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Growing in Christ, Pt. 2 (of 2)
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, Mentone, California, USA
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2005-07-24 00:54Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-gixpt2.php
The last time we met together we reviewed the first two of the seven sentences found inthe newly voted Fundamental Belief called “Growing in Christ.” As we pointed out, this is not felt by anyone to be new light, but it puts into a definite form something we have long believed and practiced. The part we dealt with last time had special reference to God and His control over evil spirits, something it was felt should be added to our beliefs. As our denomination has grown all over the world in over 200 nations now, we have run into some places where spirit worship and ancestor worship raise such questions. But let us review the whole Fundamental Belief statement again. Here it is:
By His death on the cross Jesus triumphed over the forces of evil. He who subjugated the demonic spirits during His earthly ministry has broken their power and made certain their ultimate doom. Jesus’ victory gives us victory over the evil forces that still seek to control us, as we walk with Him in peace, joy, and assurance of His love. Instead of evil forces, the Holy Spirit now dwells within us and empowers us. Committed to Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we are set free from the burden of past deeds and our former life with its darkness, fear of evil powers, ignorance, and meaninglessness. In this new freedom in Jesus, we are called to grow into the likeness of His character, as we commune with Him daily in prayer, feeding on His Word, meditating on it and on His providence, singing His praises, gathering together for worship, and participating in the mission of the church. As we give ourselves in loving service to those around us and in witnessing to His salvation, His constant presence with us through the Spirit transforms every moment and every task into a spiritual experience. (Ps 1:1-2; 23:4; Col. 1:13-14; 2:6, 14-15; 1 Thess. 5:23; 2 Peter 2:9; 3:18, 2 Cor. 3:17, 18; Phil. 3:7-14; 1 Thess. 5:16-18; Matt. 20:25-28; John 20:21; Gal. 5:22-25; 1 John 4:4.).
Continued Exposition (from the first sermon)
Let’s pick up with the third and fourth sentences:
Jesus’ victory gives us victory over the evil forces that still seek to control us, as we walk with Him in peace, joy, and assurance of His love. Instead of evil forces, the Holy Spirit now dwells within us and empowers us.
This statement about Jesus’ victory is left a bit vague. His victory gives us victory. His victory where? The previous sentences referred to His victory on the cross. So let’s think about this.
Remember, the atonement has specific phases. First God provides the plan of redemption whereby atonement is made. Jesus was promised to come and die for us, the Messiah was promised to come and crush the serpent under His feet. For 4000 years the promise lingered. Satan must have watched for those thousands of years. What of the child Seth, of Enoch, of Moses, and so on, down through the years? Satan was waiting to destroy the Messiah as child if he could. When the book of Daniel was given in the sixth century B.C., the 490 and 2300 day prophecies, Satan knew that about 4 B.C. the Messiah would come. At that time, he provoked the government to slaughter the innocents in hopes of killing the infant Messiah. But God intervened and sent the child and His family to Egypt. Jesus was preserved.
Next came 33 years of sinless living. Jesus, in a disordered human organism like our own, came and lived midst trials and temptations. That life, a sinless life, He offered on the cross in place of our own. He was innocent; we were guilty. He took our punishment; He gave us His righteousness. The blood He offered here was the blood He mediates from there in the heavenly sanctuary.
The mediation from heaven does matter. The power sent from heaven does work. So, first Christ prepped the blood; He lived a life in fallen flesh and did not sin. He successfully offered that life at the cross. He presented to the Father a character unsullied by this world.
He was approved to serve as our great High Priest as one holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners (Hebrews 7:26), even as to be our High Priest He had to be one with us in kind (fallen humanity), our brother, partakers of the same flesh and blood as us, of the seed of Abraham as are we, one who side-by-side with men suffered temptation, one who is touched with the feeling not of Adam-before-the-fall’s infirmities (that Adam had no infirmities) but of mankind-after-the-fall’s infirmities, one in all points tempted like as we are, “that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest” (Hebrews 2:17).
We consider both His phase as sacrifice and His phase as High Priest mediating that sacrifice because we see also here both parts. Do not miss that this victory comes “as we walk with Him in peace, joy, and assurance of His love.” We must walk with Him. This is supremely crucial. There is a fallacious teaching that says that He must walk with us but we need not walk with Him. We, and the world SDA church, disagree with that. We see the Bible urging us to walk with Christ as He walks with us.
It is precisely as we so walk with Him that “Instead of evil forces, the Holy Spirit now dwells within us and empowers us.” The Holy Spirit wants to do this very thing: dwell within and empower victory. These are very important lines and phrases here, for they remind us of God’s purpose to transform us through the power of His gospel.
