Transcript of partial video
I’m going to be discussing why I left the Adventist Church right now and I’m going to try and keep it as brief as possible. Now to make it pretty short and simple, basically I was serving as an elder in the church and while I was preparing sermons and stuff for a span of about two or three years, I started noticing Bible verses that didn’t fit in with Adventist doctrine. Also since I was teaching directly from the Bible, I had people coming up to me, they would say “You need to preach more of Ellen White from the pulpit and not just the Bible.” And here I’m thinking “But this is a church of the bible and the bible only right?” It’s really not and I realized that when I was in it, that it really isn’t a church of the bible and the bible only. They look through the eyeglasses of Ellen White at everything which is why there’s such a major emphasis on the Sabbath day. That was something that really started bothering me and so I took it to God in prayer and I said “Lord, the things that I’m reading in Scripture, these things don’t line up with what I’ve learned from the adventist church growing up and so I said “Lord I’ll keep the Sabbath if you want me to but if you don’t want me to, then let me know. If you do want me to, then please let me know. And I’m going to be searching the Scripture…” And then the thought came to my head I said “Lord, just like with Gideon, he tested you with a fleece and and you did the due thing with it, it was wet and then it was dry the next time and he tested you right?”. And so I said “Lord, don’t show me. Instead, rather, so that I know that it’s from you, show my wife whether or not we should continue to keep this and I’ll be watching to see what you show her.”
And so the next day my wife, she calls me up at work and she says “I just read through Galatians and God has just been showing me so much stuff” and she said “I really don’t think that we should be observing the Sabbath day anymore, it doesn’t seem relevant” and I’m sitting there thinking like “This is an answer to prayer. Look how fast God moved and a lot of it all started with this verse Colossians 2:16-17 and it says “So don’t let anyone condemn you for what you eat or drink or for not celebrating certain holy days or new moon ceremonies or Sabbaths for these rules are only shadows of the reality yet to come and Christ Himself is that reality.” This is very important and it really caught my attention, not just this verse but many other verses, which I’m not going to have time to cover here; this is just my testimony of why I left. But if Christ is the reality that the Sabbath represents, number one, why isn’t the Adventist Church teaching that? This is what the Bible says about the Sabbath. Not only that but I realized why are New Moon’s and other holy festivals listed here? We’re not keeping New Moon festivals as Adventists. We’re not doing this thing or that thing, all these other holy days but they’ve taken parts of it I noticed, parts of the Old Covenant and they decided we’re going to keep this one, we’re going to ignore these other ones. We’re going to not eat pork but it’s okay to keep the Sabbath and stuff but we’re not going to sacrifice sheep or anything like that but we’re going to abstain from certain things and then we’re going to do other things. Nothing made any sense. I realized that I was part of a movement that was like wannabe Jews. You can’t have the law and Christ, they don’t hold hands. I realized that this is what the Bible teaches too. Once I left the Adventist Church, the Holy Spirit opened up all scripture to me and now it all makes sense because when you’re an Adventist, there’s a lot of things that are conflicting, a lot of battles going on there.
Now I realize that there’s essentials and non essentials to salvation. The essential is that Christ is all and in all. The Bible teaches that the Sabbath was a shadow of Christ, which means when he came that shadow – another word for shadow is the prophecy of him – that prophecy was fulfilled. He is the fulfillment of the Sabbath.