Stuart Tyner - Marriage, How Do I Find a Husband - NNZC Big Camp 2002

And where are you from and who is the only one you worship oh that's good you make me feel at home thank you very much appreciate it am i on okay can you hear me okay we go from there thank you for putting questions in the question box the last couple of uh days it's been fun for me to Read them at one point i only had two in there and i was really getting worried but i came back this afternoon and there were more and i've divided them into several categories i think i've got

five categories and tonight tomorrow night we'll just take a look at the questions and see if i can give you some answers that will satisfy your questions i don't think it's too late if you had Something that came up and you'd like to put questions in the box please feel free to do that okay i've got five categories of questions the first category is questions i can't answer uh this is a a big one here's the first one i actually the first one i open oh there's more i'll tuck them in and read them tomorrow

maybe i'll read them no i'll read them Tomorrow here's the first one in the category of questions i can't answer can i have a green vest jacket next camp somebody help me out what is that about i have no clue what that one is okay we'll let somebody else answer that one the second one i couldn't answer is this why can't camp food taste more like the real thing i don't know where you're eating but uh yeah it's always that way with camp food Isn't that and dormitory food it's always that way i it was

uh kind of fun to read that question but it got me remembering about how sometimes when we can be thankful that camp food doesn't taste like the real thing at the general conference session that was held in new orleans my wife came down i had been there for a long time and my wife came down and We took an afternoon off and strolled down by the mississippi river and i took my wife out to eat at a beautiful restaurant looking over the river and as we went upstairs and into the restaurant we had to walk

by an oyster bar and karen who has a third generation vegetarian said boy i hope there's nothing like that where we're going to eat well we just ate a few tables away from the oyster Bar karen ordered an omelet or something like that and apparently the omelet had been cooked in the same skillet that the oysters had been cooked in at one time or something like that seafood seasoning or something and within a few minutes of the time she was eating she got violently sick she jumped up from the table ran back to the Restroom

and she came back she was very very red and she said i've got to get out of here it's too hot in here i'm itching all over i don't know what i can do and so i quickly put some money down to pay the bill we went outside and walked right down to the river there's a little boardwalk that goes a long way down the river people sit on benches there and look at the beautiful river and the Boats going by and karen wasn't looking at the boats she wasn't looking at the river she just

couldn't take whatever was in her system and all of a sudden she jumped up from the bench and she went over to this great big garbage pail that was there and leaned over the pail and just let go everything that she had inside her it was just awful and i was standing back away Trying to be you know supportive and i noticed some i noticed a man get up from a bench over here and the way he staggered over to karen i could tell he was a drunk and he just staggered over there and he

went right up to karen right in the middle of what she was doing and he put her arm his arm around her and he said that's okay honey i know just how you feel I was remembering that today when i read this about the camp food and i was sometimes thankful that the camp food doesn't taste like the real thing whatever the real thing tastes like okay a couple questions i can't answer second category are specific issues i'd like to deal with tomorrow night and most of them have to do with worship issues you ask

questions about Music and puppets and crosses in church and raising your hand hands and i'll uh i'll try to deal with that tomorrow night we kind of clumped all of those questions together specific issues about worship there were some questions about sin and some specific sins and i'll try to get to that tomorrow night and a few questions about things like the 144 000 and predestination and uh I'll try to find some answers for that so that's tomorrow night uh if you want to add to that category very specific issues that would be great if

you want to bring something totally different up or even if you want to put a question in something that we did tonight that would be fine too three categories of questions i'd like to talk about tonight there were some questions about Marriage good questions the first one i read was how do you get a seventh-day adventist husband anybody volunteering i saw a hand go out back there i don't know you know the question reminded me of a question that i asked a doctor one time when i was in elementary school it was time for the

facts of life lecture to the elementary kids i was in a very little school there were four boys and four girls In the eighth grade class and the teacher who was a lady took the four girls into one room and she asked a doctor a family practice physician to come and talk to the four boys in the class about the facts of life and you know i we were 12 13 years old and really nervous about this whole discussion and sitting around a little table in the library and the doctor was at one end and

i'll Never forget him he was not too tall he had a red uh crew cut and he was very very nervous about presenting the facts of life to these boys and we were nervous listening to him and his nervousness made us more nervous and i'm sure our nervousness made him nervous and i looked around the table you know 45 minutes into the into the lecture that we were getting And i the guys were starting to go like this to me and i realized that they were nominating me to ask the big question to the doctor

and boy i looked the other way i didn't want to ask any questions and and the guy one guy kicked me under the table and finally i knew i had to do it so i raised my hand and i said to the doctor doctor what we would like to know is how Does it happen and i remember the doctor just turned red beat red and he began to go well well well well it's just a miracle he said maybe that's a good answer to this question about how to get an sda husband i'm not sure

how it may be just a miracle um how do two people ever get together two people end up loving each other two people that Are fit for each other they they uh complement each other how did in the world does that happen it's a miracle i'm sure i would like to say that instead of always just trying to find the ideal husband or the ideal wife i think it's a good idea to try to become the ideal husband or wife ahead of time so many of us get caught up in the looking for that we

