Nikki and Colleen discuss the basis of their surviving 2020 and the absolute truth that will keep them through 2021. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: We’re glad you’re back with us to go through yet another passage from Ephesians 2. We’re coming to you two days before the new year, and we’re going to look at this 3-verse passage from Ephesians 2 and connect it to entering a new year, which as we reflect on what happened after last New Year’s podcast, we’ll see that we really can’t plan our futures without saying, “If the Lord wills.” As we have walked through the Christmas season the last few weeks, we’ve talked through one of the most remarkable passages in the Bible, Ephesians 2:1-10. We’ve learned that each one of us is born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath, but that God made us alive in Christ while we were dead, and He’s seated us in Him in heavenly places. We learned that we have been saved by grace through faith, and this salvation is entirely God’s doing. We don’t contribute anything to our new birth. Finally, when we have been made alive by God’s sovereign act of grace, we learn that our new life in Him is God’s workmanship and that He created us new in Jesus in order to do His work, which He prepared in advance for us to do. We saw that these gifts of God are the fruit of His sending Jesus as a human baby to be the Lamb of God who would die for our sin. The Christmas child, who had every attribute of God in Him, grew up with parents whom He came to save, just as He saved each one of us through His death and resurrection. And now, we’re standing on the threshold of a new year, 2021. Last year at this time we had no clue that 2020 would be defined by a pandemic, lockdowns, isolation, loneliness, and strange politics that made us feel as if we were living in a foreign country sometimes. Now, as we stand on the cusp of the unknown, we’re going to let Paul take us from the facts of our individual salvation to the reality of what our salvation does between people groups. One of the mysteries of the New Covenant is that when we’re reconciled to God in Christ, He also reconciles us to each other in Him. We aren’t just saved individuals, but we’re placed in a Body with other saved people, and in Christ we’re one new man, as Paul says, instead of people separated by laws and language and heritage. Before we look at our passage, though, I want to remind you that you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. We love your questions and your comments, and you’re welcome to share your thoughts and ideas with us. You may sign up for our weekly Proclamation! emails and online magazine articles at proclamationmagazine.com, and you may donate there as well. We also want to let you know that the 2021 FAF conference is coming up on February 12-14. This conference, because of COVID, will be online only. We will have live speakers and worship, and we’re planning to have breakout sessions on Zoom, as well as interviews and commentary throughout the conference, but you must register to attend online. However, there’s no fee. This year the conference will be free online to all who register. Donations are welcome, but because we’re not meeting in person, we’re inviting you to participate virtually, at no charge, and if you want to be part of this conference, let us know by emailing us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and include your mailing address as well. So now, we’re going to start looking at Ephesians 2:11-13, and I have a question for you, Nikki.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: When you were an Adventist, what did you think a Gentile was?
Nikki: It’s actually really an embarrassing answer, but I thought a Gentile was synonymous with a pagan. I think of the phrase “Gentile dog,” and that’s essentially what I thought a Gentile was. I thought that it was a godless person who was living for their flesh and their desires, and it didn’t occur to me to see myself as a Gentile, because I was spiritual Israel. I was the new Israel. I was the true Israel. And so, when I would read passages that mentioned Gentiles, it was all very historical, it was the writer speaking to a people group of that day. And just that it was kind of a shameful thing to be a Gentile. I don’t know, I didn’t have the understanding that a Gentile was essentially just not a Jew.
Colleen: Isn’t that so fascinating. You know, I did understand that Gentiles were not Jews, but I was really confused in my head about how to understand all these passages about Gentiles and Jews because, like you, Nikki, I thought I was part of spiritual Israel. Of all the people in the world who claimed to believe the Bible, we did it best because we knew the law was for us, and of course that made us Israel. It was a really confusing thing, and when I’d read passages like this one in Ephesians 2, I’d just sort of glaze over, and it was just words to me. Like you said, it was kind of a historical reality, it was a bit metaphorical, and I was supposed to understand this through the lens of being an Adventist who had the law and who knew how to keep it –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – even though I knew I didn’t do it very well. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Why don’t we read these three verses that we’re going to talk about and discuss what it actually is saying, and then, from there, we’re going to talk a little bit about what it means for us as former Adventists to understand that we’re Gentiles and how this even affects the fact that we’re standing on the threshold of a new year. So, Nikki, would you like to read those three verses, Ephesians 2:11-13.
