Do you work hard to be good enough to be saved? Understanding the truth about our works could give you the best Christmas ever. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Let me first begin by saying “Merry Christmas.” As this podcast airs, we’re just days away from Christmas morning, when we’ll all gather in spirit to worship the birth of the Lord Jesus. Before we get started, let me remind you that if you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. If you’d like to receive our weekly email, with ministry news and links to online articles or if you’d like to donate or give a year-end gift to the ministry, you can visit proclamationmagazine.com. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. As we’ve discussed over these last few weeks, for believers Christmas encompasses so much more than a lovely nativity scene. It’s here at the manger where we see, in a snapshot in time, our infinite, omnipotent God veiled in newborn flesh and on the path to a death that will ransom His people forever. The scenes of Christmas unfold for us both the reality of the gospel and the response that it demands. It’s here at the manger where we see our king wrapped in the swaddling clothes that remind us of the graveclothes, both on the day that our Lord was buried in death and then again folded in the empty tomb following His resurrection. In these Christmas scenes, we also see the response of the lowly and the great to leave behind the norms of life and to come and worship our baby God. Worship is the call of Christmas. Come let us adore Him. O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. Emmanuel, God is with us. At Christmas we come to adore the Christ child and to herald songs that proclaim who He is and what He’s done for us, songs that, for whatever reason, even the secular world enjoys hearing and singing this time of year. And in a very real way the call of Christmas is the call of the Christian life: Come, see, know, proclaim, and worship Him with your life. When our Father raises us to life with Jesus, we are made new, and we respond with a life of worship, and that worship touches everything we do thereafter. Today we continue our focus on Ephesians 2:6-10, with an emphasis on verse 10, which talks about the good works created for each of us to walk in. As we look at this verse, we recall that these works come only after we’ve been given the gift of salvation by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus. And we submit to you that the works God prepares in advance for each of us to walk in is the worship that we do with our life in response to knowing Him. So, Colleen, before we begin, I want to ask you: As an Adventist, how did you understand works? What was their purpose and what motivated them?
Colleen: That’s a really interesting question because as an Adventist I was unclear about works. Even though I didn’t understand that salvation was by grace through faith, I did believe that we weren’t saved by works, even though I would have told you I had to keep the commandments in order to be saved. So when I’m thinking through this, what I’m realizing is that I had a head full of conflicting ideas, which interestingly enough, my dear friend, Joanie Yorba-Gray, who translates Proclamation! into Spanish, told me years ago is a symptom of an abusive situation, an abusive family. She said, “An abusive family will tell you conflicting information and tell you both things are true, and you’re supposed to figure out how to live with both things without understanding how the two can both be right.” And I realized that this whole concept of works was part of that confusion in my head as an Adventist. I didn’t think of keeping the Sabbath as a work because that was something that I did if I loved God. I didn’t think of the health message as work because that was something I had to do if I wanted to hear the Holy Spirit and if I loved God. I suppose I might have thought that good works were doing all those good social things, like, you know, taking a loaf of bread to the neighbor or making sure that the lonely widow down the road had a Christmas card or – I just know that it wasn’t until I was an adult and coming close to questioning Adventism that I started seeing what Paul meant when he talked about the works of the law. The commands of the law are works, and that I had not understood as a child. I just thought these were things I had to do, and they wouldn’t save me, but I would have to do them if I was saved, and works would be all these other good things, but I had to have a willing heart, and if I didn’t have a willing heart, then doing these things just because I was supposed to would not be credited to me in any good sense. So in answer to your question, I was a confused mess. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: What about you, Nikki?
