1. An Episcopalian (American Anglican) rector (pastor) was travelling on foot one sunny day through the mountains in a southern state.
   1. Thirsty and tired, he chanced across an old cabin tucked away along that wooded trail, and so he stopped and asked for a drink of water.
      1. In the course of his conversation with the good woman of the house, the Episcopalian pastor inquired if there were any Episcopalians living in these parts of the woods: "You got any Episcopalians around here?"
      2. The woman of the house stared at him for a while, a question mark written large across her face.
      3. Then without speaking, she arose, motioned for him to follow, and led him to the back of the cabin, where the wall was covered with the skins of all kinds of wild animals.
      4. Pointing at those skins, she turned to the rector and drawled: Thar's all the different kinds of critters the old man's rifle has ever killed...look 'em over and see if you can find an Episcopalian among 'em."
   2. Poor mixed up woman, you say....she thought an Episcopalian was some sort of wild creature her husband probably hunted!
   3. But maybe the woman's right!
      1. Episcopalians....maybe they're just another skin on the wall!
      2. With all the other skins up there--all the other religions, all the other churches!
      3. Has it come to that--are we all just another skin on the wall?
      4. Baptists and Methodists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Adventists and Catholics and Orthodox and Pentecostals and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and Episcopalians.....
      5. And Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Moslems and Christians and New Agers and....
      6. Are we all just another skin on the wall?
      7. Is that what it means to be church and religion anymore?
   4. And if it HAS come to that, then how under heaven, shall I know which skin to choose?
      1. Illus: It's like the Chinese student who came here to enrol in one of the American universities.
         1. The application blank asked him to list his RELIGION.
         2. He knew what the religion of his ancestors was, so he wrote it down, he thought .....CONFUCIANISM.
         3. The only problem was he misspelled his religion in English and ended up writing down as his religion the word CONFUSION.
      2. But then it is confusing, isn't it?....with the practically innumerable throng of churches and denominations in the United States alone and the 100's of 1000's of religions and sects the world over.....how in the world is a rational human being supposed to make a rational human choice?
   5. This evening once again in the NeXt Millennium Seminar, we open this Book in search of the answer.
      1. Join me in reading the words of the battered and beleaguered Apostle Paul who will end up dying for his confession, Ephesians 4:4-6 (p 1126).
      2. Did you catch that? Paul cries out: "There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one body, one hope, one Spirit, one God and Father of us all."
      3. Seven times he writes, One!
      4. But with over 300 different churches today in America alone, and ten times that many religions and sects the world over, the unavoidable query is, WHICH ONE?
      5. Does God even have a church anymore?
      6. Of all the skins on the wall of history...which one?
      7. It's a fair question to ask...and it deserves a reasoned response...and so for the few moments you and I have together...I'd like to join you in our NeXt Millennium Seminar's search for the answer.
2. An answer that begins in the midnight tent of a restless commander....and the cryptic words of an ancient proverb.
   1. Before we step into the Roman warrior's tent, read these cryptic words quickly with me.....Proverbs 4:18 (p 607).
      1. A single ancient proverb dusted off.
      2. Could it be the answer to the skins on the wall lies within these words?
      3. Reread 4:18.
   2. Illus: But as we tiptoe into the tent, it is not the full light of day...instead the midnight sky high over the Roman general's bivouac is black and silver and silent.
      1. And so the Roman warrior sleeps...barely, fitfully....but enough to dream.
      2. When suddenly with a startled cry, the warrior jerks awake.
      3. You see he's had a dream....high in the sky he saw them...two letters from the Greek alphabet ...the letters Chi ( ) and the letter Rho ( ) ...[show on screen]
      4. But he saw not only the two mysterious letters ...he also heard a voice in the night that spoke the cryptic words: BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER.
      5. The two letters and that single voice race through the mind of the commander who is now wide, wide awake.....Chi, Rho, Chi, Rho, by this sign you will conquer.....Chi....Rho....
      6. And then he has it....Chi....Rho...why they are the first two letters of the name it seems half the Roman empire has been dying for....Christus ( ез ) ...Chi ( )...Rho ( )...
