The title of this series of sermons has been "The Death of Truth." Of course, it is an overstatement for the simple fact that truth is eternal. What is true is always true. I don't need to tell you that God is Truth. He has always been and He will always be, and for that reason God is the ultimate truth. We can understand then why Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life."

So when we think of something as absurd as the concept of the death of truth, we mean, that at a particular time in history people are no longer interested in what is true--rather they are interested in what makes them feel good at the moment, and to justify themselves they begin to invent so-called truth.

By that I mean that truth becomes what I want to do, and it is true for the simple reason that it is what I like to do. It also means that I do not appreciate a person pointing out to me what is right and what is wrong, because I don't like people telling me that what I like to do is wrong.

This is not a new concept. In fact, it is the concept on which the whole problem of sin began in this planet. You remember in the Garden of Eden the Bible tells us that there was a tree. It was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Until that time that tree basically represented the only thing that God had told the human race that they couldn't do. Basically they were free to do anything but eat from that tree.

It comes as no surprise then that we see Eve walking up to the tree, and Lucifer, speaking as a ventriloquist, says to her what amounted to something like this:

"Has God told you that if you eat of this tree you will die?"

She answers, "Yes."

"Well," the serpent goes on, "that is simply not true. Look at me--I am eating it and I am not dying. I can see that you are not only beautiful but also very intelligent, so I am going to share something with you that will change your life. In fact, if you do what I tell you to do you will actually not have to have anyone, including God, telling you what you can do and not do anymore. Listen, Eve, if you will eat from this tree you will receive special powers. From now on you will be totally in charge of your life. You will not have to take orders from anyone. You alone will be the sole arbitrator of what is right and what is wrong."

Do you see what happened then, my friends? The name of the tree tells what the issue was. The issue was that a person who ate from it was trying to get out from under the rulership of the Almighty. A person who ate from it would be the one who could decide right from wrong, truth from error. In that moment he would become his own god.

Don't forget, as I said in the beginning, God is truth because He has always been. Truth and error, right and wrong, are simple. Whatever He tells us to do is right; everything else is wrong. I think then you can understand why I would call this series, "The Death of Truth," not because truth would ever die, but because there would come a time in which we would reject God and become our own gods.

You may say, "That will never happen with me." I surely hope not, but we must realize that though we may always say that we believe in God, unless we are seeking to obey Him it means that we have decided to depart from truth and are setting ourselves up as what the Scriptures would call false gods.

The title of this particular sermon in this series is "Love Bombs." What is that all about? I will explain.

The Bible tells us that God is love. There is even a whole chapter in 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 13 is called the "love chapter." It is all about love.

I don't need to tell you that the Bible is all about love. In another place we read that love is even the fulfilling of the law. Some people take that to mean that you don't have to keep the law if you have love. They believe that it is an either/or thing. A person doesn't need to choke on the concept like that though, because our Lord has said that the whole Ten Commandments can be summed up in just two commandments, and they are to love God with all our hearts, our souls, and our minds, and He said that the second is like unto it, and that is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

As you listen to this sermon I hope that you will not slam the door to what I am trying to say. Try to get the big picture. I know that I am responsible to try to help you with that, but it is hard if you turn the sermon off and on or stop listening before I stop talking.

The reason that I am saying this is because, though this generation claims to be open-minded, it is probably as close-minded as the old generation ever was. It might not appear that way, but I have found that, as a minister, all I have to do is say one sentence that a person doesn't agree with and the rest of the sermon is out the window.

This is why I will say many times when I am preaching that the listener must understand that I am not verbally inspired. I may not always be able to say clearly what is on my heart. As I go along I open other windows just to make the scenery interesting, but resist the temptation to jump through them. There is a point that each sermon is trying to make, and I pray that when I get done you will be able to put it into a sentence or two--a paragraph at the most.

Now I know what you are probably thinking: "Pastor O'Ffill, just give me the sentence or the paragraph and let's be done with it." I wish it were that easy. The devil puts up lies and error in sound bites, but you can't do truth that way.

To understand the truth, when it is being buried in a mountain of error, requires that a person think. Animals don't have to think and they will do things the way that they are supposed to. It is sad but true, but if a human being doesn't think, he will probably act the way animals do. And I don't need to tell you that we were not created to be animals, but rather we were created in the image of God. We have been endowed with a free will and the gift of reason. God expects us to use both.

I am glad that when we finally get down to the truth it makes more sense than lies. Lies are always dumb if you really look into them. Lies are lying all over the ground but you have to dig for truth. But when you find it, you will say, "But why didn't I see it that way from the very first?"

