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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Paul Negrete

What I Learned While I Was Teaching

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your blessings, Lord.

And we thank you because you have allowed us the privilege to come together in freedom and liberty to praise your name, to worship you, Lord.

We know that the time is short, but we thank you for today.

And we pray that today's message will bring honor and glory to your name.

I pray that you would bless me as the speaker, that your spirit would speak through me.

And I pray for those that are hearing that your spirit would allow the message to reach into their hearts and turn into something that they can do in their lives.

My name is Paul Negrete, and I am the principal of San Gabriel Academy.

And this is my 19th year in Adventist education.

So you could say career-wise, I am just about at my half-life, okay?

And as I look at my time with Adventist education, you know, there's a lot of mixed emotions about our system.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you have gone from K to graduate level or college through the Adventist system?

All right, so I'm praying that I have firm support for Adventist education here in this room.

How many of you, Loma Linda University is your first integration into Adventist education.

Well, whatever it is, you're here today, right?

Even if you're not attending or have not attended an Adventist school of some sort at whatever level.

We're sitting in an Adventist school, correct?

And so, in some way, we support Adventist education.

But the fact of the matter is, as we look forward into the future, there are challenges that we're facing, aren't there?

And I wanna talk about some of those challenges.

I want to give us a perspective so that as we discuss the challenges, whenever you talk about it, whenever you leave this room and you go talk about it with your friends or whatever else.

It won't be open to just simple opinion and personal perspective.

It will have the framework hopefully of what Christ, how Christ wants us to see this organization, this institution.

So as we're looking at it, let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 2.

Because I like to start at the beginning.

It says, It says, The Lord God took man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.

And the Lord commanded the man saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat.

For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone.

And out of the ground, the Lord formed every beast of the field and every file of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field.

But at Adam there was not found a help meet for him." What does this have to do with Adam's education?

From the beginning, the master teacher is teaching.

He said, listen, of everything, this is what you do and this is how you do it.

And then he also allowed the opportunity for some discovery learning.

He didn't decide to make Eve when Adam found out that he needed her.

He says, and the Lord God decided that he would make him a woman, but he allows Adam to go name all the animals and do this, and then to realize that I have need for a mate myself.

From the beginning, the master teacher is teaching his pupil, Adam.

In Genesis 3, verse 8, it says, And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

And we know this, this is right after the fall.

But again, the teacher comes looking for who?

And for those of you that have worked with any group of students, for any amount of time, this scene plays out over and over again.

It doesn't matter what age level, whether they be in kindergarten, preschool, high school, even at college, when there is an offense, when there's something going wrong, there's hiding taking place isn't there?

And then I find it interesting that there is still in chapter 3 in verse 22.

It says, And the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become as 1 of us to no good and evil.

And now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken." So I kind of see this as 1 of the first disciplinary committees here on Earth.

In education, unfortunately, sometimes we have to have a disciplinary committee.

And Unfortunately, sometimes maybe I've sat in too many of them.

But 1 of the things that I do appreciate is that in Adventist education, we have this idea of redemptive discipline.

So that means even as we discipline, Even as we may have to ask a student to withdraw from school, there should be a plan on how to redeem that student.

And I want to see if that redemptive discipline, because it's something that we're told to do, is actually in how God first deals with his first 2 pupils.

And so if I look at verse 24, it says, So he drove out the man and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.

So the action is to expel Adam and Eve from this garden home, from this first classroom.

He puts cherubim there and notice what they have.

It says they have a flaming sword that turns in every which way.

I looked at a concordance and it says that the word keep is the word shamar, which means to guard, to protect, to mark, to observe, to preserve, to reserve, and to save.

Was the sword there to keep Adam from touching the tree Or was the sword there to illuminate the way of how he would get back 1 day?

But the other side of preserving and saving and marking is to point there it is.

Let's take a look at something in John chapter 5 verse 35.

In John 5 35 it says of John the Baptist, Jesus says this, He was a burning and a shining what?

And ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light.

Notice that the description of John the Baptist is similar to the description of the burning sword that shined in every way to keep, preserve, mark the path back to Jesus.

Well, we keep on moving from this and we're going back to the book of Genesis.

We won't take the time to read it, but I'll just make reference to it.

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What I Learned While I Was Teaching

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