      7. By this sign....it must be the God of the Christians talking to me....my victory shall be through Him.
      8. And when morning dawned a Roman warrior named Constantine hastily splashed a new monogram on his helmet....Chi Rho....and at his orders they were painted on the shields of all his soldiers.
      9. And when the sun rose on October 28, 312 AD, Constantine and his army marched across the Mulvian bridge over the Tiger River and signally defeated the forces of Maxentius.
      10. The West belonged to Constantine...and now he sat as Pontifex Maximus, the pagan title for head of the Roman Empire.
   3. Just a bit of dusty history....but in it lies the answer to the question, Why are there so many churches today?
      1. Because you see, Constantine decided that it was the God of the Christians who had given him the victory that day.
      2. Illus: And so in 313 AD Constantine issues the Edict of Milan, decreeing that the hitherto persecuted and decimated Christian sect was granted full peace and prerogatives of the empire....they were free now to preach and propagate their message...their battle with Rome was over....they were now on the inside.
   4. Sad, really.
      1. I don't mean sad that the bloody persecution of Christianity was over.
      2. But looking back across the l7 centuries now it is sad to realize that what was really happening was that the enemy was simply switching his tactics.
      3. Now Christianity is given favored-nation status.
      4. Why the emperor has branded the first two letters of Christ's name across his imperial rule.
      5. What more could you ask for?
      6. A Christian emperor? You even got that with Constantine.
   5. But therein lies the tragedy....for whenever the powers of church and the powers of state join together the union becomes a crimson compromise and a bloody bond.
      1. EXHIBIT A: the crucifixion of Jesus...take a look at the cross, for there you will witness the inevitable end result whenever the powers of church and state join forces.
      2. EXHIBIT B: history's second wave of persecution ...called the Dark Ages...masterminded by the union of church and state.
      3. And it all began with Constantine.
      4. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em.....and that's exactly what paganism did, under the peaceful coexistence of church and state.
      5. Illus: Listen to the words of William L. Gildea, in an article in The Catholic World magazine:

         "The church took the pagan philosophy and made it the buckler of faith against heathenism. She took the pagan Roman Pantheon, temple of all the gods, and made it sacred to all the martyrs; so it stands to this day. She took the pagan Sunday and made it the Christian Sunday. She took the pagan Easter (Ishtar) and made it the feast we celebrate during this season." (Patterson 13)

   6. And in the decades and centuries that followed the first Christian emperor, we encounter a sad procession and progression of voices that called for reform and truth...being systematically snuffed out and eradicated.
      1. The very persecution the church once suffered became her chosen vehicle to enforce the corruption that seeped into her bosom.
      2. But listen, let's not be too hard on the history of those far away lands, but the fact is that early in our history we did the same thing on these very shores here in the United States, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of our 13 original colonies.
      3. No....the fact of the matter is that on any shore we're in trouble when the powers of church and the powers of state join together to legislate and decree the consciences of a free people.
      4. (And so, I must add parenthetically, I watch with increasing alarm and concern the merging of religious and political powers in this nation by well-meaning but history-forgetting leaders. If church and state ever join together in this nation, or any nation, it will be as terrible as Calvary and the Dark Ages....mark my words.)
3. Dark, dark ages indeed.....Bible prophecy, you recall from our seminar, spoke of 1260 years of church and state dominance, where the light of this Book was nearly snuffed out.
   1. In fact during those centuries the Bible was the exclusive possession of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
      1. Chained to library walls, the Scriptures were rare and were rarely read even by the professional clergy.
      2. Not to mention the superstitious citizenry.
   2. But in that black, black night of Christianity's history someone struck a match and lighted up the night.
      1. How did that ancient cryptic proverb put it?
      2. Read Prov. 4:18.
   3. Because I live in a university community, I was intrigued to discover while studying the history of the Dark Ages again this past week that the places where those someone's struck their matches was frequently a university campus!