Nikki: That’s a very fair answer. You know, I think I was pretty confused too. I’ve told you before, you know, I lived in New England for a time, and I’ve lived here in Southern California for a time, and Adventism really does look and manifest different depending on where you are in this country.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: And when I was in New England, when I was younger, I think I understood works to be obedience to the law. I thought that I was supposed to do what Jesus did, and I was supposed to vindicate God, and that was my work, and that was how I was going to earn my place, I guess, in heaven. That was what was going to show that I was loyal to the right God. And then when I came to California at 19 and went to a church that was a little more progressive in their thinking and then on to a very progressive university, La Sierra University, I started to see works as kind of a bad thing. You know, people would argue against the Adventists who say you’re saved by your work, and they would say, “Oh, no, I don’t believe in works salvation,” not even realizing that that’s exactly what Adventism was.
Colleen: No kidding.
Nikki: But there was a different brand of Adventism that was talked about here, and yet it still wasn’t biblical Christianity. It was just kind of a softening of the language. I never understood works to be something that came after you were saved because I didn’t know you could be saved. I didn’t understand that our work – once we’re born again, that our work is our worship, that it’s how we love our King, our Father. I just didn’t have – whether it was the East Coast or West Coast version, I didn’t have a biblical concept of the works that God created for us in advance.
Colleen: I so understand what you’re saying. Nikki, why don’t we read our passage before we talk about it some more, just so everybody understands what we’re reacting to and what we’re examining. And I know you’ve said that we’re looking specifically at verse 10 of Ephesians 2, which has been a very powerful experience for me this week, but for context’s sake, would you mind reading the first 10 verses so we get the whole story: who we are by nature, who we are in Christ, what He has done for us.
Nikki: “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”
Colleen: That’s an amazing passage that gives me so much joy and hope and a true sense of worship. Yesterday when I was studying for today, I’d kind of gone through the passage. I’d looked at some comparative texts. I was thinking how wonderful this is, and I thought, I wonder if Ellen White said anything about this, because frankly, I didn’t remember anything she said about verse 10, that we’re Christ’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which He prepared in advance for us to do. I only understand this verse to have been meaningful to me in the last few years, as I’ve studied Scripture as a Christian.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: For the sake of just seeing if I could find anything, I did a search at ellenwhite.org for the words “God’s workmanship,” and Nikki, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. She has a lot of places where she uses that phrase, “God’s workmanship.” But when I looked at them, they didn’t mean what they mean here, in any sense. In the Bible it’s referring to our new birth, our new condition as believers. In the context of this passage, it’s entirely about who we are in Christ, as believers who are born again and placed in Christ. When she uses “God’s workmanship,” it’s entirely physical. There’s nothing spiritual about it. And I confess, I was so surprised and so angry, well, you know that I had to vent with you before we actually sat down to record.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: I’m going to read a few quotes. This is what I want all of us to understand. I never read these passages in the context of Ephesians as an Adventist. I would never have thought to put them together. I’m sure I heard these quotes, but I didn’t understand them as being in any way related to Ephesians 2. Seeing that she’s using the words out of Ephesians 2 and seeing what she does with them, I’m really angry because she has truly set a foundation for Adventism that is false and built in a false view of man, and we can’t even understand what Paul is saying because we understand these words in the foundation and through the lens that she established. It’s lies, it’s false, it’s deceptive, and it has ruined this religion from being able to look at these passages of Scripture and see what God is really saying through His apostle. So, having said that, I’ll start with a quote from, of all things, her book Child Guidance. Aren’t you glad she wasn’t your mom?
Nikki: Oh! [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Okay. This quote is from page 360, paragraph 1. Notice this, “We are God’s workmanship.” Now, right there is the phrase that Paul uses, “We are His workmanship.” So she says, “We are God’s workmanship, and His word declares that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.” Now, notice how right there she shifts it and takes it right back to Creation? And she’s using it in a physical manner. She’s not referring to our spiritual selves. I’ll keep going. “He has prepared this living habitation for the mind. It is curiously wrought, a temple which the Lord Himself has fitted up for the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. The mind controls the whole man. All our actions, good or bad, have their source in the mind. It is the mind that worships God and allies us to heavenly beings.” Notice that again, the plural “beings”? “Yet many spend all their lives without becoming intelligent in regard to the casket, the human body that contains this treasure. All the physical organs are the servants of the mind, and the nerves are the messengers that transmit its orders to every part of the body, guiding the motions of the living machinery.” Nikki, I can’t tell you how mad this makes me because she’s setting up right here the core of the Adventist worldview. Anything spiritual that we perceive or do or think or feel is centered in the mind, not in a spirit that we have from God. She’s not referring to an immaterial spirit.