Nikki: Sure. “Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “uncircumcision” by the so-called “circumcision,” which is performed in the flesh by human hands – remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”
Colleen: In this passage, we see pretty clearly that Paul is defining the circumcision and the uncircumcision rather specifically. So what is he saying in verse 11 about the Gentiles? Who were they?
Nikki: They were the uncircumcision. They were those who were not of Israel. They were not under the Mosaic covenant. They weren’t even under the Abrahamic covenant.
Colleen: That’s right. Because the Abrahamic covenant – I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this podcast – took me back to our earlier podcasts on the covenants. When God made His covenant with Abraham, it was before Jacob had even been born, before his 12 sons, who became the 12 tribes of Israel, had been born. God made Abraham an unconditional promise, a three-part promise. What was it that God promised Abraham, in a nutshell, Nikki?
Nikki: Seed, land, and blessing.
Colleen: Yeah. And He renewed this covenant with Abraham’s son, Isaac, and with Isaac’s son Jacob. All three of them received an iteration of this covenant promise from God, and then Jacob had his 12 sons, and they became the 12 tribes that defined the nation of Israel. When God made that covenant with Abraham, after Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness – in Genesis 15 we read about that – two chapters later, in Genesis 17, we find that God gives Abraham the sign of being His covenant person, and He gives him the sign of circumcision. And all of his descendants were supposed to be circumcised. So as you said, Gentiles were not even part of the Abrahamic covenant. They were the unwashed masses that had no connection to Abraham, that were not circumcised as a sign of inheriting Abraham’s promises from God. You know, I didn’t understand all that as an Adventist. I did know that Jews were circumcised and Gentiles were not, and I gathered from this verse 11 that the Jews were pretty condescending to the Gentiles because, Paul says, they called them the “uncircumcision” and themselves the “circumcision.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Isn’t that so funny to think of that being just like a common term –
Nikki: Uh-huh. [Laughter.]
Colleen: – of identity? [Laughter.] I can hardly relate to that! [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: But anyway, the Gentiles were the non-Jews. Now, in the Old Testament, what if a Gentile wanted to worship the God of the Jews? What if he wanted to worship Yahweh? What if a Gentile was convinced that Yahweh was God? How did he become part of God’s people, because in the Old Testament God’s people were the Jews?
Nikki: Well, they had to be circumcised.
Colleen: They couldn’t enter the temple, they couldn’t bring the sacrifices, they couldn’t do any of the things prescribed in the law unless they were circumcised. And if they wanted to become part of God’s people, if they wanted to live with Israel, they had to be circumcised and become Jews. And that was the paradigm for hundreds and hundreds of years that the Jews lived under. Paul is now talking to a group of believing Gentiles who’ve been influenced by Jews who are also Christians, but who still think that these Gentiles need to somehow still be Jews, and Paul is saying: There’s a big division here, but it’s not circumcision that makes you one. So, Nikki, as you look at these three verses, what comes to your mind? What strikes you about what Paul is saying to the Ephesians about Jews and Gentiles, circumcision and uncircumcision?
Nikki: Well, you know, I never ever would have understood verse 12 as an Adventist. He says to them that they were “separated from Christ.” Okay, I would have understood that. “Excluded from the commonwealth of Israel.” I don’t think I would have understood that because my understanding was that Israel was essentially anybody who lived according to God’s – I mean, I knew they were the Jews, but I did know that people could come in who were not Jewish, be circumcised, and follow God’s eternal law, the eternal Decalogue. So I thought that the law existed before humanity –
Colleen: Oh, yeah.