      1. John Huss, the University of Prague; John Wycliffe, Oxford University; Martin Luther, University of Wittenberg.
      2. Just a single light in the night....was all it appeared to be....yet if one woman is willing to light her life by the light of God's Word, the whole night can be set ablaze....one woman, one man....
4. And set ablaze it was!
   1. Illus: My boy Kirk came home from school a few years ago and announced to me, "Daddy, in school today we learned about Martin Luther and how he nailed up the 95 SPECIES."
      1. Well, there were many species of traditions going around in Luther's day.
      2. But what Kirk meant to say was the 95 THESES.
      3. 95 challenges to the species of error and darkness that had seeped into the church.
      4. Illus: On October 31, 1517, when that young monk named Martin nailed to the university church's door those challenges to the traditions of the church, HE HAD NO INTENTION OF FORMING A NEW CHURCH.
      5. He loved his church...he had committed his life to his church...when his heart was set free by his discovery of the Gospel in a Bible chained to the wall of his monastery, Luther could not refrain from declaring the Good News of grace and peace through salvation by faith in Jesus.
         1. You don't have to work your way to heaven; you don't have to earn God's friendship.
         2. He offers it to you with arms wide open.
      6. And by the thousands, people hungry for light and God, began to follow the teachings of this German university professor and pastor.
      7. So I can assure you that it was with almost sacred awe that I stood on the very cobblestones of that German village of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther once walked and preached and taught and hammered--not just on the cathedral door, but hammered from the Word of God, truths that had been forgotten and cast aside during the Dark Ages.
      8. I have read Luther's commentary on Romans, and the light has shined on my own heart through Martin Luther.
      9. But when Luther died, do you know what his followers did? They built a fence...and said what's good for Luther is good for me...I'm going to call myself a Lutheran...and within this fence here I'll live.
      10. And so the Lutheran church was born....but it went no farther than Luther.
   2. Illus: Then along comes John Calvin, a young man 26 years Luther's junior.
      1. He, too, loves his church; he has no plans of forming another church.
      2. Then he hears of Martin Luther, and he too studies the Scriptures in Geneva, Switzerland.
      3. Only he finds more than Luther and writes it all up in one of the masterpieces of the Reformation literature, Institutes of the Christian Religion.
      4. I have read from those magnificent books.
      5. Declaring with scholarly insight the great themes of salvation, Calvin focuses on "the election" of God and the security the Christian can enjoy in Christ. It wasn't perfect, but it was an important contribution.
      6. He, too, had uncovered long forgotten truths of the Bible that had been obscured by the accumulated dust of the dark and middle ages.
      7. Well, Calvin died--like all leaders do--and then his followers built a wall around his teachings, too...I'll stick with Calvin, they said ...and they became Calvinists...and formed a church called THE REFORMED CHURCH...or the Presbyterian Church here in this nation.
      8. But they would go no farther than John Calvin went.
   3. Illus: But then along came the Congregationalist Church.
      1. They weren't comfortable with the Presbyterian form of church government that Calvin had supported.
      2. They wanted no return to the dangerous hierarchy of the Dark Ages.
      3. And so because of their loose organizational structure, they became the fertile ground for a proliferation of new churches.
      4. Illus: One wing of the English Congregationalists which rose up in the early 1600's was a group of Christians who rediscovered the Bible teaching of baptism by immersion for believers, rather than sprinkling for infants.
      5. And so the Baptist Church was born, out of the great Anabaptist tradition.
      6. John Smyth, the first Baptist leader, left the Church of England and England itself in 1607 for the Netherlands.
      7. And out of that exodus the Pilgrims were born, who in search of religious freedom landed on the stormy shores of our nation.
   4. Over and over you will discover it in the history of Christianity in the last 400 years...men and women turned back to the Bible and there discovered shining truths that had nearly been obliterated during the Dark Ages.
      1. And have you noticed--that each new group builds on the rediscoveries of the previous groups?
      2. Because how does that ancient proverb read...Prov. 4:18?
   5. Illus: John Wesley didn't choose to leave the Anglican church.
      1. He and some friends at Oxford had formed a Holiness Club because they were eager to live up to the high-calling of God.
