During the last couple of weeks I heard two sermons from Loma Linda University Church (LLUC) that elicited compassion in me and the conviction that I have to respond. On June 22 and 29, Filip Milosavljevic, the pastor of young adult ministry, preached sermons calling the congregation to pray to receive the Holy Spirit and to be born again. As Richard said as we came to the end of the second sermon, “These really aren’t typical sermons for an Adventist church.”
In fact, Filip’s sermons reminded us both of ourselves during the years immediately preceding our exit from Adventism when we were discovering Bible truths but were still trying to make them mesh with our Adventist worldview.
In his first sermon Filip told of being a confident, perhaps arrogant 19-year-old pastor’s kid who believed he knew all the Adventist answers. He told of working one summer with a pastor who prayed with him to receive the Holy Spirit and said that the prayer changed him, and he knew he had a calling to preach. At the end of the sermon he asked for anyone present who wished to be baptized with the Holy Spirit to come forward, and he would pray that they would receive the Holy Spirit. It appeared on the live stream that hundreds of people went forward for his closing prayer.
His second sermon focussed on the story of Nicodemus in John 3. In brief, Filip unpacked the story of Nicodemus’ night visit with Jesus using his Adventist understanding, but he saw in a most un-Adventist way that something more is needed than simply a commitment to Adventism.
Faith: event or process?
He led by redefining “faith”. Faith, he said, is “not a singular event” but a “process”. He said, “Who is Jesus to you? What is the purpose and meaning of life? What happens when you die? Will I be saved? This doesn’t just happen after one sermon, one encounter, or one day. It’s a process. But could it be that we creatures of habit have made it out to be an event? If you do this, you’re done, you’re saved, you’re in?”
To explain his idea of “process”, he used the word “faithing”—a concept which, according to him, is “used in youth and young adult development studies.” He defined faithing this way: “A child grows into owning and embodying their own journey with God, as they encounter new experiences and new information.” This idea of faith being a process was the foundation upon which he built his sermon on being born again.
Biblically, though, “faith” is not a process but a gift from God that allows us to believe Jesus and His finished work (Eph. 2:8, 9). The evolving concept of “faithing” is more related to an ecumenical, contemplative focus on religion that suggests people may grow and change in their “relationship with God” as life experiences affect them. Missing from the concept of “faithing” is the anchor of belief in the biblical gospel of the Lord Jesus. When one believes in the gospel of Jesus Christ as the bedrock of reality, faith is the anchor that keeps us secure no matter what life brings. Instead of life shaping our faith, faith shapes our lives.
Furthermore, Filip’s Adventist worldview assumes that one cannot be saved eternally at a moment in time. He is bound by his view of “free will” and the nature of man to harmonize being born again with a process instead of with an event which is a gift from God. (See Jn. 5:24; 1 Jn. 5:11–13; Eph. 1:13–14; 2:5–9.)
His explanation of new birth
Filip posited the idea that Nicodemus may have been “making logical steps in a process” when he came to Jesus at night and acknowledged Him as “Rabbi”. He connected Nicodemus’s clandestine visit to Jesus with his fellow Seventh-day Adventists’ discomfort with their own loved ones’ faith decisions that might not have led them to Adventism.
“What if it’s not the end for them?” he asked. “What if you as a Seventh-day Adventist believer come in [to church] every week, but what if maybe you are just missing something? Sometimes we forget it’s a process, a movement in a direction that may take a lifetime.”
Then Filip said, “Jesus looks at Nicodemus and says, ‘You must be born again.’ This phrase in our modern society just does not make sense. What are people known as who are born again? Could it be there’s something so much more to this Adventist Christian experience than we have ever pondered?…Could it be that none of what you grew up studying and doing actually matters in actually making you a citizen of heaven?…
“Jesus was calling him to more than a moral and life change. If you think it’s about living a more moral and upstanding life, you’ve lost it. You won’t make it.…
“Could there be more that Jesus is calling you and I and our denomination to? Jesus is calling us to start at ground zero—build a life based on a foundation we might have never seen or felt yet. Could it be possible that the faith we have been holding onto for all these years might simply be milk?”
Then Filip read John 3:5–6: “Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
After reading the passage he looked up and asked, “How do we know if we are converted? How do we know if we have experienced this rebirth?”
