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Sacramento Central SDA Church

Herbert Douglass

The Great Controversy Theme

Good afternoon, everybody, and I'd like to welcome you, for those of you who are looking in on live streaming video, welcome to Sacramento Central Seventh-day Adventist Church.

And we're here this afternoon because we have a biweekly gathering called Discipleship University.

We're on camera, but I have to cough, excuse me.

Thank you for being very forgiving, I appreciate that.

Anyway, we're here this afternoon, our special guest speaker who has been here before is Dr.

Douglas, I want to welcome you again, and He's here with his dear wife Norma.

And I'm proud to say that we live pretty close together.

I live in Rocklin and they live in Lincoln.

So brought in the water here, and that's our little joke.

Anyway, that aside, we'd like to welcome you Dr.

Those of you who may be from another church, anybody here from another church?

Okay, how did you hear about the presentation?

Did you hear about it on the word of mouth or internet or...

Douglas, I'm going to read this if you'll excuse me because There's quite a bit here, but it says here on the fly, which we've had in our church bulletin for the last couple of weeks, it says, during his 60-year ministry, Dr.

Herbert Douglas has served as a college theology professor, an Atlantic Union College President, Vice President of a Publishing House, President of Weimar Institute, and most of you know where that is, just up the hill here.

Vice President for Philanthropy and Adventist Heritage Ministry, and he's an author of many books.

If you go to the ABC, you'll see quite a shelf there with his books.

And so, it's always a pleasure to listen to Dr.

Douglas because he's been around a while and he's gathered a lot of information and he's had experience and he knows quite a bit of the history first hand.

So the theme this afternoon is the great controversy theme, the heartbeat of Adventism.

Now if I may, those of you who regularly attend our discipleship university, we're gonna have Dr.

Stone or Holly or somebody, Norma, we're gonna send these around, And if your name's on, just check that you're here on the left side column.

At the left side of the column, today's date.

If you're new, you can find a place at the back where there's a blank space.

Put your name, phone number, and email address.

Just so we know how many people were here today.

We won't have them today, but if you put your email address down we can let you know when those will be available.

Douglas will turn it over to you, and thank you again for being here.

Gracious Father in heaven, we thank you this afternoon that we can be here in your house, and we thank you.

We have our guest speaker and good friend, Dr.

And we just pray, Lord, that you would bless him and use him as he brings to us this, not just information, this inspired picture that we find, not only in the Scriptures, but also in the spirit of prophecy, that wonderful gift that you've given to your remnant church for this last hour of earth's history.

So use him now, and bless us as we gather together to worship and to listen to this truth.

I'd like to hire this man out for introductions.

English butlers do most anything required, of course, but his rages are too high.

But here we are to discuss something that is deeper and clearer than anybody can understand in these last days.

This is not going to be an academic lecture.

I usually take 9 weeks to go over something like this.

This is just a friendly talk we have, just sharing a story of the great controversy and why things are the way they are.

But first things first, maybe you didn't expect this.

I want your eyes to be on our Father God and Jesus Christ when we study the Great Controversy and not upon rules of the church, not even upon the rules they created.

If everyone in the world got 100 percent in all their Bible course lessons, Voice of Prophecy, Faith for Today, Amazing Facts.

Every question right, diplomas, everyone came and worshipped on Saturday, paid their double tithe, Developed a very nice health ethic.

That would make them pretty good Seventh-day Adventists, I think, don't you think?

The persons who did just that way, lived that way, believed all that I just said, crucified Jesus.

There must be something more than that level of the gospel that people all over the world believe to be the truth for these last days, there must be something more than even God's first and best rules.

The good news is the gospel is that God is much different than what most Christians think he is.

And we're going to talk about what kind of a God that makes a difference.

Because when you start talking about God the Father, you really are getting into an area that's new to many people of my own church.

We discover why Adventist pastors have different views about basic questions.

Such as, are we born sinners or are we people who choose to sin?

I'm not gonna have time to think about these questions.

Do Edna's have a last day message for the world?

It may be in telling the truth about these questions.

Some of the basic questions we want to discuss this afternoon.

Why didn't God zap Satan before Lucifer messed everything up in heaven?

If Satan was defeated at the cross, why isn't the game all over?

Believe me, all these questions are really issues that I meet everywhere, and not always with agreement.

The Great Controversy Theme

Transcript

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