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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Scott Mayer

If You Love Me

So this message this morning is titled, If You Love Me, What?

Think about this being said right here, If you love me, do what I say.

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Dear gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, as we open up this topic here today, I don't even know how to describe the way that you love us.

So I just pray that you speak your words through me today.

And may we see a beautiful picture of how much you love us and what you're asking of us today.

So we praise your name, you are an awesome God, we love you in Jesus' name, amen.

Because you see, I heard a rumor, and you're gonna have to tell me if this is true or not, That you come to Loma Linda to find your mate, right?

I have a little personal testimony to tell you on that That little rumor.

When I left the church and I spent many years in Hollywood, my wife was going to the dental hygiene program here at Loma Linda.

And So I fell in love with her here on this campus.

And it's amazing, like when we came here last night, I parked in the little place where you would go if you were in the dental hygiene area.

And I can remember, I was so in love with my wife that I would come and often be her guinea pig for all of the competencies and things that they have to do And let me tell you the first time my wife was giving me a shot because they have to give shots, right?

My eyes are just just seeing red roses I'm just completely in love and my wife is coming in at me like this.

And I'm going, are you sure you know what you're doing?

But I was so in love with her, I was willing to do whatever it took, right?

I think I came here to the dental program and literally had every excuse.

I think I ate candy just so I could come here and get my teeth clean.

Now I asked you the question, who here is in love?

You know what I found is really interesting about this idea and topic of love is many of you have maybe heard of our ministry or maybe you saw a flyer that made you come here, that we talk about Hollywood and some of the things that Hollywood does.

And Tom talked a lot about gardening last night.

And sometimes some people go, you know what, gardening, wait, you guys were gonna talk about Hollywood.

Those of you that were here last night see that when you garden, you see these beautiful truths of growing God's character in our lives.

And I hear something quite often, actually.

We've traveled around and we've given these presentations on Hollywood many times.

And with all sincerity of their hearts, I'm sure they do.

But they're still watching some of these terrible, terrible things.

And so I wanted to share this presentation with you today because what does it mean to love somebody?

I mean we throw this term out here today.

People love popcorn, people love snow skiing, people love all sorts of things.

And then it's like, we're supposed to understand what God means by loving him and keeping his commandments.

And you know what's interesting about love?

I just typed in the internet, what percentage of songs write about love?

I thought it was actually going to be 92.

At least a lot of the research that I read.

It's more like 60% of all songs are love songs.

Because I'm sure there's probably a lot of other ones that, you know, are very against love.

But what I typed in too is in the top billboard, the 100 billboard, guess what the percentage of the top 100 billboard is about love?

Ninety-five percent have something to do with love.

And of course, it's not God's picture of love.

It's much often portrayed as the world's picture of love.

So love is very much so a part of our world's vocabulary.

In the movies, they said that it was somewhere in the range of like 80 to 90% of films have some kind of love story intertwined into the movie.

So I hope that you get a little bit of that understanding from today's presentation.

God's marriage is a representation of the church.

Almost everyone in this room has heard this before.

And when I started doing this presentation, I wanted to see, okay, well, what Is it really that God was asking us inside of this marriage that gives us a great picture of him?

In traditional Jewish literature, the marriage is actually called a kiddushin, and which is translated as sanctification or dedication.

Sanctification indicates what's happening, not just in a social arrangement or contractual agreement, but a spiritual bonding and the fulfillment of a mitzvah.

And the divine precept, the dedication indicates the couple now have an exclusive relationship that involves total dedication of the bride and the groom to each other at the extent of becoming 1 soul in 2 bodies.

Now, I was very interested in this, the Jewish wedding, because there are so many things in the Jewish economy that pointed to God, pointed to Christ, pointed to the story of salvation.

It's like their whole entire culture was wrapped up around these little signs and types of things that would describe what God was wanting his people to do and be.

Now, Malachi 3.14 says, it is useless to serve God.

What profit is it if we keep his ordinances, but we walk as mourners before the Lord of hosts?

So what good is it if we actually, man, I gotta do this.

Let me tell you something that's kind of a funny story about my wife.

When I'd come out here and I would go to the dental hygiene and I would get worked on, I wanted to hang out with her.

And often it was on a weekend or something.

I lived in Los Angeles, so I'd spend all this time in traffic, 3 hours sometimes, to just get out here.

Then I would come and I'd visit her for a little bit and I'd wait for her to get off and she lived with her brother.

So I would go to her house and I knew, my wife is very clean and she loves things in perfect order and very clean, right?

So I would go to her house and I knew she would come home on Fridays and want to clean in preparation for the Sabbath.

And so what I would do is I would get out all her scrubbing stuff, all of her stuff.

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If You Love Me

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