HAYSTACKS #6: Alpha and Omega
Today our series exploring key pieces of Adventism continues. We use the acronym "HAYSTACKS": "H" stands for "Hope," and our historic focus on Scripture and prophecy. "A" is for "Advent," Jesus is returning. Second Coming occurs very soon! "Y" stands for "Youthful Eternity." In the earth made new, those who accept Jesus and His unselfish principle of life, will receive new bodies, experiencing a perpetual youthfulness. The first "S" is for "Sabbath." God prepared His rest in the beginning, not merely to help us slow down for 24 hours, but that we might experience focused communion with Him on His holy day. "T" is for "Temperance," living the abundant life, refusing to be enslaved in sensation or anesthetized by food.
It has been impossible at any letter to leave Jesus out. Adventists are VERY interested in Jesus. We look to His soon return, but we're also deeply curious about Him. How did He live? How did He overcome? How can He be our pattern? How can we live a life that pleases Him?
Read more...The Grand Illusion
Introduction
The Bible says that man is made in God's image. Humans are designed. We are not gods but we are designed with a similarity to the one true God.
Children are like parents, each unique. They possess traits echoing us. All of us represent something larger than ourselves. We're designed for eternal life but we're not immortal yet.
Read more...Have Mercy on Us Son of David
Life is so busy, our focus so fleeting. Could it be that someone needs to turn to Jesus all over again? Is today such a day for you?
Read more...Dissolution or Revolution?
Design a Church for the End-times
Can we try to think from God's standpoint for a few minutes? The Protestant Reformation stalled and you are raising up a movement, a revitalization of the Reformation, developing a group who will complete the Reformation. You've worked it all out prophetically, but then this question: how do you organize the church for the end-time? You see ahead because Your eye is divine. You know the philosophical waves and eddies coming up. You see beforetime the rise of human reason, of radical individualism, of the narcissistic, self-serve final age. Out of that froth of self-satisfied psychedelic end-time blindness, you are going to raise up a people. Not just any people, but you are creating a group that will endure through the last age.
How do you do it?
How do you design it?
What do you create? With what thoughts and ideas do you impress these people, this last-day, test tube laboratory, experimental people? How do you create an organization that will endure crisis after crisis, satanic ploy after Satanic ploy?
Interesting questions. Now, some will not like this, but we have posed the question and I will tell you the answer.
Read more...Biblical Hermeneutics and Church Leadership
Introduction
Please open your Bible with me to the book of Jude. Find it immediately before the book of Revelation. While you're tunring to that, let me begin with a quotations that just droppe dinto my email box a few days ago. Thomas Lambrecht is a United Methodist minister. That denomination is going through a dramatic problem right now becuase they have differing hermeneutics happening within their church.
Read more...HAYSTACKS #5: Temperance
Jesus raises the blessing-bar high. Many claim to be Christian. But let's make it personal and ask ourselves. Does our own behavior match what the Bible predicts for the believer?
Let's turn to Galatians 5:16-24. Listen:
Read more...The Eternity of Jesus
INTRODUCTION
The Bible teaches that there is one God manifest in three distinct persons: God the Father; God the Son, that is, Jesus; and God the Holy Spirit, who, like the Father and like the Son, is also a person. Not three Gods, but one; not one person but three.
Some, more recently, are experimenting with a different teaching. These say that God the Father has always existed, but that the person, Jesus, has not always existed. Jesus, they say, had a beginning. They say that there was a time when He was not. Some are saying that the Holy Spirit is only an impersonal power, or, that He is not a person distinct from Jesus. Ideas are swirling. These mistaken teachings are not a problem for most. But we have friends. What will we say if our friends become interested in these ideas?
To...
Read more...