forget to turn the attention Ourselves and by the time we find somebody they're already found somebody else and they're not looking at us because we haven't become the ideal person so i think that's a good idea to try to become the ideal instead of just look for them one of the questions said how did you meet your wife well thank you for asking that was sweet Of you my wife and i met the second year we attended high school together first year together second year in high school and we happened to remember the very moment

it was on the 4th of september a date that we celebrate every year now our first meeting we um we were in registration for school i got up early to go down to be the first one in line and my wife and her mother and her sister were already there and We were there in line for about an hour before the line opened up and we got to go in and we got talking and became friends almost immediately sang in choirs together we started dating the next year i was 15 years old she was much

older than i was 16 and a half 17 something like that and we stayed great friends for a long time finally The year that she graduated from nurses training and i was a junior in college we got married she got her nurse's license her driver's license and her wedding license all within the same week and we got married and we've been married now for 35 years and we're happily married that was nice somebody said what's the secret of a happy marriage that's a great Question and i think that the answer is that you need to

stay best friends with the person that you marry i i'll be honest with you and tell you that i would rather be with karen my wife than anybody else in the world we have a great time together we have similar interests we love doing things together and it's important to stay friends and Karen and i have passed the time now where our kids have grown up in our house and they've left and it's a time you know when many families separate when mary many husbands and wife look at each other after the kids have gone

and they say you know i have no clue who you are i've been pouring my life into the children i don't know who you are and i'm not sure We're friends anymore and they go their separate ways and karen and i have been aware of that dynamic and we wanted to make sure that when our kids were gone we were still very best friends and we remained that our youngest one went away to college a couple years ago to newbold in england and it was a very traumatic moment in our life i stood there and

waved goodbye and just Cried and cried big tears going down my cheek my baby had left the house just karen and i were together for the first time in years and years and years in the house he was away from from us for about a year and i remember clearly the day that he came back i stood the airport to welcoming him and thought of his coming back into our Lives i just cried and cried and cried i i wasn't sure i even wanted him back we've been having such a great time it's a good

thing to stay friends with the person you're married with and i think the secret of a happy marriage might be trying to be friends with the person that you marry i hear a lot of husbands and wives talk to each other In a tone of voice that most of us wouldn't talk to enemies in you heard that conversation before i've heard husbands and wives demand things of each other in ways that we wouldn't do to people that worked for us and i often wonder how that marriage is doing when i hear that kind of tone

of voice try to stay friends when you get married or if you Are married stay friends talk to each other nicely try to be really sweet to each other and the rewards are great when you do that a few questions about marriage um one or two questions two or three questions about prayer but they all kind of boil down to a question that goes why don't my prayers get answered you ever felt that way Ever wonder why it was that god didn't answer your prayers in particular or if you were asking for specific things why

didn't come and then you may be in churches with people who who talk like god speaks to them almost on a minute-by-minute basis and audible words and and they know exactly what to do god told me to do this particular thing i did a funeral Uh a week ago this last sunday less than two weeks ago and the funeral was was very well put together i finished my little homily we're going to move into a congregational song soon and very soon you know that song no more dying there and the family had requested that song

and the guy that was going to lead the music was just i was going to back up and he was going to come forward like that And all of a sudden as i was backing up and he was coming forward a woman stood up in the corner and said god told me to stand up at this moment and say something to you and she began to read a devotional and it was rather long and and she said i didn't want to stand up and say this but god demanded that i did it and some of

us who have a different Experience and prayer hear those people talking about prayer that way and we wonder why god talks to them and he doesn't talk to us you ever felt that way when you're talking or working with teens you'll find that this is really the experience that they have they sit in churches and people talk about god talking to them all the time and that's usually not What has happened to them and they wonder about why they're second-class citizens in the category that god answers prayers i'm not sure i was a very good

student of prayer for many years of my life looking back i find out that the kinds of prayers that i offered generally were short sentences that asked god for some kind of miracle in my life some kind of uh uh Intervention and something you know they were the prayers before i ate i always said please bless this food didn't matter who cooked it didn't matter what kind of food it was i asked god to bless it i remember one time the kids and i sat down to a pizza supper that i had made i don't

remember where karen was i had stuck this pizza together and I'm not a great cook and i had piled lots of cheese on it and a few other things and i remember we prayed please bless this food and one of my kids started to giggle and with i said what are you laughing about well god better bless this look what we're eating here you know and i i began to think about that we used to pray before the kids went to sleep um please my youngest son would say Please help me to have a good

night's sleep with no bad dreams or nightmares and he prayed that prayer every single night before he went to bed i remember one saturday night we lived way out in the country and we had had the youth group from the church out and we'd been playing hide and seek in the dark and people were jumping out at other people from real dark corners and behind trees and And the kids were running around with everybody else scared to death every time screaming and you know what you do at a youth party like that root beer floats