Nikki: She says in that quote that we worship with the mind.
Colleen: And Jesus said that true worshippers worship God, who is spirit, in spirit and in truth. Of course our minds are involved in worship. Our minds perceive truth. But our spirit is what is either alive or dead, as we have discovered here in Ephesians 2. She doesn’t give any credibility to the fact that we have spirits, and this actually explains to me their health message explicitly, and it tells me why Ted Wilson could say, years ago at a health conference in Geneva, Switzerland, that we eat healthfully, we eat vegetarian, as Adventists, so that the neurons in our frontal lobes will be able to perceive the Holy Spirit. She says that’s where we perceive spiritual things. “All the physical organs are the servants of the mind.” No! This is absolute heresy. This is not what the Bible teaches. Now, there are a few others here that I just want to read some excerpts from. This is from a book called Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene. “Adam’s sin plunged the race into hopeless misery, but by the sacrifice of the Son of God” – get this – “a second probation was granted to man.” Now, the Bible never speaks of probation. There was never a first probation, and we are not on probation. We are either dead by nature or alive through belief in Jesus. There’s no probation here. “In the plan of redemption,” Ellen continues, “a way of escape is provided for all who will avail themselves of it. God knew that it was impossible for man to overcome in his own strength, and He has provided help for him. How thankful we should be that a way is open for us by which we can have access to the Father, that the gates are left ajar so that beams of light from the glory within may shine upon those who will receive them.” This has nothing to do with the blood of Jesus creating a new and living way.
Nikki: Or of beams of light. She sounds so New Age.
Colleen: She does. I agree completely. She goes on in the same book, “Christ began the work of redemption just where the ruin began. His first test was on the same point where Adam failed. It was through temptations addressed to the appetite that Satan had overcome a large proportion of the human race, and his success had made him feel that the control of this fallen planet was in his hands. Jesus’ victory” – get this – “Jesus’ victory is an assurance that we too may come off victors in our conflicts with the enemy, but it is not our heavenly Father’s purpose to save us without an effort on our part to cooperate with Christ. We must act our part, and divine power, uniting with our effort, will bring victory.” Nikki, I don’t have any effort that ever accomplished anything, and the Bible doesn’t tell me God unites His power with me. He makes me new if I believe. It’s no wonder that the whole idea of works was absolutely unable for me to comprehend as an Adventist, and I felt like the works of the law were just the normal part of living, because she made works part of Christianity.
Nikki: This is the Adventist gospel.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: You lay it next to this passage in Ephesians that we’re looking at, it is a completely different story. It is not the same gospel. It’s not the same Jesus.
Colleen: Absolutely not. This is from her book Faith and Works. Interesting title. “The moment the workmanship of God refused obedience to the laws of God’s kingdom, that moment he became disloyal to the government of God, and he made himself entirely unworthy of all the blessings wherewith God had favored him.” Well, she’s using “the workmanship of God,” which Paul here refers to as the new self that trusts Jesus and is born again, she’s referring right back to the created physical Adam.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s not what Paul is referring to when he calls us God’s workmanship. And she also says that Adam, the minute he became disobedient to the laws of God’s kingdom – and again, the Bible is very clear, Adam had only one command. Do you remember it?
Nikki: Not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden.
Colleen: Yeah. But Ellen insists that he had the Ten Commandments, that the Ten Commandments preceded him, and that Adam’s disobedience was breaking that eternal law. That’s not what the Bible says. “Christ proposed,” she says, “to become man’s surety and substitute, that man through matchless grace should have another trial, a second probation, having the experience of Adam and Eve as a warning not to transgress God’s law as they did.” No wonder we lived in fear!
Nikki: It wasn’t good news.