      2. Wesley ends up a missionary for the Church of England here in America....meets some Moravian Christians on the boat-ride over....is deeply impressed with their faith and freedom in Christ.
      3. Returns to England later....and encounters Christ in an upper room prayer meeting.
      4. I have stood upon that very spot again with almost sacred awe!
      5. He and his brother Charles and a friend George Whitefield set England on fire with the good news of grace and growth into Christian maturity in Christ.
      6. John Wesley is one of my favorite men in all history.
      7. They taunted Wesley and his friends for their methods.
      8. And as it usually happens, that name, originally meant to be pejorative, stuck, and the proud heritage of the Methodist Church was born.
      9. But as it happened before it happened again... the followers of Wesley also drew a line and built a fence....and said...it is enough to be like Wesley...I shall remain a Methodist... AND THEY WENT NO FURTHER.
   6. Ah...but you see....Prov. 4:18 isn't over yet.
      1. Read the verse.
      2. In the great Reformation movements of the 1500's and the 1600's and the 1700's, there was still a priceless teaching in this Book that had been obscured through the dark ages of history....a gem that waited to be brought into the shining light of the Reformation.
   7. Illus: That's where a Baptist farmer from upstate New York comes in.
      1. He couldn't believe his eyes or his heart.... and so he reworked the calculations over and over again.
      2. And every time he examined the prophecy of Daniel 8:14 he kept coming up with the date, 1843/1844.
      3. Now what does a Baptist farmer to do? DON'T MAKE ANY WAVES...HIS MIDDLE-AGED HEART CAUTIONED HIM...BETTER SIT ON IT....NO TELLING HOW YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS WILL REACT.
      4. But by August, 1831, the farmer who for 13 years had been studying the prophecies of Scripture, could bear the pressure no longer: ALL RIGHT GOD...I'LL MAKE A DEAL WITH YOU....IF YOU WANT ME TO SHARE THIS DISCOVERY, THEN YOU GET AN INVITATION FOR ME TO PREACH....YOU HEAR?
      5. William Miller arose from his knees that muggy summer day in upstate New York, convinced he'd settled the matter once and for all...after all, who would invite a 50 year old farmer to come and preach.
      6. Within 30 minutes...there was a pounding at his door...he opened it to see his nephew: "Uncle William, our Baptist preacher can't be at church tomorrow and father sent me to ask if you'd be willing to come and preach instead--and Father says to tell you to share with us what you've been studying lately."
      7. William Miller stumbled back out into the maple grove beside his house to wrestle in prayer again....Only this time a farmer went stumbling out...and a preacher came striding in.
      8. And for the next 11 years....Miller and a host of preachers from nearly every denomination preached up and down America and across Europe the glad tidings THAT JESUS WAS SOON TO RETURN TO EARTH...as they finally calculated it...ON OCTOBER 22, 1844.
      9. Once again the Reformation fires blazed in the night....and thousands joined this great Advent movement...selling all they had to get the glad news out that JESUS WAS COMING SOON.
      10. And as October 22 neared, their commitment intensified all the more.
      11. Which only made their Great Disappointment on October 23 all the more bitter and devastating.
      12. When you've hitched your wagon to a star that didn't come....what's left in life when your hopes are dashed?
   8. Well...what was left in the end was a group of Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others who banded together to re-examine the Scriptures....we made a mistake...what was it?
      1. Bringing with them the richness of truth from all the Reformers, this devout group of Bible students continued fanning the fires of the Reformation.
      2. I can tell their story in 30 seconds, but the truths they RE-discovered and set ablaze weren't reached easily or overnight.
      3. But in the course of the years since 1844, through the influence of the Reformation begun 3 centuries earlier, this group of Bible students REDISCOVERED GOD'S TRUTH ABOUT AN END-TIME JUDGEMENT THAT IN FACT DID BEGIN, ACCORDING TO PROPHECY, IN 1844.
      4. What is more, they rediscovered a Bible truth that had lain hidden and covered and forgotten throughout the dark Dark Ages: the shining Old Testament and New Testament truth about the seventh-day Sabbath.....