Nikki: – and that the Gentiles had the opportunity to become Israel, to become Jewish, so I wouldn’t have understood that they were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, that they were strangers to the covenants of promise. Maybe they didn’t hear about it, but not that they weren’t to be a part of it. But remember, I thought the Gentiles were just people who were rejecting God, just pagans, and having no hope and without God in the world. That would have fit my paradigm, but the idea that they would have been excluded from God’s people? I wouldn’t have known what to do with that because my understanding was that all of humanity could come to the law of God and keep it, and I had the Great Controversy in my head.
Colleen: Of course! Nikki, that is so interesting, and it’s not surprising because that is the core of Adventism. Adventism teaches us.
Nikki: I couldn’t meld the Great Controversy into what this is saying. I couldn’t have done it. I don’t think I would have known what to do with it. And I know I’ve read Ephesians, but I’m sure I just kind of flew past this, thinking of them as nothing more than pagans who didn’t want to know God, and that’s why – I don’t know. I would have redefined it in my head. But then he says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” And what they’re being brought near to is Christ Himself.
Colleen: Right!
Nikki: They’re not coming under this circumcision now. They’re not coming under Israel, which is what I thought good believers did, when I was an Adventist.
Colleen: Yes. Adventism taught us that you had to come to Christ, whatever that meant to us, but that “coming to Christ” meant we would then bow to the law and come under its authority and that only as we kept this eternal, supposedly, law would we ever come to know God or please God. It was completely different from what Paul is saying here. It’s not surprising that you thought that way, and it’s not surprising that I just sort of blew past passages like this, thinking of it in sort of metaphorical terms, that I could sort of morph – you know what I would do with passages like this as an Adventist?
Nikki: Hmm?
Colleen: It was a little bit like if I was writing a paper about Shakespeare. I always felt like it was up to me to have some fresh new insight, to make connections no one else had seen.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: What did this character represent? What did that character represent? How did they work together? And that was my job with the Bible: Well, what could Paul have meant here? How can we make this relate to something else? And I never saw it as meaning, the words mean what the words say.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It was up to me to figure out how to interpret it in a clever new way, and to be honest, all those Sabbath school classes confirmed that.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: All those guru-taught Sabbath school classes, where people would just throw out their aeriodite ideas, and you’d leave there thinking, “Well, I wonder if they’re right? Well, surely not. I think my idea is better.” But it isn’t about our ideas.
Nikki: No, and approaching Scripture from that perspective – which, by the way, I completely relate to. Approaching it from that perspective makes it so that when we come across verses like this where we just kind of are like, “Yeah, that’s boring,” we’re not going to invest in coming up with a unique interpretation of this because it’s really not interesting, and we keep reading until something gets interesting.
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: That was my experience, anyway. So a lot of these things I just sort of rolled past, with my vague interpretations in my head that I hardly paid attention to, until I got somewhere that seemed a little bit more about me. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Oh, you said that so well, Nikki! That was exactly what I did too! [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] It’s really awful, but it’s just the way it was for me. And it wasn’t – I believe you, it wasn’t unique to me. I remember sitting through elder meetings in the Adventist church we attended, and we would read a passage from The Message, and the question would be, “What does this mean to you?”
Colleen: Like that’s the thing about the Bible: “What does this mean to you?” No. You know, I saw a great quote from John MacArthur recently, and I won’t be able to completely quote it word-for-word, but here is the essence of what he said: Our question should not be, “What does the Bible mean to me?” The question should be, “What does this verse say if I did not exist?” The Bible means what the Bible says, whether I exist or not. The meaning doesn’t change –
Nikki: Excellent.