I must be careful when I say that because a person, who has decided that they do not want to serve God and obey His will, will actually prefer lies. After all, lies come in all shapes and sizes and can be tailor-made to fit the sinner. Truth on the other hand comes in only one size and, by the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, God actually changes us to come up to the shape of truth. Don't you like that?

I am telling you all of this because I am going to seem to be putting down love. You might be thinking now, "I am glad you told me that at the beginning, because I am not going to waste my time listening to you. I'm outta here!" Wait a minute, before you go. Better yet, stay. I didn't mean that. I am not going to put down love; I would have to be an idiot to do that. After all, as I mentioned before, God is love.

I hope that you are smart enough to have recognized by now that, if God is love, then the whole world must be on God's side because even the worst of the lot use the word love these days.

Something has got to give. We have got to get a handle on love. Will true love please stand up? I guess to make this sermon even more difficult to preach I will throw a concept that Mrs. White gave us years ago. To paraphrase it, it goes something like this: If we were as kind and loving as we ought to be, we would have a hundred souls where now we have only one.

I would be foolish not to say Amen to what the servant of the Lord has told us. Who would argue but that a loving atmosphere is the ideal environment where truth can be considered with a favorable attitude. Because this is a valid concept in recent years there has been an increasing desire to form small groups where people can discuss truth rather than simply declaring it as we do when we listen to a sermon being preached.

Though a loving atmosphere is indeed the ideal environment, we will never "nice" someone into the kingdom of God. Did you hear that? I said that we will never "nice" someone into the kingdom of God. I don't need to remind you that there have been, and I suppose I am safe to say that there are, groups who use their loving demeanor to bypass truth, or even worse, instead of truth.

When a small group uses love instead of truth and bypasses the decision-making processes that God has given us to be used, they are in effect guilty of manipulating their members rather than persuading them.

I told you that this was going to be a tough one!

Anytime we try to win people to Jesus while bypassing their minds we are guilty of manipulation. The cult experts call that approach "Love Bombing." A group that "love-bombs" is one that makes an outward show of love in order to attract and even gain control over visitors. Listen to me now. Guests who are being love-bombed may find themselves joining the group without even knowing why they were doing it.

Now before you say, "Enough of this," and run out the back door, let me say right now that I believe with all of my heart that we must be loving. But let us not forget that our commission is to give a defense for the hope within us. Listen to 1 Peter 3:15: "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear."

The scripture calls on us to declare the excellencies of God. Listen to these texts from Colossians 4: 3, 6: "Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:" "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man."

The apostle Paul says "Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men" (2 Corinthians 5:11).

Now before I continue, you must understand that in talking the way that I am, I am not talking about an either/or. I am not saying that we must choose: Will we be loving or will we just give Bible Studies. I am only trying to help us understand that if we made a mistake in the past in being too preoccupied with the information side of the gospel and not sensitive to the love, which we must experience, we could now go to the other extreme--throw the Bible Studies out the window and go 100% support group, if you know what I mean.

I remember how well this can be illustrated by something that a pastor told me one time. He said that his church had voted not to do any evangelism, They voted that they would emphasize nurture. Why does it have to be either/or? Why is it that in the church, when the Holy Spirit leads us into a new understanding of truth, our tendency is to throw out the truth that we have already had?

If God has feelings like we do, He must be frustrated with us sometime. Here the Holy Spirit is sent to lead us into all truth. God is bringing truth in the front door and there we are throwing it out the back door!

In the gospel of John, Jesus taught that one way you could tell that Christianity was real was by the unity and the love that the followers had for one another.

The New Testament also relates to us how Christians brought their friends to Christ through what we would now call relational or friendship evangelism. Friends, we must make no mistake about it. Being a Christian is being relational, and Christian outreach must contain a strong relational component. I personally believe that friendship evangelism and the concept of the church as community are very important.

They are, in fact, necessary if we are to successfully communicate the gospel. This is more important in our generation than perhaps ever before. This is because this generation has selfishness as its chief characteristic. This selfishness then results in a profound sense of loneliness. We have also exacerbated loneliness by insisting that everyone is different. When we do this we destroy any basis for closeness.

The mindset of this age is that everyone's opinion is right. When everyone's opinion is of equal value, no opinion is of any value. As a result, people have nothing to talk about.

There is a premium these days on respect. We say that we respect everybody's points of view. So then we have respect, but this respect can result in a loss of closeness. When we have no basis for disagreement and debate, it is easy to see how a person can drift into apathy and indifference. This is a high price to pay for respect.