      5. It had never quit being truth--but when Constantine baptized Christianity into favored-religion status, the pagan sun-worship day was also slowly baptized into the Christian Sabbath and the Creator's seventh-day Sabbath was forgotten and abandoned.
      6. BUT THE GREAT REFORMATION DIDN'T END WITH Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Wesley--that reformation continued to rediscover Bible truth through an interdenominational movement that came to be called the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
5. And I know what you're thinking--"OK, OK, Dwight--thanks for the list and the history lesson tonight--but let's cut to the quick. How can a person possibly know which religion, which church is the right one?"
   1. Fair enough question--and I assure you that I myself, just like you, have to wrestle with the myriad of choices that face the contemporary seeker of truth.
   2. And no one has ever lived in an age when there has been more choices available, and more claims to truth being made than we face today.
   3. But God has provided two very simple, very clear, and very powerful guidelines to direct us in our search for the truth.
   4. YOU CAN'T FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES AND NOT KNOW THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHICH CHURCH IS GOD'S TRUE CHURCH FOR THIS DAY?
   5. For the first guideline, I invite you to turn to Isaiah 8:20 (p 661).
      1. As you turn to it, please keep in mind the history we've just shared tonight--even though we've only had time to share a thimble full of the history of Christianity.
      2. And of all the world's religions, it is only the Christian faith that God's Son, the prophesied Messiah Jesus, established, and that tells the greatest truth about God and His salvation.
         1. That is why we didn't spend time reviewing the history of all major global religions.
         2. God's greatest truth is within Christianity, but within which Christian Church particularly?
      3. Read Isaiah 8:20 (p 661).
      4. Here is one infallible method of discovering on your own which church is God's church!
      5. Because in your hands you hold the one infallible standard by which all teaching and all doctrine and all religions and all churches must be evaluated.
      6. In your search for God's true church, you must energetically evaluate every cult, every sect, every church by this great standard.
      7. If they are teaching any doctrine contrary to this Book, Isaiah says, "There is no light in them."
      8. Oh yes, they may have some light--but what good is some light if it's mixed with some darkness?
      9. Illus: If a pharmacist gave you a bottle of pills and told you that it contained a lot of good pills, but it also contained some harmful ones, would you say, "Oh, that's okay, just so long as some of the pills are good." Of course not! You would return that bottle and demand that ALL the pills be good.
      10. That's the common sense guideline God is giving us here: "Don't settle for half truths.
      11. Keep searching until you find the full truth."
   6. Which brings us directly to the second clear and infallible guideline God has given to direct us to His true church in these last days.
      1. And it shouldn't surprise us that it is found in the very heart of that book of the Bible we have returned to again and again in this series, the book that God gave especially to guide His people at the end of time namely, the Apocalypse, and specifically.
      2. Revelation 12:17 (p 1182).
         1. "And the dragon..."--who's this dragon? Oh, we remember him in v. 7--that old Serpent called the Devil and Satan.
         2. "And Satan was enraged with the woman..."--who's this woman?
         3. Illus: Paul in both Eph. 5:25 and II Cor 11:2 likens the church to the bride of Christ.
         4. So here is Satan, the dragon, waging war with the woman, trying to destroy the community of faith that is loyal to the teachings of Christ.
         5. And the community of faith that is described here is the last one, the one at the end of human history just prior to the second coming of Jesus.
      3. For centuries many Bible scholars have recognized Revelation 12 as a symbolic depiction of the church from the time of Jesus, through the persecution of the dark ages, ending in verse 17 with a description of God's final church.
      4. If you have been with us through this NeXt Millennium Seminar, you know that Revelation 13 describes the final crisis to come on the earth. We've spent two entire lectures studying that chapter. In Revelation 12:17 God identifies the distinguishing qualities of His last church, the one that will go through that crisis.
      5. And what are the distinguishing marks that God said would identify His last-day church? THEY WOULD KEEP THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD AND HAVE THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS!