Colleen: No! It was fear, it was confusion. And thinking of Jesus coming to unite His power with mine only made me feel more like a failure, because it didn’t work! I just have to read this last one. She says, “Man is God’s workmanship, His masterpiece, created for a high and holy purpose, and on every part of the human tabernacle God desires to write His law. Every nerve and muscle, every mental and physical endowment is to be kept pure.” And this is from her book Temperance. And this section ends with this quote. It just makes me laugh, actually. First of all, as “God’s workmanship” she’s referring entirely to the physical aspect of humanity, ignoring the fact that we have spirits, and she’s saying that on every aspect of our physical person God writes His law, and then she says this: “The drunkard sells himself for a cup of poison. Satan takes control of his reason, his affections, his conscience. Such a man is destroying the temple of God. Tea drinking helps to do this work. Yet how many there are who place destroying agencies on their tables.” Nikki, you’ve got to quit that tea habit.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: When I saw these quotes yesterday, I really felt angry because I realized that although I’ve heard many of these quotes in different contexts, the foundation, the underlying principle that she’s writing about, is that she’s taking this phrase right out of Ephesians 2:10 and appropriating it to a completely different worldview. She’s ignoring the new birth, the new creation in Christ, and she’s applying it to the flesh, to the flesh, that physical body of Adam, and to our fallen flesh, and she’s saying we get right with God by uniting with His power in some mysterious way – which is never explained, by the way – and by avoiding tea and liquor and bad thoughts. I just feel mad.
Nikki: It’s an antichrist gospel. Did you know that tea was His kryptonite? I had no idea.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: What does she do with verse 9 here? Well, let’s take it to 8, the beginning of the sentence: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” No one may boast. It has nothing to do with your tea drinking. It has nothing to do with your food habits. It has nothing to do with that. In Adventism, in Ellen White’s teaching, very clear teaching – they are a continuing and authoritative source of truth – you’re lost or saved on the basis of your commitment to keeping God’s what she claims to be eternal law and to character refinement. But the word of God says that it is not about our works, that we do not get to boast, and that we’re lost or saved on the basis of being dead or alive. A dead man can’t bring himself to life.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Only God can bring us to life, and the words in this one verse, verse 10, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus,” not just in Eden, although He created us. In the context of this passage, those who have been raised to life in Christ are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, not because of good works.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: For good works, which God prepared beforehand. She has taken the words of Scripture, which we have grown to love in new and deeper ways year after year after year, and she has created an antichrist gospel. That’s why you’re angry. That’s why we’re angry. And it’s not the kind of anger they like to accuse us of.
Colleen: No, it’s not.
Nikki: It’s not about having had a bad experience. I loved being an Adventist. It’s about finding the truth and realizing how intentional she was, and the founders of Adventism were, in destroying that truth to create something else.
Colleen: That’s it. She has completely redefined the words of Scripture. She has redefined who Jesus is. She has redefined who we are. She has redefined our nature, the nature of Christ. She has redefined the nature of sin and the nature of salvation, and she has made it almost impossible for a person who believes Adventism to be the truth, whether or not they’ve read Ellen White, she has created a worldview that makes it almost impossible for an Adventist to look at Scripture and to actually see what it says, because the words are redefined. That’s sin.
Nikki: I would add to that that she has redefined the nature of the Christian life, because in her gospel – which is not a gospel; I don’t even like using that word – in her story, you do the work to get saved, you do the work for salvation.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: But Scripture says that the believers work from salvation.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And it’s because we’re working from salvation and we understand that the gospel really, truly is good news and that it has been done, that work we do for Him truly is a work of worship, and it’s why the apostles called themselves bondservants of Christ. We love Him; we’re indebted to Him, out of our will.