The statement continues:
Committed to Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we are set free from the burden of past deeds and our former life with its darkness, fear of evil powers, ignorance, and meaninglessness.
Yes, when we make a commitment to Jesus as Lord, we are set from from the guilt of sins past. Our old values and commitments begin to change, but we do not suddenly attain to maturity. We may—or may not—experience sudden and complete loss of desire for certain indulgences. For many, the battle is just beginning. But God is always ready to give immediate victory over sin. With the new window on the world held by the biblically-informed Christian, he realizes that many of his previous understandings about how the world works were wrong. Changing long-established thinking may take time. When I came into the church, it took me awhile before I consistently said “Sabbath School” rather than “Sunday School.”
The next sentence from the statement:
In this new freedom in Jesus, we are called to grow into the likeness of His character, as we commune with Him daily in prayer, feeding on His Word, meditating on it and on His providence, singing His praises, gathering together for worship, and participating in the mission of the church.
There is indeed a new freedom we have in Christ. It is the freedom of renewal in the life. Our conversion was not a one-time event. Our life is now shaping steadily in a new aspect. These things change us. As we spend time in prayer with Him, it will change us. As we feed on the Bible, we also will be changed. We will learn many new things about the world we live in and about ourselves. Promises to help us live right will encourage us, faith in God’s goodness will strengthen us. We think about His goodness toward us both as we see His goodness toward others and also as we see His providences working themselves out in our own experience.
Singing His praises should not be overlooked. I grew up knowing precisely one musical instrument (I used to say): the radio. For the past century, recorded music instantly reproducable has changed the way many of us relate to music. We are used to listening to it, some listening seemingly all the time. But music was never meant only to be listened to. The very purpose of music is to give praise to God, and that means that most of our music will be not only listened to, but played for or sung to God. If the music has words, normally those words are to be sung by an individual or a congregation to God.
Maybe you feel like you can’t carry a tune. Don’t worry; go ahead and make a joyful noise. Singing His praises is not just listening to His praises. As we sing them it will affect our own attitudes. Think about this: the character is made up of the thoughts and feelings, right? Then we want not only right thoughts, but right feelings. Our music directed in praise to God may evoke very helpful spiritual feelings in us. Go and buy yourself a copy of the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal and learn to sing some of the hymns. If you can’t read musical notation, don’t worry about that. Try to follow the melody the best you can from memory. Sometimes as a people we are a little on the dry side. We shouldn’t be. We have a powerful faith to live and (we should have) a powerful experience with Christ to share!
Gathering together for worship is also very important. It reminds us that we are part of something larger, of a community that holds the same beliefs, that is seeking the same God. Are there a variety of beliefs in some cases travelling in the same church today? Yes. But many of us hold essentially the same beliefs. Those that are not of us, the Bible warns, will go out from us. So the present is just a snapshot; the final picture of the church has yet to be taken.
Worshipping together also means sharing our joys and sorrows, doing good not only to those outside but to those of the household of faith. It means praying for each other, strengthening each other, encouraging each other, learning from each other.
A key aspect of church is learning. We come here, not only to give to God our praises but to learn about Him and His ways. Man may have produced a Reader’s Digest version of the Bible, but God did not. The Bible, depending on the size of print, may range anywhere from 800 to 1400 pages in length. That is a very substantial volume. And we are warned that in the last days especially, false teachers would come. So who should be more informed about its actual teachings than are we?
When the church holds a teaching event, (Sabbath School, prayer meeting, or a worship meeting), you should be there. You should be there to learn. Some of us are missing unusual opportunities to strengthen our faith as Seventh-day Adventist Christians. If you are unclear about the many winds of doctrine that are presently blowing through the church, and you are not in attendance at the truth-filled meetings of this church, then what excuse do you have? God would not have us be ignorant, swept along by any random idea, but intelligently informed concerning our own faith.
The mission of the church, of course, is not just evangelistic soul-winning. It, more precisely, is to prepare ourselves and others for translation and for heaven. This means our living and giving an authentic witness to God’s kingdom through the Third Angel’s Message. Not any other message, but the Third Angel’s Message. A Seventh-day Adventist Church that is not promoting the Revelation 14 message is Seventh-day Adventist only in name. Your church needs to be a church that fully gives the Third Angel’s Message. If it is not, then take steps immediately to find one that is being faithful to its God by giving His appointed present truth message for this intensive hour.