lots of ice cream like lots of soda and then we went to bed late at night and i knelt down beside my son's bed and he prayed please help me have a good night's sleep with no bad dreams or nightmares and i Thought this guy is a physiological candidate for a nightmare there's no way that he's going to sleep all night without having a nightmare but it was kind of like every prayer we prayed was that please overcome the elements and have a miracle here the other prayer we always prayed when we got in the

car to drive was Please keep us safe remember one time a family in our church on its way to sabbath school and church had a wreck and one of the children in the car was killed my kids want to know why god didn't keep that family safe you ever wondered those kind of things we pray those prayers sometimes they're answered sometimes they're not and then a very traumatic thing happened in my life my mother Contracted cancer she fought it for a little bit there was a remission of seven years during which time my mother married

a man who had lost his first wife to cancer he was older than my mother was and they had a pretty good time for seven years they traveled came down here to new zealand one time and just had a wonderful time and then the cancer came back and my Mother was struggling and i was living in the east coast of the state she lived in southern california and i flew out to see her as often as i could it was very clear to all of us that she was going to die pretty soon and i

i spent week after week coming out for the weekend and going back to the east coast and flying out for the weekend and trying to be with her i remember the Last time i was in her home it was uh i've been there for a long weekend sunday night now my mom was in her bedroom she was hooked up to oxygen her hair was all gone she was struggling to breathe the cancer had spread all throughout her body she was in pain heavily medicated couldn't lay down in her bed she was sitting up trying to

grasp a few Last breaths i was washing the dishes and trying to wonder what it was going to be like and my mother's husband was sitting in a chair reading his bible and all of a sudden he put his bible down in his lap and he said stuart i don't want you to worry about your mother she's going to be healed and i said wow i stopped the water and the sink quit washing the dishes i said how do You know that he said you know i'm a man of prayer i'm a man of faith

served god all my life and just recently i've been reading all of the bible promises and i've claimed them for your mother and i believe with all my heart she's going to be healed and i said well i sure hope you're right and he said don't say i hope so have faith god rewards great faith and Just believe that your mother's going to be healed next morning i went into my mom's bedroom put my arms around her kissed her goodbye didn't know when or if i'd see her again flew back to the east coast that

sabbath i was a youth leader in my church i told the kids in the youth group what had been happening they knew about why i had been gone so Much they knew that everybody was praying for my mother i told them this conversation that my mother's husband and i had had and they were very interested they prayed then for my mom and then tuesday the next week she died i flew back out a couple days later performed her funeral and spent a couple of days with my two sisters and then i flew back to the

east coast In the next sabbath i was back in the sabbath school room and the kids knowing what i had been going through had gotten somebody else to lead out in the sabbath school and that person had invited somebody to come and do a special feature and they came and the guy stood up and i was sitting in the middle of the room with all the kids and he stood up and he said kids i want you to know we serve a god who answers prayer And everybody in the room kind of went through a

little bit and they looked over at me are you going to be okay with this and i just smiled and i was very interested in what he was going to say kids we serve a god that answers prayer he repeated and then he began to tell the story of how the previous fall he had been trimming some trees in the back of his property with a little chainsaw and he had put the chainsaw Away and the winter had come and gone and it was spring now and he got the chainsaw out to do some more

trimming and before he started the job he noticed that the gas cap on the chainsaw was missing and he went back into his garage and he looked and he couldn't find the gas cap to the chainsaw and he went out to the back where he had been cutting the trees Trimming them the the fall before and he couldn't find it anywhere and he went back and forth you know how you do when you lose something you look in the same place over and over again finally in a frustrated way he knelt down in the backyard

in the middle of the yard and he said to god will you please help me find the gas cap to my chainsaw everybody was listening intently and he Said i lifted up my eyes before i got up off of my knees and i looked and there on the lawn in front of me was the gas cap to my chainsaw kids i want you to know we serve a god that answers prayer and i'll have to admit to you that i began to wonder why god listens to and answers prayers for gas caps to chainsaws And

he totally ignored all of our prayers to heal my mother i really didn't think that was the way it worked but it made me wonder and i began a several year prayer journey in my life where i began to study prayer and to examine the way i prayed and to try to try to find a better way to understand the whole prayer dynamic the first thing that i did was to listen to those prayers that we'd been praying In our life please bless the food please help me to have a good night's sleep please protect

me while i drive and i realized that the entirety of my prayer life was asking god for something it was a petitionary prayer please do this for me and most of the time it was change the course of human events and just do what needs to be done in my life But as i read in the bible and in in spiritual classics about prayer i read that many people understood prayer to be more than just asking god for things there was this element of pouring out your heart of telling god exactly how you feel about

things you read the book of the psalms like a study group that meets in my house has been doing For the past three or four months and you hear the words of the people that wrote the psalms who wrote down the prayers that they had to god and they are merely the outpouring of whatever is on their heart and apparently god values more listening to what's on their heart then whether or not what's on their heart is always correct one of the psalmists can write i hate my Enemies god will you please get your fists