Colleen: You know, I was thinking through this, and I was thinking, okay, as a former Adventist who really is a born-again believer now, this passage looks so different to me. But if I’m going to talk to people who have not completely unpacked their Adventism, I want to understand how to talk about what this workmanship is. What is this being “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus”? And I thought, you know, one of the first places that I think of when I think of what it means to be created in Christ Jesus is what John said at the beginning of his gospel, in verses 12 and 13 of the Gospel of John, chapter 1. He said, “But as many as received Him” – and that’s what we do when we trust His finished work and realize it was for us and we entrust ourselves to that, entrust our sin to Him. “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” This is not speaking of a physical birth. We can’t rebirth ourselves, but this is a spiritual birth that God does, born of God. It’s something only He can do, and that’s the new creation. And that’s in our spirits. Make no mistake, we are not just bodies that breathe. We have an immaterial spirit, and God brings it to life when we believe.
Nikki: This makes me think of 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” And the Greek word there for “creature” is used of something made from nothing. It’s something only God can do. It’s a divine work of God. And that’s what we are when we’re brought to life, when we’re born of the Spirit. He said, “Spirit gives birth to spirit, flesh gives birth to flesh.”
Colleen: Yes. And this can happen because, like we talked about last week, when we talked about being seated with Christ, raised with Christ and seated with Him in heavenly places, because of His blood, we learn in Romans 3 that it’s because of Jesus dying and shedding His human, sinless blood that any of this is even possible. It says in Romans 3:22-26, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Jesus shed His blood to satisfy the demands of God toward sinners. This is the thing that I didn’t understand as an Adventist: that the incarnation was God the Son taking human flesh so that He Himself could propitiate His own demand for sin. He is eternal almighty God. And by taking human sin and dying and experiencing becoming sin for us, becoming what God hated, and being separated from the Father as He hung on the cross, He paid for our sin, and He was the only one who could do it. This is how we have been given the right to become sons of God, because He became a Son of Man and opened a new and living way for us. It’s just overwhelming to me. He also says in Romans 5 – and this is where I really start to understand what Paul is saying here in this 10th verse of Ephesians 2. In Romans 5:6-11, Paul actually makes a distinction between what Jesus’ death accomplished and what His resurrection accomplished. Now, this is where I completely had no concept as an Adventist. Nikki, what did you think Jesus’ resurrection was about as an Adventist? What did it do for us?
Nikki: Well, I didn’t necessarily think it did anything for us. I thought that He was just off to His next stage in the process. The really hard part is now done, and He’s going to give us the power we need to do our part, and He’s going to be up there waiting for us, and that was sort of my concept of it. I liked that He resurrected, but I didn’t know that it really did anything for us.
Colleen: I didn’t either. And I did think it was a promise that if I was good, by and by I would be resurrected if I died.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah.
Colleen: But it didn’t do anything for me. But listen to what Paul says in Romans 5: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die – but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, this is the passage: “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” So I remember a long time ago, I was already out of Adventism, I was a believer, and I was reading this passage, and I was reading this passage, and I realized that when it says, “If we were reconciled by His death, much more we are saved by His life,” I realized that was talking about His resurrection, the life that came after the death. And I remember having a conversation with a person I really respected, who was arguing with me at first that this was His life on earth, that we are saved by His sinless life on earth. No! That’s not what this passage is saying at all. This is His resurrection life. But that would be what Adventism would teach, that His life on earth is what qualifies Him to be our Savior, and because of that we can be saved because He kept the law perfectly, but that’s not what this is talking about. It’s His resurrection that gives us life when we believe, that gives us spiritual life.
Nikki: That’s 1 Peter 1:3: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” The resurrection life of Christ is what brings our spirits to life. It’s our security.
