastly, I want to get more into our experience as Christians applying the same mind to the same issue, to present something that I call a capacity theory, which helps us understand our own experience of knowing, loving, and enjoying God, and why sin is so detrimental to that experience.

I'm going to give you a good reason on why sin is such an interferer with that.

And the reason I'm going to bring this up is because as I travel around, not so much now, but when I was in kind of the youth ministry heyday, whether I was in Romania or whether I was talking to kids in the Philippines or here in the United States, the issue usually resolved around or revolved around the questions they had for me, the burning questions were the what is wrong with questions.

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Drained

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