Colleen: – just because I come along.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But I didn’t understand that about Scripture. When we read these three verses now, what I’m seeing now, what Paul is clearly saying, is that there are two essential types of humanity. There are the Jews, who were God’s chosen people in the Old Testament, the promised lineage from Abraham, and there were the Gentiles, who were not children of promise that God had promised to Abraham. And he’s saying here that the Ephesians, before they trusted Christ, were just the uncircumcised Gentiles, and the Jews were just circumcised Jews, and he’s saying that their commonality is in Christ. No longer do Gentiles become right with God by becoming Jews, and Jews have no basis for scorning Gentiles. Everything changes in Christ. And for former Adventists, I think the biggest thing for me has been to realize, yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew that ethnically I was Gentile, but that meant nothing to me until I understood that Christ makes us one new man in Him. I have to go back and realize that before I can own the fact that I’m a Gentile, I have to divest myself of believing I’m spiritual Israel.
Nikki: Yeah. We are not spiritual Israel. We are the church.
Colleen: And Adventists certainly are not spiritual Israel.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: And they truly believe they are because they’ve embraced the law and they believe in the Sabbath, but that doesn’t make them Israel.
Nikki: And true Israel matters to God. There are verses in Revelation where Jesus refers to the “synagogue of Satan,” and He says that they claim to be Jews but they’re not. It’s kind of a big deal to claim to be something that you’re not, and Israel matters to God. We can’t just go and decide we are Israel because we want to be.
Colleen: That is so true. And the argument goes that because the Jews rejected Jesus, we who “accept Jesus” or believe in Jesus now have inherited all those promised blessings that God made to Israel because Israel rejected them. So Israel gets to keep all their curses, but we get the blessings promised in the law because we’re embracing the law. That is not what the Bible teaches. As former Adventists, when we read this passage now, we have to see not just that we’re Gentiles, but before we can fully understand and accept that fact, we have to get past the fact that we’re not spiritual Israel. As Adventists, we thought we were people of faith. We thought we understood Scripture better than Sunday Christians, and we believed that Sabbathkeeping was the mark of obedience that showed we were sealed by God. We believed that we alone had the endtime message, but we didn’t have faith in the real Jesus. We have to face the fact that as Adventists we likely weren’t even truly believers, much less Israel. And then, once we face that fact and realize that we couldn’t have been Israel, we couldn’t have been spiritual Israel or anything like that, we were just Gentiles who never were entitled to keep the law. Our keeping of the law as Adventists was illegitimate at the best because we were not Jews and it was never meant for us.
Nikki: We were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel.
Colleen: And one more thing that Paul is hinting at here, although he is addressing a Gentile church, he’s also suggesting here that Jews have no right to see themselves as superior now that Christ has come. The Jews had to let go of feeling that their genetic inheritance made them superior to Gentiles. They had to let go of the idea that their circumcision made them spiritually superior. They had to give up their arrogance at knowing God’s word better than the Gentiles. They had to see that they had to accept Christ and that when Gentiles, who were excluded from the law, and Jews, who had had the law, both came face-to-face with Jesus bleeding on the cross for their sin, the ground became level, and they were equally sinful before God, equally in need of a Savior, and as they repented and accepted what Christ had done for them, they became equally the adopted sons and daughters of God. It’s in Jesus that they became related to the Father. As we start this new year, we have to see that what Paul says here in verse 11 is for us. We have to remember what we formerly were. And Nikki, you were talking about the fact that people often say to formers, “Don’t keep thinking about what you were.” Do you want to apply that here a little bit, because what you said was so profound, actually.
Nikki: You know, we’ve all heard, “The past is the past; move on; get over it. It’s behind us. Look forward. That’s the direction you’re walking in.” All those clichés, all the memes –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – that are out there. But Paul is calling the Ephesians to reflect on where they were. He’s telling them, “Remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, weren’t a part of this, and now you’ve been brought near by the blood of Christ.” We remember where we were, and we remember that we are where we are now through the blood of Christ. And when we remember where we’ve been, we come to the cross worshipfully because we recognize that it was the work of Christ alone who brought us here. And being a former Adventist, in particular, we often will hear, “You need to just move on. You’re a Christian now. You’re not a former. Just call yourself a Christian. Just call yourself a Christian. Why do you call yourself a former Adventist,” or, “Why is your ministry called Former Adventist Fellowship?”
