We got mail…

Putting off defilement

Just out of curiosity, do you know of people leaving Adventism and getting tangled back in it? It is hard to imagine ever going back, but just this holiday season I had to acknowledge some fear of “what if they are right”,  and this really surprised me as I thought I was done with that. I am so done with it, but it can have a way of trying to creep back as a fear. I attacked this with coming straight back to the gospel and that it isn’t what I know that saves me, but who I know.  

Nevertheless, I have so many theology questions, and while the gospel feels clear, the other stuff does not. I have spent the last 14 months or so being fine with not knowing, but now it is causing some of that cognitive dissonance. The biggest of these was triggered by reading 2 Corinthians 7:1 about cleansing ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. 

In my new paradigm, when we are born again, transplanted from death to life, made a new creature and sealed with the Holy Spirit, I understood that these changes happened in our spirits. But now, I may be seeing this through an old Adventist idea of perfection. How and why would you have to cleanse a born again, joined to the Holy Spirit spirit? Any thoughts? 

God bless and keep you all and watch over your upcoming conference. 

—VIA EMAIL

Response: People do have strong temptations to “look back” as they transition out of Adventism. It is very common. I believe one of the reasons for this pull is spiritual; Adventism has a spirit connected to it, the same spirit who gave EGW her doctrines of demons in visions and dreams. There is a profound battle as we leave, as per Ephesians 6. When we left, we realized we had to renounce Adventism just as if we had been Mormons or some other false religion. We realized a spiritual power controlled it. Richard prayed with the three of us and asked God to remove the spirit of Adventism from us and to place the Holy Spirit in the place where Adventism had resided in our hearts. That was the moment when all my backwards glances just ended. Stopped. I had no more morbid fear or curiosity about how people were thinking about me. Richard said that was the moment when he KNEW he was born again.

But the doubts and fears are NORMAL; they were built into our worldview and are inevitable. As I experienced those disorienting doubts, I discovered that going back to the promises of Jesus was the THING that grounded me. I had to choose to trust the words of Scripture over the embedded fears in my head. We were brainwashed to have those doubts and fears to control us throughout our lives as we faced things that Adventism couldn’t explain. As we strip away our Adventist worldview, we come face-to-face with those imprinted default thoughts and doubts and fears. That is the essence of this false religion! We were programmed never to leave.

But Scripture is God’s corrective to all the lies that shaped us. It is our ONE source of living truth, and we can absolutely trust it. It is powerful, and is the only thing that can disarm the Adventist fear because it shows us reality. 

Now as far as the question of cleansing ourselves from defilement goes, that is one of those things that is hard to explain to someone who has lived in a materialist frame of mind all one’s life. We were steeped in a belief that we were only bodies that breathed, that when we died we ceased to exist, and all our spiritual perceptions were products of the bio-chemical processes of our minds. Within that framework, being saved HAD to be physical. There was nothing else! That’s why sin had to be defined solely as bad behavior—disobedience to the law—and salvation had to be somehow submitting one’s bad thoughts to the law, and with great will power and determination of character, we had to resist temptation. It was all a matter of aligning our thoughts to value what Adventism told us was truth, seeing Scripture according the EGW’s hermeneutic, and “putting off” caffeine, meat, bacon, alcohol, sugar, free fats, and drinking eight glasses of water a day and sleeping enough in order to be healthy enough to perceive the Holy Spirit! 

In Scripture, however, salvation has nothing at all to do with behavior and observance. It has everything to do with believing Jesus and His finished work and repenting of our sin and trusting Him alone. When we trust Him, we are born again and adopted (Rom. 8:14–17). 

But you are right in what you said: our spirits are born again and made alive! We are eternally saved and secure in Christ, even though our bodies are still mortal. We still have sinful patterns and habits hardwired into our nervous systems and thought processes. We still have what Paul calls “a law of sin” in our “members” (Rom. 7:21–23). AFTER we are saved and made new, born of God (Jn. 1:12), then God works with us to bring our habituated responses and desires to Him and to allow Him to teach us to trust Him instead of indulging the desires of the flesh. So, in the 2 Corinthians text, Paul is telling these new believers that they couldn’t both indulge in their habituated sinful practices and associations while simultaneously worshiping God. The two are at odds!