Colleen: Absolutely. And in 1 Corinthians 15, which I always, as an Adventist, just thought was the great big long chapter that dealt with the resurrection, which was kind of hard to understand, but Paul does say, “For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” He’s making it really, really clear that Jesus died, and we know that His death was the propitiation for sin, we know that His death on the cross disarmed Satan and his minions, we know that from Colossians 2:14 and 15. He is telling us here that the resurrection is what gives us hope, not just the fact that Jesus died, and that if He hadn’t resurrected, we would still not have any hope. This is how we know, as Gary Inrig said on that Easter Sunday years ago – and it shocked me when he said it because I had never thought about it – His resurrection is what proves that His death was sufficient for all of us. Because if He had not died a sufficient death for human sin, it wouldn’t have satisfied the demands of God, which included Jesus Himself as God the Son, and He couldn’t have broken the curse of death. He wouldn’t have raised. So His resurrection shows us His sacrifice is enough for all of us, and when we trust Him, that’s when we have life. This whole passage in Ephesians 2:10 is showing us that Jesus’ resurrection means something to us. It’s real.
Nikki: It’s interesting, without the resurrection you might have reconciliation for a moment, but the next minute you’re going to sin, and then it’s gone. And that’s essentially Adventism. But in the Christian gospel, because Christ was resurrected and ascended to the Father, He gave us life. He brought us to life, and now we’re being kept by the power of God for salvation. And yeah, we sin. That’s an unfortunate part of being human. But that’s covered. He paid for it.
Colleen: So we have life, and as it says here in Ephesians 2:10, we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. This life that we have, this eternal life when we believe, is the new birth, the new self, the new identity, moving from being in Adam to being in Christ. It’s a whole new reality. This is not our physical bodies. This is the spiritual life God gives us. Ellen White was completely wrong, and when we read what Scripture actually says, we see that God gives us something completely new.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: It’s His resurrection that gives us eternal life, and we don’t lose eternal life when we receive it, we don’t become unborn when we sin. We still have bodies with laws of sin in them, as Romans 7 says, but when we’ve truly trusted Jesus and we’ve truly been born again, He keeps us, as you said. We’re His workmanship.
Nikki: And you can read that in Jude verse 1, that we are kept by the Lord for the Lord. This statement here, that we’re created in Christ, it doesn’t say that we’re created new and then connected to Christ. We are created in Christ. This is positional. This is where we are. This is where we stay, and this is why we say in Christ alone.
Colleen: Nikki, that is such a great point. We’re created in Christ, not separately and connected. We don’t even exist as these new beings without being in Christ. This is entirely His personal righteousness, His personal life that makes us into these new creatures. We are His Body. He is our head.
Nikki: This is one of the things that helps me understand that when we die we go to be with the Lord because the grave cannot contain Christ, and if we are in Christ, it won’t contain us either. We will go and be immediately with Him. It just makes sense of that for me.
Colleen: That is so true. Adventism destroys the grace of God. It destroys the fact that we’re God’s works of art in Christ. We aren’t works of art because we have a wonderful and lovely body, with nerves and organs that have connections and that our good eating will keep pure and holy. No! The grace of God gives us spiritual life. We’re new creations because of Jesus and His resurrection life. It’s God’s life, not just human life that we have. And His righteousness has been credited to us. What I have seen as I worked through this verse and looked at these Ellen White quotes – and I’m not speaking of individual Adventists here because, you know, I was an individual Adventist, and I wanted to know and serve Jesus. I know there are many Adventists in that situation. I know you were one of those, Nikki.
Nikki: Yeah, and a lot of people I knew.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But Adventism as a religion, as a system – and I know how harsh this sounds – but Adventism hates the resurrection, even more than Christmas, because it illustrates that we have spirits that literally come to life when we believe, and this is something that our sin cannot take away from us. It’s based on belief or unbelief, and Satan has no power over our eternal life when we believe, and Adventism, the whole system of Adventism, falls apart if we see what Scripture actually teaches about us and our connection to God through belief in Jesus and the resurrection life of Jesus.
Nikki: You know, it’s interesting, in our walk through Colossians we talked about the fact that Satan was disarmed at the cross. What he had been armed with prior to the cross was the law. He used the law to accuse the brethren, but the Lord disarmed Him. He removed the power of the law for those who believed in Him by nailing it to the cross, and it’s fascinating to me, and scary, but in Adventism the cross doesn’t disarm Satan. In Adventism the point of the cross was for Jesus to uphold the law.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: The very weapon Satan uses to accuse the brethren. They don’t see that they’re missing the biblical effects of the death of Christ. They don’t see that Jesus inaugurated a New Covenant and a new law, the Law of Christ. They’ve replaced the good news of the gospel with the Decalogue of the Mosaic covenant and then use that to measure and accuse their own brethren.