together and smash them in the mouth it's in the bible i guess the message is that what's on our heart is important to god i don't think god has done that a lot to our enemies he loves to hear what's on our heart one theologian has written that speaking to god from your heart is the only real religious issue there Is and many of us tell god not what's on our heart but what we think he wants to hear or what we think we should be saying to him and in a way we kind of

live a false life we live a lie with god we tell him things that we think we should say instead of saying what's on our heart you need to get up in the morning and say to god I don't feel like praying today by all means say it to him you need to get up in the morning and say i'm discouraged about this day i don't know how i'm going to get through the day i don't know what i'm going to do by all means tell god he loves to hear us talk to him prayer

is our turn to tell god what's on our heart and it's important to do all the great writers in prayer also say That prayer is a wonderful vehicle for praise and instead of just asking god for miracles i decided in my own life i would try to praise him more for the things that he did for me and so instead of saying please bless this food i started to pray thank you for this food thank you for creating taste buds on the tip of my tongue That i will be able to tell between salty and

sweet and savory and sweet and and hot and cold and i can tell the difference between chocolate and baked beans what a wonderful blessing that is if everything tasted like baked beans i guess if everything tasted like chocolate that would be okay but isn't it wonderful that we can tell the difference between tastes And textures and temperatures and i have begun to bow my head before i eat and thank god for the way that he's created my mouth to taste this i began to praise god for for the different vitamins and minerals that he's put

into the food that i'm about to eat if i haven't killed it on the top of the stove already and thank him that by eating my body is Replenished and i began to to have those vitamins and minerals inside me would you try that the next time that you pray when you whether you're eating canned food or you make your own meal or you're you're out to eat in a restaurant the next time you bow your heads for prayer for prayer instead of asking god to bless the food thank him for the blessing of the

food Would you be willing to do that next time you go to bed instead of asking god for a miracle to override all of the ice cream you've been eating or whatever it is why don't you thank god for creating our body so that in a few moments we'll be asleep i hope that's the way it is for you i'm one of those lucky people that can go to sleep anywhere except in an airplane And and in moments i'm asleep and in a few hours my body's rejuvenated what an incredible gift that is on a

daily basis next time you go to bed would you be willing to praise god for the way he made our bodies to need sleep and to be rejuvenated because we get sleep i think it's a great thing to do and the next time that you get in the car to drive somewhere Instead of praying please keep me safe keep everybody else away don't let me run into one of those americans driving on the wrong side of the road just you know change the world keep me safe what if you prayed thank you for the the

peace that i have of knowing that whatever wherever i go today you are with me and whatever happens to me today you are Here with me wouldn't it be a wonderful way to to to get into the car before you took a trip to begin to to thank god that he's there with us and and that you know if the worst happened and and somebody cuts in front of you and and and you are your your life on earth is lost we know where we're going to wake up what a blessing that is If we

die on the way back to to home after camp we know where we're going to be 10 million years from now so it's tragic but but can't we praise god for the fact that he's given us eternal life and and that our safety is not so much what happens on this earth but where we're going to end up in heaven but if we praise god in the words of romans 8 Nothing can separate us from the love of god next time you get into a car and you're going to pray i wonder if you'd be

willing to praise instead of petition god i think petitioning is part of prayer but i don't think it's all there is to prayer and i found my prayer life really blessed by trying to include other things in Prayer besides what i used to pray about i want to say also that prayer is not about how good you and i are i have heard a few prayers in my life where people literally demand god to answer their petition because they're such good people and haven't i done all these good things for you the worst story i

heard of this i was in I was in kauai a couple of weeks after hurricane iniki a few years ago i had been there before kauai is a beautiful island those of you been there know it and and uh hurricane iniki just devastated the island the trees were knocked down and buildings and what had been a beautiful place with just trashed it was a terrible sight and one of the Teachers at the adventist school that it happened on a friday and the teachers and the students were in the school and they heard the hurricane coming

and they all got in the little cupboards on the inside of the classrooms and the hurricane went right over them and you know they got out they uh they heard the calm and and they kind of walked outside to see what was going on and the winds were Still coming and they went back it was just a lull in the hurricane and the hurricane kept over and the the little school was not damaged terribly but one of the teachers went home that afternoon and found out that that the roof of her home had been blown

off and that afternoon friday afternoon she went down to a building supply store with hundreds of Other people and stood in line for hours to get the big sheets of plastic and she finally got a couple of rolls and she and her husband were so exhausted went to bed that night in their house with the roof blown off the um the the uh what do you call the things underneath the roof the they were they were still there but there was no covering on the on the house so sabbath morning Early uh this teacher and

her husband got up on the roof with these big rolls of plastic and they rolled them out and they began to hammer the nails into the plastic to hold the plastic down so that if it rained again soon it wouldn't come into the house and ruin the house and while they were up their sabbath morning nailing the plastic on their roof they noticed the car drive up And out of the car came a woman from the local church where these two were members a sabbath school leader and it was about a quarter to 10 on

sabbath morning and the woman drove up got out of the car and came over to the roof and she looked up and said what are you two doing up there it's time to be in sabbath school and the lady the teacher told me the story she said well We our roof got blown off and we're we're trying to keep the rain out of our house didn't want to ruin the furniture any more than it is and the woman on the ground looked up and she said well some of us didn't get our roof blown off

i guess we know how to pray isn't that a terrible attitude about prayer prayer is not about how good we are God doesn't look at us and say you're a little holier than she is i guess i'll answer your prayer first in line and if i have enough time i'll get to you it doesn't work that way prayer is about how good god is not how good we are if we get anything from the hand of god it's a gift that comes from the goodness of god not a reward because you and i'm in good