He said that the rebirth is a “reorienting, a reordering of the heart’s loves”. Then he offered four tests of what the new birth might look like. He took these four tests from the book What Is A Healthy Church Member? by evangelical author Thabiti Anyabwile:
- Belief test: Do I trust in Jesus Christ and His salvation? Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ is born of God (1 Jn. 5:1).
- Obedience test: Does my life show a pattern of habitual unrepentant sin or of repenting for sin, and striving to walk in the light? (1 Jn. 1:6-7).
- Love Test: Do I love other Christians in concrete ways that show the reality of my faith? (1 Jn. 3 :14-15).
- Perseverance test: Am I continuing in the faith in spite of the struggles and oppositions and hardships in my life, family, church? (1 Jn. 2:19)
Lacking a biblical understanding of man’s literal spirit which is born dead and must be made alive by the grace of God by faith in Christ Jesus and His finished work, Filip then attempted to define the new birth with three “shifts”:
- A psychological shift: It’s a shift in the mind, a reorienting of our desires, a “complete brain surgery”, he said.
- An organic shift: It’s not only a psychological shift, he said, but an organic one. He said the new birth must happen at the “root level, not the leaf level”. He said “we have to have our life uprooted and God’s life planted,” and he mentioned Adventist historian and author George Knight’s explanation that the “big sin” in our hearts starts the “little sins” of bad actions. “It’s the sin of replacing Jesus in your heart with you.”
- A salvation shift: I cannot be born again out of more good doing. It’s a replanting constantly. It’s an ongoing “I need you to help!” always. It’s dealing at the heart level and not at the level of “small ’s’ sins”. Then the true fruit would emerge.
Filip then stated that within the past 15 years, the Adventist organization has baptized 31,000,000 people, but 11,000,000 have walked out the back door. “They have to have a new birth life,” he said. “Jesus says we have to grow and disciple intentionally and one-on-one.”
He concluded his sermon with an appeal. “For some reason God wanted you to hear this sermon about Nicodemus because just maybe it’s about you hearing the most basic fundamental truth again: we need a heart replacement,” and then he referenced an “Old Testament verse—‘I will take your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’”
“Jesus is calling you,” he said. “Be reborn.” He closed his appeal by saying:
“I want you today to make a decision,” and he listed three things he wanted the people to remember:
- God is at work in dark places on dark nights. Be patient.
- People are not always all good or all bad. Be merciful.
- Pray for those who need Jesus until their last breath. Do not give up on anyone because Jesus did not give up on anyone. Be hopeful.
Observations
After hearing these two sermons, I was left with a profound sense that the Lord is working in Filip’s life, but this young pastor has not yet been able to see that Adventists’s foundation cannot support the scriptural truths that are impacting him. In fact, both Richard and I remember discovering some of these same passages of Scripture, being convicted, but being unable to see that those very passages were calling us to leave behind our Adventism.
In the mid-1980’s I read a newly-published book by Adventist author Douglas Cooper entitled, Living the Spirit-Filled Life. I knew there was something about the Holy Spirit that I had not understood, but I felt that old familiar fear that if I prayed to receive the Holy Spirit, I might be compelled to do something I would HATE to do—perhaps preaching on street corners or being a missionary in some unsavory place.
At the same time, I knew I wanted to “follow Jesus” and do His will. Looking back, I see clearly that God was drawing me and revealing His word and will to me while I was an Adventist. In His mercy, He taught me one step at a time, but my desire to know truth and to belong to God were His gifts to me.
Because I saw in Scripture that the Holy Spirit was a promise, I decided to pray that I would receive Him. I did not yet know the biblical gospel, however, and I simply could not understand the connection between receiving the Holy Spirit and trusting in Jesus’ finished work. I was left to grapple with the scriptural accounts of believers receiving the Spirit and my own misunderstandings of truth.
In spite of my fears of what I might be made to do, however, I prayed that God would fill me with the Holy Spirit. I was desperately wanting truth, and I wanted to honor the Bible. I knew I needed something I did not have, and when I read that book, I decided the Holy Spirit must be what was missing.
I was not looking for signs and wonders or for power. I was merely wanting to do the right thing and to obey God. Looking back on that experience, I know that the Lord answered my prayer—but not in the fulness that I later understood when I learned the gospel. I remember that I felt less anxious and reactive. I felt internally more peaceful, but one of the most profound ways things changed for me was in a deepening hunger to understand Scripture.