Colleen: They’ve replaced it with a curse.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Not only that, at the heart of their Investigative Judgment and their final resolution of judgment, they have Satan as the scapegoat, who finally carries the sins of the saved to the Lake of Fire and is punished for them. That is horrifying heresy.
Nikki: That’s not in the Bible. And I want to say, if you’re an Adventist and you’re listening to this and this is offending you and upsetting you, then let it motivate you to search these things out and see if this is truly what Adventism teaches, because it’s horrifying. And if you don’t believe these things, why are you there?
Colleen: That’s a very good question. This verse ends by saying: We, who are God’s workmanship, were created by Christ Jesus for good works, which He created and prepared in advance for us to do. Nikki, how do you now understand this verse, in the light of what Paul is actually saying and what Christ has actually done? What are those good works and what does He mean that they’re prepared in advance for us?
Nikki: Well, I’ll tell you what, when I left Adventism – I was sharing with you earlier – and I knew the gospel and I was so excited by what the Lord really did and what was true, and I wanted to learn about the church because I realized there was so much about the church I had never been taught in Adventism, and so I read the stories of the martyrs and I read the stories of the missionaries, and I was getting familiar with my family tree, and I saw the work they did for Him, and I felt like, “I have got to get out there, I’ve got to do something.” And I had these two beautiful little toddlers and was able to be home with them, and I felt very spoiled. And I remember calling you up and saying, “Colleen, I’m reading Voice of the Martyrs, and I’m seeing what people are doing for the Lord, and I feel like I’m supposed to be doing something,” and you told me that my work was to do what God put in front of me to do, that I was to be their mother and that I could obey Him by doing the next right thing and that He will prepare, He has prepared work for me. He will bring it to me, and as it comes I’ll walk in obedience. And that has been more true than I ever understood at the time. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: As I have walked one foot in front of the other every day with the Lord, He has brought so many different things to me. One of them really is unpacking Adventism. That has been a big part of the work He’s brought to me. What you shared in those quotes and how Ellen White used the word “workmanship” and created something completely different with it, just hijacked Scripture, that’s one of the reasons why it’s not enough to just see the Investigative Judgment is wrong and then leave. We have to process what we came out of with the word of God, and so that’s been a big part of it, and as I’ve done that and as I have walked with the Lord and grown in my knowledge and my love for Him and in His word, He has brought things to me. I haven’t had to stress and worry that I’m not doing enough, that I’m inadequate, I want to do more. He takes care of it, and that’s why it says, “God prepared these works for us beforehand,” and I love that “beforehand” because it means He knew I was His, and He knew I was going to come to life, and He had a plan before I knew what was going on.
Colleen: Yes. [Laughter.]
Nikki: It reminds me of Psalm 139:16, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” I remember worrying an awful lot about, what if I don’t see what I’m supposed to be doing? What if I’m not obeying? What if I don’t recognize it when God brings it to me? And there are two other verses in that Psalm that have really comforted me. They’re verses 9 and 10, and David says, “If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will lay hold of me.” It doesn’t say, “You can see me, you’ll chase me, you know what I’m doing.” It says, “Your hand will lead me. Your right hand will lay hold of me.” So even if I find myself running, God is with me, and He’s leading me, and He’s holding me, and He’s going to use all of that experience with Him for the work that He’s prepared in advance for me to do, and I’ve seen Him redeem that in my life. I don’t have to fear missing these works that He created. I just have to walk with Him and obey Him.