It is no wonder then that so many people are so miserable. They are as we say "driven." Driven to find pleasure and meaning for their selfish, lonely lives. Only truth can explain the problem that faces us in this age. The solution to our problems must spring out of The Truth.

Therefore, the manifestation of Christian love must supplement the truth of the gospel; it must not replace it.

There is a tremendous move in the modern church context to build community. Others call it the "church family." We must understand, however, that the focus of the church should not be itself. The focus of the Church is Christ, who is its head, and He says that He is Truth.

Therefore, the center of our lives must not be each other; the center of our lives must be God-- God as revealed in the written Word--not some kind of a home-brewed god that we have conjured up in our own minds. We came from God. We are the work of His hands. Friends, our lives cannot find their true meaning in each other; our lives can only find true meaning in our Creator. The Word says that in Him we live and move and have our being.

No, there can be no doubt that the Bible never treats Christianity as something we do as individuals, but a faith we live out together as members of the Body of Christ. But our decision to follow Christ must be individual, and Jesus knows His sheep, not as a flock, but He knows us all by name. So the Bible stresses the importance of community and the importance of the individual.

When Christians stress the importance of community, we do so because we want to build healthy relationships and draw on common strengths and giftedness in order to build up one another. In other words, for Christians, community is redemptive and open. But though the church is a community, we must never forget that it is more than a community committed to itself; rather it is based on the commitment that each of its members have with the Lord Jesus Christ. A Christian community can only be as effective and as strong as the sum of the collective commitment to Jesus who is the object of its worship.

Unless the church community is first and foremost--a Christ-centered community--the church is just another community, and as such will be controlling and intimidating, the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the majority over the minority.

The increasing emphasis on community in the 21st century in His word, and in His place we may very well be substituting the collective self with the strong arm of love.

Basing the church on love as an expression of caring can lend itself to all kinds of things; it can be a two-edged sword. Many can indeed be attracted to the church because they were attracted to its love. But the flip side of that is, if I am coming to church because of certain expectations that I have of the members, then when someone treats me wrong, I'm outta there!

Listen now to what I am about to say. Jesus said that the Ten Commandments could be boiled down to two. You remember that we should love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul and with all our mind. And then He said that the second commandment was that we should love our neighbor as ourselves.

What I am about to say is this: Real love, true love, the love that you can trust and count on is one concept with two facets--love to God and then love to our fellow man. Now read my lips. Something that says that it is love that does not make God first is not love at all. By the same token, something that says that it loves God and does not express that love to its fellow man is not love either.

That is why a person who says that they love God and are mean are kidding no one but themselves, and I think that even they know the real truth. Mean people really are mean because they love no one but themselves.

As we begin the new millennium God is being marginalized from our lives, even in the church. The church is supposed to be about God, but you don't have to be in some churches five minutes before your realize that it is really about them.

We are in many cases love bombing each other. Truth is out; love is in. When the church begins to cater to the philosophy that the customer is always right, at first you may have service with a smile. But all the while the product is being diminished in quality until at last there is no product, only service with a smile. Pretty soon, when the product is gone, there is no reason left for service with a smile, and after a while the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.

You have heard the words "social gospel." I worked for twelve years in ADRA--it was called SAWS in those days. I know what the danger of the social gospel is. I remember when I was a teenager. One year soon after the Korean War reports began to come out of Korea that thousands of Koreans were being baptized. I can remember going to camp meeting and hearing men from the General Conference telling the wonderful stories. I can even recall that some began to use the words "Latter Rain."

Years later when I was grown and working in ADRA I heard, as Paul Harvey would say, the "rest of the story." The rest of the story was that after the war, in order to rebuild the country, the US Government sponsored land reclamation projects. These projects were what we would later call Food for Work projects. That means that, if you would work on a certain public works project, they would pay you with a ration of rice.

And so it seems that the SDA Mission became one of the sponsors of the Food for Work projects. In order to receive a rice ration you had to work; in order to work you had to be a member of the church. Do I need to tell you more? We have a word for that now and it is "rice Christians." It is another form of Love Bombing. There seems to be two extremes.

What shall we do about helping people? There are two extremes. One is that we would use rice to get people to be Christians and the other is that we would give rice out to the people and not care whether they heard the gospel or not. The trend in social work is that we are more likely to be doing the latter. A social outreach can be an expression of and an extension of the gospel or it can be a substitute for the gospel!

Excuse me if I put in an aside at this point. As you know, the government of the United States is real strict on the matter of the separation of church and state. They will not let you do any proselytizing with tax money. You can understand that.

