If you’ve been a Former Adventist for any amount of time, if you’ve digested the sweetness of life in Christ, then you’ve probably felt the urge to want to shout it from the mountain tops. You’ve probably felt the urge to prod and prompt your loved ones to take another look at their beliefs and compare them to the Bible. You’ve probably been driven by the desire to witness someone’s “ahaa!” moment via a Facebook exchange.
If you’ve felt any of these things, you’ve probably felt crushing disappointment. It’s so CLEAR to you, why don’t they get it? It’s right there in black and white, “just look!” you urge. And you get nowhere. It might even feel like walls are going up and they’re digging their heels in deeper.
I’m writing this post to tell you that I get it and I understand. I also want to encourage you to relax. God is not leaving it up to you alone to share the Gospel with your friends and family. It is amazing how blind eyes (and especially blind eyes that refuse to see) can miss what’s obviously there.
Afterall, everything you learned about the Word was always readily available to you. The Bible wasn’t recently written. The New Covenant didn’t just get discovered in a recent archeological dig. Even the errors of Adventism, precisely the same errors that Formers rail against, are chronicled and expounded in the writings of DM Canright who wrote these things in 1914. It’s all been there all along. Hidden in plain sight!
But God in His providence and plan used different events in your life to create dots. Through the years; through various people, books, sermons, experiences, sound bites, Facebook posts, magazine articles, blogs, and songs; He planted dots. And when you were ready, He began to connect those dots to form a beautiful picture of salvation.
For my husband, a former SDA pastor, God even used a SDA seminary professor to leave an indelible dot in his brain. At the beginning of each class this professor would read Galatians 3:23-25,
“But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.”
He would offer no explanation or exposition of the text. It would be several years before my husband understood the profound significance of that passage. It was a dot.
So relax. Take the pressure off. Trust that God is using you in your circle of influence. Your deliverance was not only for your benefit. Those Facebook and CARM message board debates are not always pointless. Your efforts could be dots in someone’s story.
Ask God to use you to be a dot. You can also ask Him for spiritual eyes to one day see how He used your testimony, your love, your sharing of the Word, to be a small part of someone’s journey to Christ.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://blog.lifeassuranceministries.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_0918.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Delina Pryce McPhaull is a Christ-follower, wife, mother of 3 young children and a writer. Delina and her husband Ben, a licensed minister, co-founded Quarterlife Ministries to encourage, equip and inspire young adults (quarterlifers) to get grounded in the Word. She writes regularly on her blog, www.deliniation.com and hosts webinars for Former Adventists at www.after7.tv.[/author_info] [/author]
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