So watch how you pray don't tell god that you've done so many good things that he's got to answer your prayer another category i'd like to talk about tonight is a few questions that i got about salvation and particularly about the topic of salvation by grace alone which as you know has been on my heart not just In the meetings here but in the meetings in the morning and in fact in my ministry in the last dozen years or so i think it's about all i've ever talked about and somebody um somebody wrote a question

that goes like this how did you get so hung up on grace isn't there an awful lot more to talk about well let me try to answer the question of how i got so hung up on grace I was i think a pretty typical seventh-day adventist kid i grew up in a home that was half adventist my mother was kind of an adventist my dad never was i went to adventist schools from the time i was in late elementary school through high school and college i took theology in college intended to be a pastor early

in my life ended up being a bible teacher but i remember in college i was in a Study group that was studying the book of romans and every night that we met we we took another chapter in the book of romans and i remember the week we were on chapter 5. i remember exactly where i was sitting and i remember across the circle in this little group the leader of the study group said let's start reading in romans Chapter 5 verse 1 and the first verse of romans 5 says that for people who have been

justified by faith they have peace with god and i remember clearly that i didn't hear another thing that night because i realized that in my life i did not have peace with god i was a theology major karen and i were already married i was doing my best to prepare for a Life of working for god but i was while i was trying to do all the right things i did not have peace with god and i struggled with it for three weeks until we got to chapter eight in romans and the first verse of

romans chapter 8 says that there is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in christ jesus And suddenly the answer to the question how can you have peace it's very clear to me we have peace with god because he doesn't condemn us that was the first time for me that the gates of grace began to open that i'm aware of but i struggled against the gates of grace all of my life i just didn't feel like that was the way that seventh-day adventist christians should understand what our role in in the world is I

remember about a dozen years ago i was in a bookstore and i i saw a book called the the grace renewal the grace revival by chuck swindoll grace awakening the grace awakening and i thought you know i haven't gotten my wife a gift recently and my wife is an incredibly gracious person and i thought that might be a great book for her to Read that grace awakening and i got the book and i wrote a little note to karen in it and i just wrapped it up and gave it to her and it wasn't her

her birthday or an anniversary or anything just was being a really good husband and i gave her the gift and she opened it up and she read the notation she loves me to write in books that i give to her and And uh she read it i'm sure pretty soon it was on the bedside stand and one afternoon i opened the book and i began to read it and i was fascinated by what this man was saying in the book grace awakening i began to realize that there was a theology in this book that i

didn't know anything about and i was sure it was wrong and i was right and i I just decided what i needed to do is study the points that he was making so i could disprove what he was saying i could argue with anybody who wanted to bring up a grace theology and i would do that and i began to read everything i could about the bible what the bible has to say about how we're saved i thought surely i can turn to the writings of ellen white and disprove this grace thing And i began

reading everything i could find in the writings of ellen white about grace i found that i had a thirst for knowledge about this topic that would not be quenched and i began to buy every book i could find i went to old bookstores that had big sections of theology and i found every book i went to a bookstore one time At a theological seminary and i bought 13 books all at one time i walked into the house and my wife so you're not going to read those things all at once and of course i didn't

i just kept going through it my library now has over 200 books about grace in it i've read everyone and i've taken notes and what i found in all of the bible that i studied in all the writings of ellen white and all The books i read is that the biblical theology about salvation is that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in jesus christ alone period that's what it's about and i began to to say um how did i go wrong on this where did i where did i get off track what

what happened and i thought i've got to start collecting My thoughts on this and and for about a decade now i've been writing a book on on the theology of grace i've got a chapter about grace in the old testament and another one about grace in the life and ministry of jesus and another chapter on on grace in the writings of paul and then i began seeing the development of the doctrine in the early church and then in the Medieval ages and and what happened at the reformation sometime i would love to talk to you

about each of those things sometime maybe we can get together somewhere in the face of the earth and just talk about all of those phases of how we understand the doctrine of grace i have to tell you that i've come to the conclusion That contrary to the person who wrote the question i don't think there is an awful lot more to talk about for me it's not just because it's my favorite topic but everything else in the christian life i think comes back to this point do we understand how much god has done for us

and how much how big his love for us is it doesn't matter where we are Or where we've been or what's what habits have overtaken us it doesn't matter to god he loves us and it is god and his unfailing grace that motivate us to change our behavior and so many times we've got it backwards and we begin to talk to people about behavior if you just quit doing this if you'd stop doing that you know when i drive out of here to Where i'm staying this week i drive by half a dozen young people