      6. And so that no one could mistake that this is exactly what God meant, He repeated it again in Revelation 14:12.
         1. After identifying His end-time people in Revelation 12:17, and describing the final crisis to come on the earth in Revelation 13, and giving the last message of warning and loving appeal to be given to the earth in Revelation 14:6-11, and just before He describes the return of Jesus at the end of Revelation 14, God pauses and reiterates the distinguishing marks of His last-day church.
         2. Read Revelation 14:12
      7. God looked down through time and saw that at the very end there would be so many voices and churches claiming to be the true ones, that He decided to give the world a very simple, clear, unmistakable way to tell which one was most truly His, which one would be upholding to the world what He wants to be upheld at the very end of time.
   7. And what were the distinguishing marks God gave that we might know for certain who His people are at the very end of time? You know them. We just read them. What are they? They KEEP THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD AND THE FAITH OF JESUS.
      1. #1--And what are the commandments of God?
         1. They are His law so perfectly and powerfully summarized in the great Ten Commandments.
         2. And HOW MANY of the Ten Commandments would this final church community honor and obey?
         3. ALL of them, of course.
         4. Which includes the 4th commandment--Remember the seventh-day Sabbath to keep it holy.
         5. God knew that by providing that ONE IDENTIFYING MARK of His final church, He would narrow the field of contestants to the smallest handful.
         6. God made it crystal clear that His final church on earth will keep His commandments, including the 4th commandment. It will be a seventh-day Sabbath-keeping church, just like the church in the New Testament.
      2. #2 And secondly, what else will God's last day church have? It will "HAVE THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS" and "THE FAITH OF JESUS."
         1. Not only will the true community of faith at the end of time be a Sabbath-keeping church that seeks to be faithful to all God's commandments--it will also be a church that puts its faith in Jesus and testifies to all the truths that Jesus taught, whether they are popular or not.
         2. It will be a church that believes and testifies that Jesus was involved in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and without Him nothing that exists could have existed.
         3. It will be a church that believes in and testifies that Jesus alone is the Lord of salvation who died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead to be our living Lord.
         4. It will be a church that believes in and practices baptism by immersion just as Jesus experienced it when He was here.
         5. It will be a church that believes Jesus' own testimony that He is the Lord of the Sabbath and it therefore seeks to be faithful to Him in the keeping of His Sabbath.
         6. It will be a church that believes in and testifies to what Jesus taught about death--that it is an unconscious sleep in which one awaits the resurrection at the second coming of Jesus.
         7. IN FOLLOWING THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS, it will be a church ignited by the hope that Christ is coming soon to end human misery and heartache.
   8. Is there such a community of truth and faith on earth, whose sole allegiance is to Jesus Christ and His Holy Scriptures and Ten Commandments?
      1. I believe there is.
      2. Revelation does not identify it as a denomination....or as a church....but simply as the "rest of her seed"--the last chapter, the final continuation of God's eternal truth on earth.
      3. Humbly but with deep conviction I must testify to you that I believe the church that has brought you this "NeXt Millennium Seminar: Finding a Forever Friendship with God" represents that final community of faith tonight.
6. And so I am compelled to end this evening with a personal testimony--why I am a Seventh-day Adventist Christian.
   1. And I can hear you saying: "Oh great, Dwight--I know what you're going to say--you're going to tell us that you believe your church is the only true church and that we're all lost unless we join your church."
      1. But the moment you say that, my friend, you put me in an awkward position!
      2. Kind of like the question, HAVE YOU QUIT BEATING YOUR WIFE?
         1. If I say YES, then I admit that there was a time when I once beat Karen--and that is simply not true! Just ask her!
         2. If I say NO, then you'll assume that I'm still beating my wife.
      3. You ask me if I believe my church is the only true church on earth?
         1. If I say YES, then you'll immediately declare, "Dwight thinks there are only going to be Seventh-day Adventists in heaven"--but that simply isn't true--and I don't believe it!
         2. And if I say NO, then you'll conclude, "Hey, what's the big deal--different strokes for different folks--as long as we all have a church and a religion we'll be saved!"--but that's not true either.