So we learn to pause at those moments when we are tempted to act sinfully or self-indulgently or self-protectively and to ask the Lord instead to take care of us, to show us how to stand in truth and reality, and to honor Him in the moment. This isn’t just about ruminating over whether or not we are sinning or inadvertently doing something wrong; on the contrary, the Lord Himself gives us new desires and tastes and new power, and as believers the Bible reminds us that we have to break our deep ties to the things that pull us away from the gospel. For many of us, that breaking away involves allowing some of the people we loved to pull away as they refuse to hear the gospel but argue and shame and attempt to guilt us back into their “fold”. Sometimes we have to literally break or weaken some of the emotional ties to people we loved because they end up clouding our clarity by shaming us to express loyalty to them instead of to what we know is true. 

This isn’t a call to return to the health message or to the teachings of Adventism. First of all, Adventism did not have biblical definitions for defilement and holiness! What we learned those things were had nothing to do with honoring and worshiping Jesus. They were all about behaviors that were supposed to make us holy! 

This call is a call to refuse to compromise with the things that formerly felt familiar. We now look to Jesus and trust Him; we give up our natural inclination to self-soothe in old destructive ways, and the Lord Himself convicts us of the things we need to address. 

Learning to let go of the trappings of Adventism and trusting God’s word instead is a HUGE deal for us as we leave that religion, and for us, that is a very big part of letting go of defilement. We are both material (physical) and spiritual. We have spirits. Those spirits are made completely new when we trust Jesus. Then, for the rest of our lives until the Lord takes us to Himself, we grow in trust and submission to Him and His word. We learn to allow the Spirit to apply Scripture to our lives, and that process slowly but surely corrects our worldview and teaches us to live godly lives instead of self-centered lives. 

We have to learn to read the Bible from a completely different perspective. What we were taught these things meant, they don’t mean when we read them in context from the position of being born-again believers. Now we can read Scripture using normal rules of grammar and vocabulary, and we know that the words mean what the words say!

 

Only one foundation

In listening to the metaphor describing Christ as the cornerstone and the apostles and prophets being the foundation on which the church is built as discussed in the January 12, 2021, podcast, I had a thought about that foundation. A couple of additions to this metaphor popped into my mind. If every decade is a  new story in the temple God is building, and if every converted believer is a brick in the wall, we know that the only reason we are included in that family of bricks is that the master Builder picks us up from the reject pile, transforms us from death to life, adopts us, and includes us in that growing temple known as the church. It is only after being placed in the wall that the old mortar and dirt are removed from us. This reconditioning is not done by the bricks but by the Builder Himself.

False subcontractors are those who believe that they have been shown additions or subtractions from the original plans which specified that the foundation is built upon the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the Cornerstone. These false subcontractors build and build, thinking they are improving the original plans, but when the master Builder comes to inspect their work, they are rejected because they have built with counterfeit materials and have not built on that original foundation laid once and for all by Christ and His apostles and prophets.

Thank you, Nikki, Colleen, and Richard, for these podcasts.

—VIA EMAIL

 

Questioning in Kenya

Hi! I am from Kenya, Africa. I was born into a devoted Adventist family, and I was baptized at a young age. After coming across your Youtube videos, I am learning a lot about the Adventist doctrines and how they contradict the Bible. I would like to share this information with my friends and family so that they know the true gospel. I would appreciate if I could get your materials, whether books or magazines. May you be blessed.

—VIA EMAIL

Response: All our back issues of Proclamation magazine are online here: http://www.lifeassuranceministries.org. 

We have also added your name to our weekly Proclamation! email updates. You may need to add the email address LifeAssuranceMinistries@gmail.com to your contacts in order for the email not to be directed toward your Spam folder.

You might also enjoy our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/FormerAdventist/featured

Also, you might like to subscribe to our podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/former-adventist/id1482887969

I am also copying Dale Ratzlaff into this email so he can share his e-books with you!