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: I want to say that Adventism was more like trauma than it was just a past. I really do believe that we were brainwashed. I believe that we were spiritually abused. And I believe that the word of God was used to support doctrines of demons.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And because the word of God is so central to the life of the believer now, it’s important for us to get rid of all of that old Adventist thinking, all of the stuff that actually turns out to be hurdles now as we walk with the Lord and read His word. People will often write and say, “Hey, I read this in the Bible. Is it true?” We have a hard time trusting Scripture because we were abused with Scripture, and so we have to let go of all of the false constructs we had in our thinking, all of those reflexive kneejerk reactions that we have when we come to the word of God. We have to recognize them and let them go. We have to remember that they were a part of a cult, of a cultic teaching, of an abusive upbringing, and we have to replace it with truth. I want to give an example of what I mean. I had someone write to me this week who was reading about Jesus on the cross with the thief, and He told the thief, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” And the question was, “Was the thief with Jesus in paradise that day? Because when Jesus was resurrected, He told Mary that He had not yet ascended to the Father. So He hadn’t yet gone to heaven, so did the thief go before Jesus got there?” And I recognized right away that the way that this person was looking at the passage had Adventist thinking overlaid onto it because what we did as Adventists is we would see things that looked like contradictions and then we would try to come up with the details that helped us live with that contradiction. It didn’t necessarily occur to us that there wasn’t a contradiction. That we were struggling with understanding it didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. Now, Jesus is God, and God said, “Today you will be with me in paradise” to the thief, which means that day Jesus and the thief were together in paradise. And we know it’s true because He said it and because it’s in the inerrant word of God. So when we come across those kinds of questions in our thinking, that’s a moment where we remember from where we came, and we remember that we had been taught how to approach Scripture very inappropriately. We have to recognize that this hurdle is connected to our past. We need to pray, and then we need to go in and read the words and trust what the words say. The questions are important. They are. We can’t ignore the questions, because if we ignore the questions, we’re never going to understand what we’re doing. We have to be willing to examine and deconstruct those old patterns, but we need to recognize them when they come up and not continue to put ourselves over the Scriptures.
Colleen: That is such a good point, Nikki. And let me just say regarding that question, it is a very common Adventist argument that Jesus couldn’t have meant He would be in paradise that day because He said to Mary, “Don’t touch me because I have not yet ascended to my Father.” That is such a misuse of the language that it kind of makes me angry, to be honest.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We know what Jesus meant by “ascension,” because Acts 1 describes His ascension. He bodily ascended into the clouds that covered Him, and the angels told the disciples that “this same Jesus will so come as you have seen Him go.” Ascension is a physical word. But when Jesus said that He and the thief would be in paradise together that day, He wasn’t talking about bodily being there; He was talking about spirit. And Nikki, you have a memory of our pastor, Gary Inrig, saying something at an FAF conference that still impacts you. Do you want to tell that? I think it’s really important to mention it here.
Nikki: Yeah. He was actually talking about the nature of man and what happens when we die, and he leaned over the podium and pounded on it and said, “You are not your body.” And with every beat of his fist on that podium, I felt conviction, which was a feeling that I had not had up to that point. This wasn’t that many years ago. I had always kind of felt sorry for myself that I struggled to believe that I had a spirit that survived death. I kind of felt bad for all of us, that we were taught that and that that’s hard for us, and all those Christians are so lucky that they don’t have to struggle with that. And, you know, I kind of just hoped I’d get over it. But as he pounded on that podium, I recognized zeal for the truth of God, and in seeing that in him, I recognized sin in me, to even continue to doubt or struggle or feel sorry for myself about this. No, the Bible tells me that I have a spirit that survives death, that I will go to Christ when I die, and I need to believe that, and I need to stop, I want to say licking my wounds about that being hard to believe. It’s time to grow up, for me.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: That was the conviction I felt in that moment. I think we come to a point in our processing out of Adventism where we move from the questions to the conviction, that it’s time to repent for what we once held onto and to just believe what the Bible says. I feel like I need to be so careful in how I talk about this because it’s a long process out, and I don’t ever want anyone to feel ashamed or uncomfortable asking the questions that we have to ask. Those questions are there because we were brainwashed.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: We were manipulated. We have to recognize them. We have to reach out to people who’ve been out longer or who know the word and who are willing to sit with you and talk about it. That’s a really important part of this, and we should never shrink away from that. But at some point we have to own the fact that it’s time to repent for the false teachings that we still hold onto, even if we don’t want to hold them anymore. And you know what, Colleen? When I did, I haven’t struggled with that since then.