      4. Illus: Jesus Himself said in the Sermon on the Mount [show on screen]: "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you: depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.'" (Matthew 7:21-23)
      5. You see, calling Him Lord simply isn't enough!
      6. You must not only call Him LORD, you must follow His LIGHT and His LAW and DO THE WILL OF HIS FATHER IN HEAVEN.
   2. For that very reason God has Himself described His last church on earth as a community of faith that "keeps the commandments of God and has the testimony and faith of Jesus."
   3. And so my personal testimony is that I have found the Seventh-day Adventist Church to be just such a community continuing the great rediscovery of Bible truth that the mighty Reformation began long ago!
      1. And at the heart of this contemporary rediscovery is the shining portrait of God that has been long forgotten!
      2. A God who hungers for a personal friendship with every member of the human race.
      3. A God who was so in love with us that He climbed up Calvary's cross to declare, I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH....and to show the horror of sin's eventual consequences and deliver us from death.
      4. A God who cared so much about my happiness that He framed ten commandments of love to protect every meaningful relationship in my life, including my all-important relationship with Him.
      5. A God who was so eager to share my friendship that He created the seventh day as a weekly celebration of our shared friendship...a gift of time that will go on for all eternity.
      6. A God who is urgently trying to get the Word out that He is soon to return to this planet...in fact even now...the books of Heaven's judgement are open...and GOD IS PROVING TO THE UNIVERSE THAT HE REALLY DOES HAVE FRIENDS ON THIS PLANET WHO WILL STAND FOR HIM EVEN IN THE FACE OF PERSONAL LOSS...men and women and children who will take their stand for the truth no matter what family and friends might say.
   4. THIS IS THE GOD I've met here in this Book--AND THIS IS THE GOD I'm inviting you to love and follow for the rest of your life, too.
   5. AND THIS IS THE CHURCH I've found on earth today that stands unashamedly for these truths about God and from God--AND THIS IS THE CHURCH I WISH TO INVITE YOU TO JOIN.
      1. A church that like all the Reformation movements, began small....but now has over 10 million SDA's world-wide who cherish the Reformation truths about salvation through faith in Jesus, and who long for His soon return to this planet in power and glory!
7. As you have noticed, I like to end each lecture with a carefully chosen story that applies the message for that lecture. But tonight, I want to end with a different kind of story. I want to end with YOUR STORY.
   1. Because some of you have been coming to this seminar night after night, and you've been learning things you didn't know before that the Bible taught.
   2. And you're wondering what to do about it.
   3. Perhaps you've been affiliated with a religious organization that has some truth and has helped you through the years, but that you now realize also teaches some things that are contrary to what you've been discovering in the Word of God.
   4. And you're wondering what to do about that.
   5. Because you've experienced for yourself the truth of Proverbs 4:18: "The path of the just is like the shining sun, that shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."
   6. And through this seminar you've seen the path of God's Word clearer than you've ever experienced before, and so you're wondering what you should do about it.
   7. Or maybe it's not that you're wondering WHAT you should do about it, maybe you're really wondering HOW you're going to do it, because you have been under the conviction of the Holy Spirit that it is time for you to take the next step into the light that God's Word is shining across your pathway tonight.
      1. By the way, taking the next step in no way denies God's leading in all the past steps you've taken.
      2. God has led you every step of the way.
      3. But remember, "The path of the just is as a shining light that shines brighter and brighter unto the perfect day."
      4. The Light that is growing brighter always advances, it always keeps moving forward.
      5. If one chooses not to take the next step into the light, it will not be long before that one is engulfed in darkness.
      6. "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life and the Light of the World," Jesus declared.
      7. That's why tonight, my friend, I am excited about inviting you to take the next step into the Light of Jesus.
      8. I promise you, it's a step you will never regret, throughout eternity.
      9. Won't you join me in taking that step tonight?

Further Study:

Discover Guide - Can I Find God's Church Today?     (Lecture Study Guide from Discover Bible School)

Web Site Navigation Here Main Menu Seminar Languages Video, Study & Links Your Feedback Credits Page

© 1998 NAD. HTML by: Alvin Evert.