who walked half a mile down the road and and they all stand in a circle and they're smoking down there and i feel so bad that we've we've had to tell them get get away from camp go way down there i myself don't understand the powerful hold that smoking has on people whether it is a physiological thing because of the drugs and Smoking or whether it's a a peer pressure thing i don't understand it's not a temptation that's over overtaken me ever and i feel bad i wish i i wish when we got through with

the meeting we'd all walk down there and just surround that half a dozen people i mean some of you might be here i don't know and i wish we'd sing songs around them and put our arms around them and love Them it is the love of god that even makes it possible to change habits it's god's unstoppable grace that even makes us want do things differently take god's grace away and you and i will fall into all the bad habits there are we we won't have any power against it and besides that we won't want

to do anything different Many people look at the prodigal son way off in the far country and the pigsty and they say see what he had to do he had to get up all that courage he had to stand up he had to put his shoulders back and say i'm going to go back to my father i'd rather be a servant my father than eat here with the pigs and what we forget is that it was god's spirit sitting there in the pigsty With him whispering in his ear get up and go back to your

father it's better in his house that made him get up we don't have those thoughts by our by ourselves i don't think there's anything else to talk about and i found over and over again one experience after another in the bible and experiences that i have and the stories that people like you tell me all the Time i keep hearing the grace of god being illustrated a couple years ago i was doing um a youth congress in lisbon portugal never been in that part of the world and so i went a few days earlier and

i flew to madrid spain for the for the only reason was to go to the prado the great art museum that's in madrid i i have known about the prado all my Life i thought i would never get to see it i love going to great art museums and since i was so close portugal is pretty close to madrid i just decided i'd fly a few days earlier i flew in i took a taxi to a hotel i'd arranged for before i went to bed at night i had already arranged for a taxi the first

thing in the morning so i could be at the prado When it opened and i could hardly sleep i was so excited early the next morning long before the alarm clock went off i was up and dressed waiting for the taxi to get there i went out in front of the hotel my taxi came and it took me down to the prada i wasn't that far away and i was there i had my ticket i was the first one in the doors when the doors opened and i walked into this Great museum one of the

one of the probably 10 best museums in the world and i was so enthralled i was i was there to see some things that i'd known about all my life and one of those paintings is talked about in the guidebooks to the prado as the most valuable painting in the in the museum and a great pride to the spanish people It's diego velasquez painting called las meninas was painted in 1656 and it's a huge painting you you may know it i'm sure you've seen it it's very dark in the background the painter himself is there

facing the people that are looking at the painting he's trying to paint this little princess and she's very petulant and she doesn't want her picture painted And the uh the ladies in waiting los meninas in portuguese have come to try to to cheer her up and to have her hold still it's a beautiful painting and you know i've known about it since i was a child i had a little art appreciation class sometime in elementary school and i remember holding in my hands a little tiny card with diego velasquez las menina 1656 in the el

in the prado museum in madrid I've known about it almost all my life and as i walked through the museum hour after hour after hour i realized i didn't see this this beautiful painting i knew it was there i kept going into gallery after gallery i thought i had covered the entire museum and i couldn't find it and i i found the map and i found where it says velasquez's paintings were And i finally found my way into that gallery or right to the front of the gallery and i looked up from my map there

were the gallery doors it said velasquez over it i knew las meninas was in there and the door was shut and there was a sign there that said closed for remodeling i was sick you know i i thought about going to guard and say I i've come all the way from california just to see this painting would you let me in the door but i've actually tried that a museum before and i got turned down before and i knew i couldn't do it i went across the all the hallway to a little gift shop and

i i found a postcard of las meninas and i went up to the lady behind the cash register and i said do you speak english and she said A little bit and i showed her this postcard and i said is there any way that i can see this card this painting and she said no i'm sorry the museum gallery has been closed for months for remodeling and the painting is is closed but you're in luck she said today this afternoon the president of spain is coming to the prado to reopen the gallery and he's going

to Be here in about 15 minutes you're in luck i could not believe it i walked down into the hallway and already i looked and there were secret service guys all over the place you know how they look they all wear the same coat and they have dark glasses on that thing hang in their ear and they think nobody notices them we all know who they are all over the place And sure enough they were running all over the museum and they were reporters and there were cameras and flashes going off and all of a

sudden people began to applaud and the president of spain walked in the prado museum in the front door and they went over to the gallery there was a ribbon that had been put up that gave him these great big pair of scissors He cut the ribbon the doors came open and the dignitaries in the in the museum got to walk in and i was standing there looking over the crowd and way over there i could see a painting that i was looking for but i couldn't get in because the president was there and every only

the important people were there and and i waited for a few minutes and the President wasn't nearly as interested in this painting as i was and pretty soon he walked out left the museum all the photographers went with him the writers most of the dignitaries went with him people began to mill around you know what i did i walked right by everybody straight into the gallery i was the only one in there i walked over to the picture and there was los menines this moment I've been waiting for all my life i stood there by