The problem that I have, I guess, is, should we as a church accept money for works of benevolence if in order to receive them you have to promise that you will not share your faith?

I know what I am talking about, because that used to be my game. I had no problem with taking their money because I figured that feeding the hungry and clothing the naked was the gospel. I used Matthew 25 to prove it.

Now I am not so sure. The servant of the Lord has told us that there is religion in a loaf of bread. When you really take off on that you can soon have yourself thinking that bread is religion. But then what shall we say about the words of our Lord when He said that "Man shall not live by bread alone?"

I am completely against the concept of making rice Christians-that is, charging a spiritual price for our works of charity. But if doing works of charity with someone else's money means that I lose the right to pray with the person or talk to them about the Bread of Life, then at that point I am getting off.

As long as I am driving you crazy, I had might as well continue. Remember when God gets a bandwagon of reformation and renewal started, the first thing that the devil tries to do is to get on the bandwagon.

When he is not able to stop the forward movement of truth, he will immediately try to mix truth with error. You know, of course, that in the lab of faith and morals, if you take a little truth and mix it with a little error and shake it together, the product is always error. In the same way if you take error and say, "I want to do away with it; I will mix it with truth." Go ahead, do it. Shake it up and check it out. It will still be error. Contaminated truth is always error.

There can be no doubt that the Holy Spirit is trying to lead this generation to all truth. We had truth; we just didn't have the big picture. Now the Holy Spirit is trying to give us the pieces of the puzzle that were missing, and so what do we do? Lose the pieces that we already had!

A word that is coming into our vocabulary as we seek to build community is the word "mentoring." I cannot say anything negative about the concept. You know, of course, what mentoring is--it is the same as having a role model who takes an interest in you and you are accountable to the person. I am sure you must have heard of it by now. The concept is solid and is being used more and more in the arena of Men's Ministry.

Mentoring and role modeling are built around the concept of the power of influence. Let me say some things here about the power of influence. Please be aware that no person can meet another on the street without making some mark upon the other person. We say that we met someone and that we exchanged words, but what we really did for a moment was exchange souls.

There is a law that we might call the "law of influence" and it is upon this law that role modeling and mentoring are based. The law is this: We become like those who we admire. The whole vast pyramid of humanity is built on the law of influence.

The apostle Paul knew of this law and wrote about it when he wrote, "So we all reflecting as in a mirror the glory of Christ, are changed into the same image."

It is an everyday fact of life. We are what we are by the impact of those who surround us. It stands to reason then that those who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into the highest.

We are as much impacted by the law of influence as we are by the law of gravity. We are being changed by language. We are changed by walking in the streets and we are changed as we work side by side with others. The truth is that, want to or not, we are becoming like the ones that we are thinking about. We become like the center of our emotional focus.

As we seek to build community within the body of Christ, we must have Christ and only Christ as our role model. What am I trying to get at? I guess I had might as well just say it.

It seems to me that the role models in the life of too many Christians are men and women that have nothing to do with developing a Christlike character. You will think that I am anti-social, but what I am getting at is that we knew more about the OJ trial than we did about the Reformation during the time of Martin Luther. The people of the theater and of the sports scene are more familiar to us than are the great men and women of the faith whose lives with the blessing of God were responsible for the raising up and preserving of the Church that we all love.

I am amazed that Pocahantas and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are having more influence on our children than the parables of Jesus. More people will come out to the church for Super Bowl night than for any spiritual program that you could work up--the exception might be some gospel rock group.

I know that something is wrong, because though we say that the center of our church and church life is Christ, that simply is not the fact of the matter. We are the center of our church life and Michael Jordan has a greater influence in the lives of the young men in some churches than even their fathers. I don't think that I am wrong. I don't think that this sermon about Love Bombing is built on a premise that we cannot, in fact, demonstrate.

Christ is boring to the average person, so it is no wonder that we are desperately trying to devise and contrive programs that will appeal to a generation that is turned off when you start talking about the "message" or about "truth." There are some who are not so bothered by hearing about Jesus though. That is because Jesus is something that you can conjure up in your mind.

However, when you talk about the truth as it is in the Bible that's when some begin to get nervous. Like: let's not talk about Truth; let's talk about Jesus. Friends, real truth cannot be separated from Jesus, and the true Jesus cannot be separated from the truth of the Scriptures.

While I am talking about the truth as it is in Jesus, let me tell you what happened to me not too long ago on the Internet. I got some e-mail from a minister somewhere in Tennessee. I think he pastors a church called the Creation SDA Church. The subject of the e-mail was something like-"SDA Church in Big Trouble?"