It was during that time that I discovered what the New Testament promised about God writing His laws on our hearts when we believed in Jesus. I had always believed that the Sabbath would be emblazoned on the hearts of true Christians before Jesus came back, but for the first time I realized that Sunday Christian whom I knew clearly had nine of the ten commandments written on their hearts.
They honored God and would never have given their worship to another. They would never defame His name or dishonor their parents. They were committed to sexual purity, would never kill or willingly destroy another person. They would not deceive or bear false witness, and they were concerned about being content without coveting. But, I realized with deep consternation, they NEVER were convicted that they needed to keep the seventh day!
Growing dissonance
That troubling dissonance was a crack in my worldview that grew deeper over time. As I continued trying to hold my crumbling Adventist life together, I became more and more convicted that I was a hopeless sinner. I realized that I was not able to avoid sin. No matter how hard I prayed or pled with God, I seemed unable to “be good”!
One gray day I paced in my apartment, suffocating with the knowledge of my sins. I felt that God could not forgive me. My life was so broken, and I was so clearly not innocent, that I believed I could not go on living. My sin was sucking my breath out of me, and I had absolutely no hope and no excuse I could offer to God.
“Please forgive me, God!” I cried, believing that He could not. I could not believe He could forgive me if I had sinned with my eyes wide open. I was not worthy of forgiveness.
And then I knew. I saw nothing and heard nothing, but I knew. God was not done with me. In some inarticulate way the Lord let me know that my life was not over, and He had more for me.
Yet I still did not understand the fulness of Jesus’ finished work.
Years later, when I finally understood the miracle of the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, that He was my Substitute and kept every single term of the covenant with God on my behalf, I wept. God was not looking for me to become righteous! I could never, ever overcome all my sin and satisfy God.
Rather, God was asking me to BELIEVE in His Son (Jn. 6:29; Acts 16:31)! He was asking me to trust His forgiveness of me based not on my successful “overcoming” but on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice (Rom. 3:21–30)! If I believed in Jesus’ finished atonement, I could move out of God’s judgment forever on the basis of my trust in Him (Jn. 5:24)!
When I finally understood that God based my eternal future on His Son and not on my personal obedience, I was born again. When I understood that my intractable sin was not my death sentence because Jesus took that sentence for me, when I believed and placed all of my trust in Him alone, I became a new creature.
God took my heart of stone away and gave me a heart of flesh. Even more, He sealed me with His Holy Spirit of promise, guaranteeing my eternal future (and a guarantee cannot be broken and is not conditional upon my behavior) (Eph. 1:13-14).
Furthermore, when I believed in Jesus alone, I understood Romans 8:14–17. I understood that I truly was His adopted, born-again daughter, that my eternal life was secure, and I was a co-heir with Jesus. I KNEW this fact to be true because His Holy Spirit testified with my spirit (yes, I actually do have a spirit!) that I am His child!
Finally, when I became born again through faith in the Lord Jesus ALONE, I finally understood all those Sunday-Christians who were never convicted to keep the Sabbath! They—and I—were not under the old covenant! The law was fulfilled in Jesus, and “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4).
Now I was in a completely new administration, a new reality. We are living under the new covenant. The gospel of the Lord Jesus is the best news ever—everything necessary for our righteousness has been accomplished by the Lord Jesus—our new Law-giver. He fulfilled the law (Mt. 5:17), and now His Spirit writes the law of Christ on our new hearts. Our only work is to “believe in Him whom [the Father] sent” (Jn. 6:29).
What I want Filip to know
If I could speak to Filip Milosavljevic, this is what I would tell him. I recognize his desire to know the Lord more deeply and to be led and birthed by the Holy Spirit. I believe that he is looking for reality and truth, and the Lord is allowing him to see in Scripture truths that cannot thrive in Adventism.
When an Adventist honestly wants to know God, that desire is God’s work in his heart. Our naturally dead spirits cannot desire God (Rom. 3:9–18). Yet the Lord seeks us and finds us, and when He does, He gives us hunger for truth.
When an Adventist honestly asks the Lord to send the Holy Spirit to him because of his desire to serve God more fully, the Lord does answer. At the same time, I would want to tell Filip that the Holy Spirit’s primary purpose is to make much of the Lord Jesus and to teach us His truth. He will not lead us outside Scripture’s clear description of truth and reality.
