Are You Still Meeting on Saturdays?
I am confused. After your leaving the Adventist cult, are you still meeting on Saturdays? Or are you preparing programs for Sabbath School for Adventists who want to leave it? I am confused and am asking you this because I read something about Sabbath School classes or lessons…
—VIA EMAIL
Response: No, we are not going to church on Saturday. We meet on Sundays in Christian churches. The Sabbath School commentaries we write are articles that expose the heresies in each week’s lessons. As people study the Sabbath School lessons, they can read our commentary and discover what is wrong with the point of view expressed in the lessons.
The Gospel Saved Me
Last week someone told me about Proclamation! magazine, and I have now listened to a couple of podcasts by Colleen and Nikki. And after reading some peoples’ stories—it’s like I’m reading my own story!! I didn’t realize how much of a hold the old lies still had on me. So much to unlearn…
I was born into the Adventist church; I always hated it and finally couldn’t stand it anymore and had my name removed from the books. For 26 years I was without a church because I was terrified to go to a Sunday church, but I would not ever return to Adventism.
I don’t know how it happened, but all I can say is, two years ago God spoke right to my heart and led me to a Sunday church where I heard the true gospel message for the first time, and I kept hearing it every week in the sermons and in the music. It sounded so good! But I could not believe it: salvation by grace alone?? After much prayer and Bible study and talking to my new Christian friends, I finally gratefully accepted the gift of salvation, and I was baptized into Jesus, rather than into the Adventist church.
I just wanted to tell that to someone who understands. I’m going to keep reading and listening.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you so much for writing! Indeed, we DO understand. I am so thankful that the Lord led you to that church where you heard and learned the gospel! Praise God! I know that life-changing, disorienting, euphoric feeling of KNOWING you are born again and realizing that all you had believed was skewed. Praise God He calls His own sheep and brings us to Himself.
Please feel free to email anytime. I’m so thankful to hear how the podcasts and the stories are helping to confirm your experience and to open up reality and truth. The Lord completes what He begins in us. His word cannot fail, and God does not trick us. He is faithful!
Confessing My Adventism and Bitterness
I was very touched with the testimony by Dale Hand. He shared the same confusion and fears I had as a child. Those fears and trying to keep all of Ellen’s rules really burdened me, like the veil that the law imposes.
The conclusions he came to were same ones I had been coming to.
Jesus is the Savior whose perfect life, death, and resurrection qualified Him to enter heaven; He triumphed over death and Satan. And to be our intercessor, the Holy Spirit is our seal and is with us.
I had been wondering if part of my trouble with decision making was that I had surrendered my mind to Adventism as a child, and it interfered with my responding to the Holy Spirit as He guides me and influences my conscience. I have broken off belief in these doctrines and asked Jesus for forgiveness in believing what men said over what His word had said.
I was shocked to see it so blatantly stated by Ellen that, indeed, what was required was to surrender our will to the General Conference. I had the same thought Dale Hand stated: that idea is making the General Conference to be God, and this belief is anti-Christian.
A fellow San Diego Academy friend noticed I had bitterness towards Adventism and said, “You need to forgive the ex-church.” He has had to do that for his own freedom. So I purposed to forgive those in authority over me who taught me this faulty teaching. I prayed this through with a Christian friend, confessing it and turning it into Jesus’ hands. I know bitterness has been a prison.
I think that a lot of my co-dependency started in this misunderstanding. Have other former Adventist friends had that struggle as they throw off old beliefs?
I’m asking Jesus to grant me wisdom to overcome fears I’ve carried.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you for writing! What interesting insights you shared. Yes, many, many former Adventists have similar struggles. Our common background has created a common “pool” of dysfunctions in most if not all of us to some degree. Adventism both attracts and creates people with certain kinds of tendencies, such as addictive personalities, anxiety, and so forth. It’s interesting how many Adventist families have hidden abuse inside—molestation, physical abuse, sexual perversions, and emotional crazy-making, for example.
Your insight that you had to confess to the Lord Jesus and turn over the people and the abuses to Him was His leading. I am convinced that we all have to repent of our Adventism ultimately, as you did when you confessed and asked for forgiveness for believing men over His word. Our family prayed, during the time we left Adventism, that the Lord would remove Adventism from our hearts and place His Spirit in the place Adventism had dwelled. Since Adventism teaches doctrines of demons, we have to treat it as the sin we now see it to be and confess it, asking the Lord to redeem us and to gives us Himself in its place.
Asking Jesus for wisdom is absolutely the right thing; it is biblical, and 1 Corinthians 1:30 confirms James’s statement that if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask God and it will be given. 1 Corinthians 1:30 actually says that Jesus has become our wisdom, and I know that as we trust Him in our need, He gives us His own presence and insight.
Jesus IS the answer, and His eternal, living word shows us how to proceed and how to honor Him and how to pray. It truly is horrifying that EGW said we were to suspend our personal judgment and submit to the GC. That is demonic, for sure. We submit only to our Lord! He is the One who has bought us from death and taken our curse.
Our early Adventism taught us to distrust our own thoughts and insights. What I am realizing is that we were subtly but implicitly taught that we can’t trust the Bible. Yet the Lord gives us His life when we trust Him, and He makes His word applicable to our lives and shows us how to live by His revealed wisdom. It’s pretty amazing to me that He has given us His own word which He has preserved for millennia! He has revealed Himself, and He makes Himself known to us as we trust Him and ask Him to teach us what He knows we need to understand from His word.
Confessing the sin of our Adventism and also our sins which we committed because of our Adventism is a hard pill to swallow, especially since we were shamed so deeply within the religion. Yet there is freedom in agreeing with God about our sin and trusting the Son in our place. He makes it possible for us to forgive those who abused us by giving to Him the burden of justice. He will execute justice one day, and we can release the organization and the people within it from “owing” us anything. We can let them off the hook, knowing that we cannot expect them ever to be to us what they SHOULD have been and trusting Jesus to fill out hearts and comfort our wounds because unbelievers and false religions will never be able to do that.
True forgiveness on our part is releasing the unrepentant to the Lord, knowing that He will deal with them justly, and He will fill the holes in our hearts Himself.
Thank you so much for your letter. You have very insightful responses.
The Lord is faithful!! †
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