Well anyway, the burden of his message was that the church was so bad that it was time to get out. I e-mailed him back to the effect that if the church was so bad it needed us more than ever, and that instead of being the time to get off it was actually the time to hang on tight and to try to keep others from falling off. I mentioned that Moses didn't jump off when the Children of Israel sinned; in fact, when God wanted to destroy them Moses actually said, "If you do that, you had might as well destroy me, too."

Jesus was the same. He said that He didn't come to save the righteous but the sinners. He even prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Well, I told the guy that I was sorry that he felt that he needed to leave the church and start up a new denomination. The next day he answered me. You should have seen what he wrote. He basically said that I was dumb, not intelligent, couldn't see clearly and must be a part of the other side if I didn't agree with him. I wrote him back and asked him why he was talking to me that way when he didn't even know me.

He replied that he was only being like Jesus; he wrote that Jesus talked tough, too. It was then that I got a new insight that I had not realized before, and that is, that there are two ways to relate to Jesus. One is to imitate him and the other is to reflect him.

But watch out now. There is a difference. If you are into being mean to people, you can rationalize that you are only being like Jesus with the Pharisees or cleansing the temple.

The title of this series of sermons has been "The Death of Truth." Of course, it is an overstatement for the simple fact that truth is eternal. What is true is always true. I don't need to tell you that God is Truth. He has always been and He will always be, and for that reason God is the ultimate truth. We can understand then why Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life."

So when we think of something as absurd as the concept of the death of truth, we mean, that at a particular time in history people are no longer interested in what is true--rather they are interested in what makes them feel good at the moment, and to justify themselves they begin to invent so-called truth.

By that I mean that truth becomes what I want to do, and it is true for the simple reason that it is what I like to do. It also means that I do not appreciate a person pointing out to me what is right and what is wrong, because I don't like people telling me that what I like to do is wrong.

This is not a new concept. In fact, it is the concept on which the whole problem of sin began in this planet. You remember in the Garden of Eden the Bible tells us that there was a tree. It was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Until that time that tree basically represented the only thing that God had told the human race that they couldn't do. Basically they were free to do anything but eat from that tree.

It comes as no surprise then that we see Eve walking up to the tree, and Lucifer, speaking as a ventriloquist, says to her what amounted to something like this:

"Has God told you that if you eat of this tree you will die?"

She answers, "Yes."

"Well," the serpent goes on, "that is simply not true. Look at me--I am eating it and I am not dying. I can see that you are not only beautiful but also very intelligent, so I am going to share something with you that will change your life. In fact, if you do what I tell you to do you will actually not have to have anyone, including God, telling you what you can do and not do anymore. Listen, Eve, if you will eat from this tree you will receive special powers. From now on you will be totally in charge of your life. You will not have to take orders from anyone. You alone will be the sole arbitrator of what is right and what is wrong."

Do you see what happened then, my friends? The name of the tree tells what the issue was. The issue was that a person who ate from it was trying to get out from under the rulership of the Almighty. A person who ate from it would be the one who could decide right from wrong, truth from error. In that moment he would become his own god.

Don't forget, as I said in the beginning, God is truth because He has always been. Truth and error, right and wrong, are simple. Whatever He tells us to do is right; everything else is wrong. I think then you can understand why I would call this series, "The Death of Truth," not because truth would ever die, but because there would come a time in which we would reject God and become our own gods.

You may say, "That will never happen with me." I surely hope not, but we must realize that though we may always say that we believe in God, unless we are seeking to obey Him it means that we have decided to depart from truth and are setting ourselves up as what the Scriptures would call false gods.

The title of this particular sermon in this series is "Love Bombs." What is that all about? I will explain.

The Bible tells us that God is love. There is even a whole chapter in 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 13 is called the "love chapter." It is all about love.

I don't need to tell you that the Bible is all about love. In another place we read that love is even the fulfilling of the law. Some people take that to mean that you don't have to keep the law if you have love. They believe that it is an either/or thing. A person doesn't need to choke on the concept like that though, because our Lord has said that the whole Ten Commandments can be summed up in just two commandments, and they are to love God with all our hearts, our souls, and our minds, and He said that the second is like unto it, and that is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

As you listen to this sermon I hope that you will not slam the door to what I am trying to say. Try to get the big picture. I know that I am responsible to try to help you with that, but it is hard if you turn the sermon off and on or stop listening before I stop talking.