myself for minutes and minutes and minutes it couldn't have been better if i had planned it that way and then i stepped back and i realized that on my own i could never have gotten into that gallery it took the president of spain to get me in there and i thought what a great illustration Of god's grace we can't get in by ourselves folks nothing that we can do no bribing no earning no meriting we can't do it only jesus lets us in i don't think there's anything else to talk about i apologize if i'm

a monomaniac but i don't apologize very much because i really think this is all we need to talk about one other question about salvation and it kind of is along the same line Somebody said aren't you just playing with words what does it matter if we say how we're saved why be so picky about how people express their christianity i guess i am picky about words i think that saved by grace is better than saying that we're saved by faith because i know a lot of people that think that if you say it that way

what you have to Do is to strengthen your faith and build your faith and the more faith and the stronger your faith then you get saved and faith becomes a work that we do and the biblical idea about faith is to admit that we have nothing to bring to get ourselves into heaven over and over again the bible story with it that is spoken of as somebody having Great faith is when they admit that they don't have anything you know i get to tell bible stories around the world to people and sometimes like i'm going

to tomorrow morning in the big tent i'm going to talk about david and goliath and how david waded into that dry riverbed and he picked up five stones and he approached goliath and Somebody yelled at me from the back of a tent one time see he had to do something he had to pick up the rocks well he did have to do something and what he had to do was to say this is all i have to defeat the philistine army five rocks that's all i've got and david is facing an entire line of people

the philistine army was on that side of the riverbank all of them with armor and swords And spears and javelins and yelling at the israelite army who were over on this side of the riverbank not doing a thing and david goes right up to goliath the biggest enemy he'd ever faced and he what he had to do was to say here's my faith i don't have anything good enough to defeat this whole army i've got five stones that's all i have A man sat there on the road who was blind and jesus came up to

him and he spit on the ground and he made some mud he wouldn't have had to spit too much here would he just picked it up he put it on the man's eyes somebody yelled out to me see he had to have mud in his eyes that's what he had to do i think what he had to do was to reach up and feel that all he ever had was Mud mud doesn't cure blindness you've got to admit that we've got in our hands stones and on our eyes mud that's all we've got the promise

is my power is made perfect in weakness i didn't say my power is getting better in you as your faith gets stronger my power is made perfect in weakness i think it makes a difference whether we're saved by faith or saved by grace Although the great people who have talked about this have have always lumped everything together martin luther's favorite phrase was justification by faith and when he said that he meant you're saved by jesus christ alone by faith in jesus and nothing else and maury venden one of the giants in our faith used the

word the phrase righteousness by faith and And my generation got acquainted with this topic through venden's righteousness by faith sermons and when he said it he meant you're saved by grace alone through faith alone and jesus christ alone i guess you'd have to say i am picky about the words i think it's more important that children learn to sing jesus's name than to find out what they can't do as seventh-day adventist christians I think it's more important for us to worship jesus we've been talking about that a lot in here and to talk about the

things we cannot do i know that there are people that have made their their livings by by going around and telling people what what things you can do and what things you can't do and what versions of the bible you should Read what versions you can't read and what musical instruments you can't listen to and which ones are okay and what you can eat and what you can't eat i know that there are things like that to take up our attention but my friends i believe with all my heart if we would talk more about

the grace of jesus all of those things would take care of themselves Ellen white has an interesting picture that she has in in the book evangelism and she says to to people that she says are picking off the ornaments and she likens it to to fruit hanging from a tree and she said if you would strike the ax at the root of the tree instead of picking off the fruit you'd have a little bit of success strike the ax at the root of the tree Instead of picking off the ornaments talk about jesus she said

and when the heart is converted everything that is out of harmony with god's will will drop off i have a more difficult time than some people i know figuring out when your life is out of harmony with the will of god i don't have any question at all when my life is when my life is out of harmony with god's will i know about it I feel it when i wake up in the morning and i know what i've got to do to get my life in harmony with god i've got to meet jesus again

i've got to meet him and some people instead of teaching the people that they talk to about how to better get acquainted with jesus and to celebrate his grace they begin picking off the fruit of the tree picking off the ornaments and i think they're better things that We can do to spend our time i'm picky about the words we use and i've learned to be picky by a lot of things when i was a young man i was in the army and during the vietnam war and i went to basic training as a conscientious

objector i was i was uh pretty nervous about what i was doing i volunteered to be a medic in the united states army the very first day i was in the army Somebody found out that i was a conscientious objector and they started making fun of me and i i was really nervous i thought i was the only one that was following god's way in the whole place and i was shipped to a place where i began to train to be a medic and this particular training session was run by a first sergeant who was

one of the toughest Military guys you'd ever want to see he was he had already volunteered for his third term of duty in vietnam and he thought all the people that were volunteering to be medics and not bear arms were girl scouts that's what he called us and he was angry at us all the time everybody else in this company was inspected on saturday morning and they were inspected By this first sergeant and it was a terribly frightening thing to everybody went through it but the people that didn't have to go through it on saturday