Colleen: You know, Nikki, you make such a good point. I do believe the Lord convicts us, confronts us, when we have a compromise going on in our heads with our old beliefs. He brings us face-to-face with our own confusion and says, “It’s my word or your head.” And I had a similar moment when my father died, and I’ve told this before, but it was with this whole spirit thing. And I looked at my Dad in the bed, knowing he was gone. He was not there. Clearly it was just a shell. And I remember having a crisis of faith, thinking “Well, is he really with the Lord or is he just nowhere. I mean, how do I know?” I realized about an hour later that I had to believe what the Bible said or it was just me supposing. Only Scripture gives me any kind of a clear path to walk, and I had to do it without feeling an emotional conviction. I had to do it because God said so. And after that moment, I have never struggled with that since. So the Lord knows how to convict us of His word, of His truth, of reality, and our job is to trust Him. He will not trick us. Ellen White taught us that God would trick us if it would suit His purposes. Remember how she said He held His hand over William Miller’s mistake so people would get ready? No! Our God does not do that. Her false God did that. That was a false God. That was a Satanic angel. That was not Yahweh, the God of Scripture, the God who saved me. Our God will not trick us, and we can trust His word. So as we look at this passage, we have to remember, as we start 2021, what we came from and know that God has given us the course correction in His word. And as we go forward, He won’t lead us astray. His word will keep us going straight. Now, Nikki, you were talking to me about having listened to our last New Year’s podcast this morning before we recorded. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve thought about?
Nikki: Well, you know, it’s interesting listening to the 2020 New Year’s podcast, knowing now what we were walking towards as we recorded that. We had no idea what was ahead, but what we knew then we know now, and we’re saying now still – we knew that Scripture was going to get us through anything that came. We knew that as we looked back at what God had brought us to up to 2020, He had taught us to trust His word and to just do what was in front of us to do and to be careful with our planning and to know that as we study God’s word, we grow in our knowledge of Him, and He carries us into our future. And we had talked in that podcast, actually we shared a little bit about struggling with depression. I don’t know if you remember talking about that.
Colleen: I do.
Nikki: One of the things you just said a few minutes ago reminded me of something that I had shared. When I was struggling with depression one day, I opened up the Gospel of John and read about Jesus coming to the Pool of Bethsaida to the man who had been lying on the mat for 38 years, and Jesus said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” And he immediately reflected on all of the obstacles that had prevented him up to that point from being healed. Nobody was taking him to the water, nobody was there. You know, people got in front of him. And the response that Jesus had was simply, “Take up your bed and walk.” It was a command. As we’re talking about this business of having these leftover Adventist doctrines that we can turn over and over in our hands and grieve, which I think is a part of coming out of Adventism, but at some point we have to stop saying, “I haven’t been freed from this because nobody took me to the water,” you know, “Everybody got in my way.” At some point we take up our bed and we walk and we obey Christ. And we walk with Him into our future. It’s an unknown future, as we saw this year.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Yes. Oh, my. As we walk into 2021, we can know that if a storm comes up, like it did for the disciples when they, with Jesus, were out on the Sea of Galilee, He was asleep in the boat with His disciples, and a storm came up, and they had trouble waking Him up. But when they finally got Him to wake up, He just said, “Peace, be still,” and the storm immediately calmed, and they looked at each other and said, “Who is this man that the winds and the waves obey Him?” Jesus revealed Himself to them in a new way in the middle of that storm. They were not in the storm because they were disobeying Him. Jesus went with them out onto the lake when the lake was calm. And the storm came up as they were in the boat. But He never stopped being with them. He never stopped being more powerful than the storm. And He saved them from the storm. So we can know that whatever happens, it’s not a punishment, it’s not something surprising to God, but if we’re His, storms will come, as we’ve seen in 2020, and we can walk confidently forward because when we’re doing the things He shows us to do, we’re in His will, and He’s even with us in the storms and rescues us from the storms in His own way, in His own time.