The reason that I am saying this is because, though this generation claims to be open-minded, it is probably as close-minded as the old generation ever was. It might not appear that way, but I have found that, as a minister, all I have to do is say one sentence that a person doesn't agree with and the rest of the sermon is out the window.

This is why I will say many times when I am preaching that the listener must understand that I am not verbally inspired. I may not always be able to say clearly what is on my heart. As I go along I open other windows just to make the scenery interesting, but resist the temptation to jump through them. There is a point that each sermon is trying to make, and I pray that when I get done you will be able to put it into a sentence or two--a paragraph at the most.

Now I know what you are probably thinking: "Pastor O'Ffill, just give me the sentence or the paragraph and let's be done with it." I wish it were that easy. The devil puts up lies and error in sound bites, but you can't do truth that way.

To understand the truth, when it is being buried in a mountain of error, requires that a person think. Animals don't have to think and they will do things the way that they are supposed to. It is sad but true, but if a human being doesn't think, he will probably act the way animals do. And I don't need to tell you that we were not created to be animals, but rather we were created in the image of God. We have been endowed with a free will and the gift of reason. God expects us to use both.

I am glad that when we finally get down to the truth it makes more sense than lies. Lies are always dumb if you really look into them. Lies are lying all over the ground but you have to dig for truth. But when you find it, you will say, "But why didn't I see it that way from the very first?"

I must be careful when I say that because a person, who has decided that they do not want to serve God and obey His will, will actually prefer lies. After all, lies come in all shapes and sizes and can be tailor-made to fit the sinner. Truth on the other hand comes in only one size and, by the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, God actually changes us to come up to the shape of truth. Don't you like that?

I am telling you all of this because I am going to seem to be putting down love. You might be thinking now, "I am glad you told me that at the beginning, because I am not going to waste my time listening to you. I'm outta here!" Wait a minute, before you go. Better yet, stay. I didn't mean that. I am not going to put down love; I would have to be an idiot to do that. After all, as I mentioned before, God is love.

I hope that you are smart enough to have recognized by now that, if God is love, then the whole world must be on God's side because even the worst of the lot use the word love these days.

Something has got to give. We have got to get a handle on love. Will true love please stand up? I guess to make this sermon even more difficult to preach I will throw a concept that Mrs. White gave us years ago. To paraphrase it, it goes something like this: If we were as kind and loving as we ought to be, we would have a hundred souls where now we have only one.

I would be foolish not to say Amen to what the servant of the Lord has told us. Who would argue but that a loving atmosphere is the ideal environment where truth can be considered with a favorable attitude. Because this is a valid concept in recent years there has been an increasing desire to form small groups where people can discuss truth rather than simply declaring it as we do when we listen to a sermon being preached.

Though a loving atmosphere is indeed the ideal environment, we will never "nice" someone into the kingdom of God. Did you hear that? I said that we will never "nice" someone into the kingdom of God. I don't need to remind you that there have been, and I suppose I am safe to say that there are, groups who use their loving demeanor to bypass truth, or even worse, instead of truth.

When a small group uses love instead of truth and bypasses the decision-making processes that God has given us to be used, they are in effect guilty of manipulating their members rather than persuading them.

I told you that this was going to be a tough one!

Anytime we try to win people to Jesus while bypassing their minds we are guilty of manipulation. The cult experts call that approach "Love Bombing." A group that "love-bombs" is one that makes an outward show of love in order to attract and even gain control over visitors. Listen to me now. Guests who are being love-bombed may find themselves joining the group without even knowing why they were doing it.

Now before you say, "Enough of this," and run out the back door, let me say right now that I believe with all of my heart that we must be loving. But let us not forget that our commission is to give a defense for the hope within us. Listen to 1 Peter 3:15: "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear."

The scripture calls on us to declare the excellencies of God. Listen to these texts from Colossians 4: 3, 6: "Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:" "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man."

The apostle Paul says "Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men" (2 Corinthians 5:11).

Now before I continue, you must understand that in talking the way that I am, I am not talking about an either/or. I am not saying that we must choose: Will we be loving or will we just give Bible Studies. I am only trying to help us understand that if we made a mistake in the past in being too preoccupied with the information side of the gospel and not sensitive to the love, which we must experience, we could now go to the other extreme--throw the Bible Studies out the window and go 100% support group, if you know what I mean.

I remember how well this can be illustrated by something that a pastor told me one time. He said that his church had voted not to do any evangelism, They voted that they would emphasize nurture. Why does it have to be either/or? Why is it that in the church, when the Holy Spirit leads us into a new understanding of truth, our tendency is to throw out the truth that we have already had?