The Bible is clear that we receive the Holy Spirit in His fulness only “after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed” (Eph. 1:13). Prior to that hearing and believing, the Holy Spirit is at work in us, as Jesus said He would be, convicting the world “concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn. 16:8).
I would want to tell Filip that I do believe the Holy Spirit is teaching and leading him—but his lack of clarity about what faith is and what the new birth is will clear up when he faces the reality that salvation is an act of God. It occurs when one hears and trusts the true gospel of Jesus’ finished work accomplished by His death, burial, and resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3,4).
I recognize the “place” where Filip is, and I would want to say to him, Jesus is all you need! You do not have to try to reconcile the Sabbath with faith in Him alone. The baptism of the Holy Spirit comes only with hearing and believing the gospel of your salvation, and when you believe and receive His life in your previously dead heart and receive His indwelling Spirit, you will finally “see”.
The Lord is calling you to submit your Adventist identity to the words of Scripture. He is asking you to read Galatians and allow Him to show you the true place of the law. He is opening the book of Hebrews before you and asking you to see that Jesus is greater than every detail of the law.
Finally, I would want to tell Filip that I am praying that the Lord Jesus will guide his heart and lead him and all those who heard his two sermons to submit their worldview, their Adventist identity, to Jesus as an act of faith. He may take away the religion that they know, but He will replace it with Himself. I would tell Filip that the Lord Jesus will confirm to him that he is His true son, born of the Spirit and eternally secure as a joint heir with Christ.
He is faithful; “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6).
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Colleen, thank you for so clearly articulating what I recognized but was having difficulty putting into words. Last Saturday, my mother was streaming that second sermon. Because she is hard of hearing, I could hear it in my room down the hall and it caught my attention; I started taking notes, wanting to comprehend what he was saying. It sounded so ‘right’ and yet not quite right and I was finding it difficult to say just how it was wrong. But you hit the nail on the head.
Thanks again
Jeanie
Thank you, Jeanie. It’s affirming to hear your response to the sermon as well. I resonated with Filip’s grappling with the implications of being baptized by the Holy Spirit and being born again. From an Adventist worldview, those realities are confusing—and compelling. Thank you for your comment.
Colleen, thank you for so clearly unpacking Filip’s sermon. We so completely identify with your response and especially your own journey being so much like ours. As we began to understand the gospel and the finished works of Jesus we finally completely disassociated with Adventism in 2002.
Our natural birth is best understood as an event. Sure, we know that there are steps leading up to it, and there is a lifetime following it, but the birth is the event that is recorded and celebrated. It is a dramatic change from the dark intrauterine world to the world of people and things. This is the common experience to which Jesus likened spiritual rejuvenation. This is what it means to enter into His kingdom through the new birth. It is a significant life event on the spiritual level that moves us from being an enemy of God to a beloved child of God. We can know we are a child of God as surely as we know our our own parents.
If being “born again” is the result of a process or journey that involves incremental improvements in our morality or outlook on life, then we should never attain it.
Interestingly as a former Adventist before I was born again I never heard the gospel from Adventists, I never heard you must be born again, and I never heard that Jesus is God in the flesh. The man you were writing about said, “pray to receive the Holy Spirit and be born again”, without out the gospel! You don’t have to pray to receive the Holy Spirit. The moment you believe the gospel, you receive the Holy Spirit. One must read John 3 in entirety to get there. And “Biblically, though “faith is not a process but a gift from God that allows us to believe in Jesus and his finished work (Eph. 2:8&9)” you said. This is incorrect also. In the verses you used, John 5:24 says “believeth”, 1 John 5:13 says “believe”, Ephesians 1:13 says “believe”, Ephesians 2:8 “through faith” in what? In the fact that we must believe the gospel. “MOREOVER, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are SAVED, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have BELIEVED in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:1-4. I don’t read repent there, I don’t read obey there, I don’t read God giving us faith there. I read “BELIEVED”. “For God so loved the WORLD that he gave his only begotten son that WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16. Believing=faith, and this is a “free will” act. The gift is Jesus, not faith. “But not as the offence (Adams sin), so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace (unmerited favor), which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” Romans 5:15, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 6:23. Blessings