Nikki: Not only does He rescue us from the storm, but He is omnipotently and sovereignly in charge of the storm.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: When He got in the boat with them, He said, “Let us go to the other side.” He knew they were going to go to the other side. He knew where this was going to end, and He walked them into that, and that has been so true for us, even still as we’ve walked through 2020. He’s taken us to the other side. Now we get to go into 2021 [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and there are a lot of unknowns, but what we know absolutely for certain is that He walked us through every storm we’ve walked through in our lives. He has walked us into them and through them, and He has used them for His glory and for our good, those of us who believe, who are called. We can know that that will continue to be the case, and when the disciples were afraid, Jesus asked them about their faith. And so when we’re afraid, we can pray that the Lord would give us more faith, that we would grow in our faith, and we thank Him for His faithfulness to carry us to the other side.
Colleen: You know, I think many of us would agree that one of the biggest storms that we have in common, that we’ve faced in our lives, is realizing Adventism was false and we had to leave if we were going to be true to the Lord Jesus.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We’ve all suffered loss and shame and humiliation, and we sometimes still grieve the loss of family, of traditions, of our social circle, of familiar foods, and even of our food jokes. Yet all of those things were part of the world that God has called us to leave behind. That’s a very big storm that’s ongoing for some people who are listening today. We can know that as we walk through the storm, whatever the storm is, whether it’s still processing Adventism, still uprooting the brainwashing that has infiltrated our heads and makes it so it’s hard to trust Scripture, whatever that storm is, we’ve been brought near to God by the blood of Christ, and we’re in Him, and we’re safe, and He won’t drop us, and He won’t deceive us, and He will course correct us if He sees us getting afraid. He will remind us to trust Him. And Nikki, like you said, it’s really important to remember that we can pray and ask God to teach us to trust His word. I can’t tell you how often I still pray that God will plant me in truth and reality and protect my head from deception, because my own emotions can deceive me, and I have a lot of emotional reactions that really are rooted deeply in my past, that come from my Adventist family, that come from my Adventist past, and God knows how to correct those things with His word and to teach me to trust His word. So as we face this new year with whatever it may hold, let’s give to the Lord all of our attachments that we already know that we may have to give up to the forms of Adventism which obscure the gospel to the pieces of Adventism that mimicked the real Jesus with a false gospel, and let’s give those up and trust Jesus to show us who He really is in His word. Let’s believe that God’s word says the truth, and let’s trust Jesus alone. The baby that we’ve been celebrating all month came as God wrapped in flesh. And that baby grew up. He died for our sin. He broke the power of the grave, and He is alive. He rose from death. He sits at the Father’s right hand, and He invites us to let go of all those righteous practices that we thought might determine our salvation and our future, and He asks us to trust Him alone. And if you haven’t done that, this would be the perfect time, as we end 2020 and walk into 2021, to just tell the Lord, “I give it up. I repent, and I want you to remake me in the way you know I need to be remade and fill my mind with your truth and make me alive with your Spirit.” So don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and if you have questions or comments, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. And if you’d like to be part of our 2021 FAF conference in February, write to us at that same email, formeradventist@gmail.com, and let us know, and send us your mailing address, and we’ll sign you up to be part of our online participation. So next week we will continue with our walk through Ephesians 2, but until then, thank you, Nikki, for doing a little remembering of what we’ve come through and what we said last year, and I just want to wish you all a Happy New Year.
Nikki: Yes, Happy New Year.
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