If God has feelings like we do, He must be frustrated with us sometime. Here the Holy Spirit is sent to lead us into all truth. God is bringing truth in the front door and there we are throwing it out the back door!

In the gospel of John, Jesus taught that one way you could tell that Christianity was real was by the unity and the love that the followers had for one another.

The New Testament also relates to us how Christians brought their friends to Christ through what we would now call relational or friendship evangelism. Friends, we must make no mistake about it. Being a Christian is being relational, and Christian outreach must contain a strong relational component. I personally believe that friendship evangelism and the concept of the church as community are very important.

They are, in fact, necessary if we are to successfully communicate the gospel. This is more important in our generation than perhaps ever before. This is because this generation has selfishness as its chief characteristic. This selfishness then results in a profound sense of loneliness. We have also exacerbated loneliness by insisting that everyone is different. When we do this we destroy any basis for closeness.

The mindset of this age is that everyone's opinion is right. When everyone's opinion is of equal value, no opinion is of any value. As a result, people have nothing to talk about.

There is a premium these days on respect. We say that we respect everybody's points of view. So then we have respect, but this respect can result in a loss of closeness. When we have no basis for disagreement and debate, it is easy to see how a person can drift into apathy and indifference. This is a high price to pay for respect.

It is no wonder then that so many people are so miserable. They are as we say "driven." Driven to find pleasure and meaning for their selfish, lonely lives. Only truth can explain the problem that faces us in this age. The solution to our problems must spring out of The Truth.

Therefore, the manifestation of Christian love must supplement the truth of the gospel; it must not replace it.

There is a tremendous move in the modern church context to build community. Others call it the "church family." We must understand, however, that the focus of the church should not be itself. The focus of the Church is Christ, who is its head, and He says that He is Truth.

Therefore, the center of our lives must not be each other; the center of our lives must be God-- God as revealed in the written Word--not some kind of a home-brewed god that we have conjured up in our own minds. We came from God. We are the work of His hands. Friends, our lives cannot find their true meaning in each other; our lives can only find true meaning in our Creator. The Word says that in Him we live and move and have our being.

No, there can be no doubt that the Bible never treats Christianity as something we do as individuals, but a faith we live out together as members of the Body of Christ. But our decision to follow Christ must be individual, and Jesus knows His sheep, not as a flock, but He knows us all by name. So the Bible stresses the importance of community and the importance of the individual.

When Christians stress the importance of community, we do so because we want to build healthy relationships and draw on common strengths and giftedness in order to build up one another. In other words, for Christians, community is redemptive and open. But though the church is a community, we must never forget that it is more than a community committed to itself; rather it is based on the commitment that each of its members have with the Lord Jesus Christ. A Christian community can only be as effective and as strong as the sum of the collective commitment to Jesus who is the object of its worship.

Unless the church community is first and foremost--a Christ-centered community--the church is just another community, and as such will be controlling and intimidating, the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the majority over the minority.

The increasing emphasis on community in the 21st century in His word, and in His place we may very well be substituting the collective self with the strong arm of love.

Basing the church on love as an expression of caring can lend itself to all kinds of things; it can be a two-edged sword. Many can indeed be attracted to the church because they were attracted to its love. But the flip side of that is, if I am coming to church because of certain expectations that I have of the members, then when someone treats me wrong, I'm outta there!

Listen now to what I am about to say. Jesus said that the Ten Commandments could be boiled down to two. You remember that we should love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul and with all our mind. And then He said that the second commandment was that we should love our neighbor as ourselves.

What I am about to say is this: Real love, true love, the love that you can trust and count on is one concept with two facets--love to God and then love to our fellow man. Now read my lips. Something that says that it is love that does not make God first is not love at all. By the same token, something that says that it loves God and does not express that love to its fellow man is not love either.

That is why a person who says that they love God and are mean are kidding no one but themselves, and I think that even they know the real truth. Mean people really are mean because they love no one but themselves.

As we begin the new millennium God is being marginalized from our lives, even in the church. The church is supposed to be about God, but you don't have to be in some churches five minutes before your realize that it is really about them.

We are in many cases love bombing each other. Truth is out; love is in. When the church begins to cater to the philosophy that the customer is always right, at first you may have service with a smile. But all the while the product is being diminished in quality until at last there is no product, only service with a smile. Pretty soon, when the product is gone, there is no reason left for service with a smile, and after a while the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.