Colleen: That is such a great point. You know, you’re talking about running and how He uses even that to prepare you for the work He brings. It kind of brings me full circle back to my horror and sadness, really grief, my desire that people who’ve grown up or been shaped by Adventism will come to understand what Scripture really says because our false prophet of the past shaped our worldview in a way that we didn’t have a lot of choice in how we related to God’s word until He broke through our darkness and revealed Jesus to us and made us learn to trust the Bible. Adventism is filled with abuse, as I mentioned earlier. Just the fact that we’re taught opposing things about God and about ourselves, two things that can’t both be true, that Ellen White said, opposing things at the same time, and we had to believe them all and make sense of them, well that leaves you confused and mentally ill if you pursue it far enough. As a matter of fact, I have known people who took Ellen White dead seriously, who tried to follow her to the letter, and did become mentally ill. I can think of one right off who actually died, not necessarily at her own hand, but died in trying to follow all the stuff Ellen White said to do. It makes you mentally ill or it spins you into complete unbelief unless through a miracle of God you capture a glimpse of what Scripture says about Jesus and trust Him. Adventism is deeply twisting, and I feel for my brothers and sisters who are still in Adventism, and I feel for my brothers and sisters who are out of Adventism but haven’t completely unpacked yet, and I want to say, there’s hope. Scripture can be trusted. The words mean what the words say, and the tenses of the verbs mean what they say. We can know the truth, and God’s word fixes our heads, and I say this from experience. I was a deeply fearful, deeply worried, deeply anxious woman until Scripture began to soak slowly, verse by verse, into my head, and even though there are things that I still struggle with because of my past, it doesn’t rule me in the same way. Jesus really has set my head free. It’s the greatest gift of all. He’s given me life.
Nikki: And you know, Paul says God prepared beforehand these works so that we would walk in them, and the word there is “would,” it’s not “could.” It’s so that we would walk in them, and “would,” to me anyway, when I read it, it has the idea of the will, the obedience. We’re not robots like some people accuse us of saying, once you’re born again –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – that God causes you to remain in the faith, and that makes you a robot. No, it’s God who works in us to will us. That’s Philippians 2:12 and 13. Paul says, “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” And I want to point out too, that comes right after an Adventist proof text that says to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. But then Paul finishes that sentence by saying it’s God who is at work in you. And I want to point out, related to that, working out your salvation is a lot like a farmer who has a field and he works the land. It’s something he already has. Or an athlete who has abdominal muscles –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and he works them out. He’s not creating them. He has them. He’s strengthening them, and this is what we do, but we do it because God is at work in us.
Colleen: He has already given us salvation –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and we manifest it in the way He leads us. So as I look at this text and see it through the eyes of a born-again believer, seeing ever more clearly than I ever have in my past how twisted our former belief was because of that false prophet, even though we may not have read her, but it was her ideas, but seeing what Jesus has done, it brings me back to what we celebrate this week: Jesus is born. He wrapped Himself in human flesh and was born to Mary and a stepfather named Joseph in a little town called Bethlehem. What we celebrate this Christmas is not just a sweet story. We are celebrating the author of life becoming a human baby, born to a human mother and raised in a little town called Nazareth, and before He died a sinless death, before becoming sin for us and shattering the curse of the law, death, He lived a sinless life in obedience to His human parents, but He came and He died, and He did pay for human sin, and then He rose from death, which held all of us in eternal darkness. Jesus came to open a way out of our natural death and our bondage to sin. He came to give us life and to make His word and His will become real to us. This week we’re celebrating the birth of our Savior, who died for our sin and gave us new life through His resurrection, and I just want to say, if you haven’t trusted Him, this will be the truly merriest Christmas of your entire life if you choose to come to the foot of His cross, seeing what He did, and lay your sin before Him and thank Him for His shed blood and thank Him for releasing you from the curse of death by rising from that tomb.
Nikki: If you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. If you’d like to receive our weekly email with ministry news and links to new online articles, or if you’d like to give a donation to Life Assurance Ministries, you can visit proclamationmagazine.com. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and please leave a review wherever you listen. Join us next week as we anticipate the new year, and until then, we wish you a very merry Christmas.
Colleen: Merry Christmas.
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