morning were the seventh-day adventists and the jewish soldiers and we got to go through the inspection on wednesday night and this first sergeant didn't want to do inspection twice a week so he gave the inspection of The adventists and the jews to a new second lieutenant that's the bottom rung of officers in the army he gave it to him and he said you take care of inspections and this young lieutenant thought he was a five-star general he would march out there when we were marching in and out of our classes to learn how to take

blood and bandage wounds and He actually put his hand in his pocket i mean in his shirt like napoleon did you know and he would look like this i think he thought he was napoleon he had been given this great command of inspecting seventh-day adventist and jews on wednesday night and boy he would yell at people and we were afraid to death of him and you know the things that they inspect you have to make your little bed So tight that the inspector can come in and take a coin and flip it onto the blanket

and it has to bounce that's how tight the blanket has to be and you have to roll your underwear in a certain way and place it in a certain way in your foot locker and and those are the things that make you a good citizen of america and a good fighting man you know toothbrush has to be faced a certain way no dirt Nothing anywhere but this lieutenant would find something wrong with everybody inspected you go to the locker hanging up and your clothes had to be facing a certain direction a certain order there was

lots of things he could find wrong with you and everybody was afraid that he would do this i remember one wednesday night he was downstairs for maybe two hours yelling and cussing at Everybody downstairs and upstairs we were looking over everything making sure everything was right we were afraid to death and finally he came up the stairs to the barracks and he started in that line and he went down and he was going to come around here i was about four people from the end and every single guy he found something wrong with his locker

Something wrong with the way they had rolled their underwear some direction the toothbrush was going different and he got in the face of every guy and he was yelling and swearing at these people and and just saying horrible things and we were as scared as we could be frightened to death finally he got around all the way and he count he came in front of me and he flipped The coin in my bed and it bounced sufficiently and he went to my locker and everything was in the right place and he looked at the way

i'd put my foot locker together and my underwear was all rolled right and i thought i'm i think i'm about done i'm about to get out of here and then he picked up the razor and the army had had issued a razor to everybody and i know if you Remember these things they they were on a pedestal and you unscrewed the bottom of this pedestal on the top open like that and you put a razor blade in there before i had gone in the army i had shaved with an electric razor and i had no

idea about these things i was just learning and i didn't know that when you took the shaving cream and you put it on and then You shaved that underneath this razor blade that shaving cream residue would turn to white powder and that the lieutenant would be looking for the white powder residue underneath my razor blade underneath this thing and if there was any residue on that he would begin to get in my face about being a bad american so i was i watched him undo this razor It came up he pulled the razor blade out

and he looked and here was all this powder under there and he exploded in my face and he got right up next to me like this and he began to yell at me about what a horrible person i was and he was using language that i had never heard before and a lot of language that i did Understand what he meant and he was yelling at me right here and i was shaking and trying to stand at attention and everybody's eyes were wide open looking at me get yelled about this guy and all of a

sudden in the middle of this tirade he yelled at me private tyner when you get to be a medic and what he meant to say was do you intend to give shots With a dirty hypodermic needle in his anger and his hurry he yelled at me private tyner when you get to be a medic do you intend to give shots with a dirty hypodemic nerdle there was this moment in the room where all the oxygen went out as everybody went afraid to say anything but having been struck so funny by the hypodermic nerdlecon Statement and

i'm afraid i didn't think before i opened my mouth but i said back to him right after this comment and and not a word in the room i said hypodemic nerdl sir and the lieutenant looked at me and it hit him funny and you know that moment when you're trying not to laugh because you're not supposed to like when you're sitting in church and Something hits you funny and that's the way it was with the second lieutenant and he began to try not to laugh and he he literally had his hand on his mouth going

trying to keep it in and pretty soon it wasn't working and he was bending over laughing and everybody in the room started to laugh and i'm not kidding my friends before a couple Minutes past he was on the floor writhing in laughter and downstairs the guys were going what's happening up there what's going on out there the um the lieutenant never came back to do an inspection again on wednesday night he was so mortified he just couldn't possibly do it i'm afraid i believe in being picky about words i have Learned that words make a

great deal of difference i tell you some words that mean a lot to me tonight are from jeremiah 31 verses 3 and 4. the lord appeared to us in the past saying i have loved you with an everlasting love i have drawn you with loving kindness that's the way the old testament talks About grace and i want to hear those words over and over and over again i have loved you with an everlasting love i have drawn you with a loving kindness i know where i'm going to be 10 million years from tonight i know

where i'm going to be because i'm going to be there not on the basis of what i've done but on what the basis of what jesus has Done and the verse goes on to say what i think we ought to be doing between now and 10 million years from now the verse says i will build you up and you will be rebuilt and again you will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful that's not a real popular adventist verse but it's exactly what we need to be Doing in our spiritual

life it's not a time for us to be beating our breasts and wondering whether we've offended god we have the assurances that god has drawn us with everlasting love he has built us up and now is the time to take up our tambourines and go out and dance with the joyful may that be your experience tonight may you know where you're going to be 10 million Years from tonight we'll talk about some more questions tomorrow night god bless you [Applause] i'm supposed to pray