The last sentance reads:
As we give ourselves in loving service to those around us and in witnessing to His salvation, His constant presence with us through the Spirit transforms every moment and every task into a spiritual experience.
Becoming a Christian does not mean entering a closed space and forever leaving behind the world. We should be actively engaged in whatever way the Lord is leading us, with the world around us. We can’t have our faith only in a vague generic way, but we want to manifest it in a specific way and share with specific people. After all, it is each specific person who needs salvation and needs the third Angel’s Message.
This last statement also, as most of the Fundamental Belief statement, assumes that the person it is speaking of is converted. Is this valid? This would seem to be a fair assumption to make of a Christian, but it could be superficial. After all, in 1 Corinthians 15:31 Paul says:
I die daily.
Is this your experience too? Every Christian needs to die daily. Did you die to self this morning? Are you converted anew as of this morning? Listen:
Genuine conversion is needed, not once in years, but daily. This conversion brings man into a new relation with God. Old things, his natural passions and hereditary and cultivated tendencies to wrong, pass away, and he is renewed and sanctified. But this work must be continual; for as long as Satan exists, he will make an effort to carry on his work. He who strives to serve God will encounter a strong undercurrent of wrong. His heart needs to be barricaded by constant watchfulness and prayer, or else the embankment will give way; and like a millstream, the undercurrent of wrong will sweep away the safeguard. No renewed heart can be kept in a condition of sweetness without the daily application of the salt of the Word. Divine grace must be received daily, or no man will stay converted… (Ellen G. White, Our High Calling, p. 215).
We must humble our hearts daily before God, and seek for a new conversion, that we may be brought into right relationship with Christ Jesus (Ellen G. White, Review and Herald, December 13, 1906).
I have to wonder also, based on the very popular and ill-founded theological views current, whether we might not have been better off if we had included some such recapitulation of the concept of daily conversion in the statement. We must be converted again. The appointed time for this is the first minutes of our rising. Then, we must maintain it throughout the day, and that will likely mean closeting ourselves from time to time. The undercurrent of our old nature is ever seeking to wash us under. We must be converted fresh every day.
How This belief statement Might Better Have Been Worded
The statement might have been improved were it worded with more precision. For example, someone might have written it thus:
By His death on the crossministry of atonement Jesus triumphedis triumphing over the forces of evil. He who through faith subjugated the demonic spirits during His earthly ministry has broken their power and madeis making certain their ultimate doom. Jesus’ victory gives usmakes possible our victory over the evil forces that still seek to control us, as we walk with Him in peace, joy, and assurance of His love. Instead of evil forces, the Holy Spirit now dwells within us and empowers us. Committed to Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we are set free from the burden of past deeds and our former life with its darkness, fear of evil powers, ignorance, and meaninglessness. In this new freedom in Jesuswalk with Christ, we are called to grow into the likeness of His character, as we commune with Him daily in prayer, feeding on His Word, meditating on it and on His providence, singing His praises, gathering together for worship, and participating in the mission of the church. As we give ourselves in loving service to those around us and in witnessing to His salvation, His constant presence with us throughthe Holy Spirit transforms every moment and every task into a spiritual experienceworks in us to sanctify us, change us, and make us, at last, safe to save. (Ps. 1:1-2; 23:4; Col. 1:13-14; 2:6, 14-15; 1 Thess. 5:23; 2 Peter 2:9; 3:18, 2 Cor. 3:17, 18; Phil. 3:7-14; 1 Thess. 5:16-18; Matt. 20:25-28; John 20:21; Gal. 5:22-25; 1 John 4:4.).
Summary and Conclusion
We now have adopted formally 28 Fundamental Beliefs. In several cases, doubtless, the expression of our beliefs could be improved from what it is. The new one is no exception (I am thinking about most of what we dealt with in Part one of this two part series). Nevertheless, the new statement, added to and standing side-by-side with the previously existing 27, is adequate, and rightly understood, each of us should embrace it.
A list of fundamental beliefs is always a challenging thing. Some will use it as an unchanging creed when the Bible is our only creed. Some will make it their purpose to lock-in at whatever is on the list and refuse any further expression or clarification of what the Bible teaches.
The present theological climate in the church suggests we should be cautious. A list of beliefs is not a CAT scan of those beliefs. A list can be very superficial. The deep internal structure and interrelationships of our faith are far more apocalyptically centered than the current list of formally adopted belief statements would suggest. We have added a new statement of precious truth. We must never forget the primacy of present truth. Let us hasten to live not jut by precious truth but also by present truth. Only thus will we accomplish the design of our God. May He help us to be faithful. GCO
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