You have heard the words "social gospel." I worked for twelve years in ADRA--it was called SAWS in those days. I know what the danger of the social gospel is. I remember when I was a teenager. One year soon after the Korean War reports began to come out of Korea that thousands of Koreans were being baptized. I can remember going to camp meeting and hearing men from the General Conference telling the wonderful stories. I can even recall that some began to use the words "Latter Rain."

Years later when I was grown and working in ADRA I heard, as Paul Harvey would say, the "rest of the story." The rest of the story was that after the war, in order to rebuild the country, the US Government sponsored land reclamation projects. These projects were what we would later call Food for Work projects. That means that, if you would work on a certain public works project, they would pay you with a ration of rice.

And so it seems that the SDA Mission became one of the sponsors of the Food for Work projects. In order to receive a rice ration you had to work; in order to work you had to be a member of the church. Do I need to tell you more? We have a word for that now and it is "rice Christians." It is another form of Love Bombing. There seems to be two extremes.

What shall we do about helping people? There are two extremes. One is that we would use rice to get people to be Christians and the other is that we would give rice out to the people and not care whether they heard the gospel or not. The trend in social work is that we are more likely to be doing the latter. A social outreach can be an expression of and an extension of the gospel or it can be a substitute for the gospel!

Excuse me if I put in an aside at this point. As you know, the government of the United States is real strict on the matter of the separation of church and state. They will not let you do any proselytizing with tax money. You can understand that.

The problem that I have, I guess, is, should we as a church accept money for works of benevolence if in order to receive them you have to promise that you will not share your faith?

I know what I am talking about, because that used to be my game. I had no problem with taking their money because I figured that feeding the hungry and clothing the naked was the gospel. I used Matthew 25 to prove it.

Now I am not so sure. The servant of the Lord has told us that there is religion in a loaf of bread. When you really take off on that you can soon have yourself thinking that bread is religion. But then what shall we say about the words of our Lord when He said that "Man shall not live by bread alone?"

I am completely against the concept of making rice Christians-that is, charging a spiritual price for our works of charity. But if doing works of charity with someone else's money means that I lose the right to pray with the person or talk to them about the Bread of Life, then at that point I am getting off.

As long as I am driving you crazy, I had might as well continue. Remember when God gets a bandwagon of reformation and renewal started, the first thing that the devil tries to do is to get on the bandwagon.

When he is not able to stop the forward movement of truth, he will immediately try to mix truth with error. You know, of course, that in the lab of faith and morals, if you take a little truth and mix it with a little error and shake it together, the product is always error. In the same way if you take error and say, "I want to do away with it; I will mix it with truth." Go ahead, do it. Shake it up and check it out. It will still be error. Contaminated truth is always error.

There can be no doubt that the Holy Spirit is trying to lead this generation to all truth. We had truth; we just didn't have the big picture. Now the Holy Spirit is trying to give us the pieces of the puzzle that were missing, and so what do we do? Lose the pieces that we already had!

A word that is coming into our vocabulary as we seek to build community is the word "mentoring." I cannot say anything negative about the concept. You know, of course, what mentoring is--it is the same as having a role model who takes an interest in you and you are accountable to the person. I am sure you must have heard of it by now. The concept is solid and is being used more and more in the arena of Men's Ministry.

Mentoring and role modeling are built around the concept of the power of influence. Let me say some things here about the power of influence. Please be aware that no person can meet another on the street without making some mark upon the other person. We say that we met someone and that we exchanged words, but what we really did for a moment was exchange souls.

There is a law that we might call the "law of influence" and it is upon this law that role modeling and mentoring are based. The law is this: We become like those who we admire. The whole vast pyramid of humanity is built on the law of influence.

The apostle Paul knew of this law and wrote about it when he wrote, "So we all reflecting as in a mirror the glory of Christ, are changed into the same image."

It is an everyday fact of life. We are what we are by the impact of those who surround us. It stands to reason then that those who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into the highest.

We are as much impacted by the law of influence as we are by the law of gravity. We are being changed by language. We are changed by walking in the streets and we are changed as we work side by side with others. The truth is that, want to or not, we are becoming like the ones that we are thinking about. We become like the center of our emotional focus.

As we seek to build community within the body of Christ, we must have Christ and only Christ as our role model. What am I trying to get at? I guess I had might as well just say it.

It seems to me that the role models in the life of too many Christians are men and women that have nothing to do with developing a Christlike character. You will think that I am anti-social, but what I am getting at is that we knew more about the OJ trial than we did about the Reformation during the time of Martin Luther. The people of the theater and of the sports scene are more familiar to us than are the great men and women of the faith whose lives with the blessing of God were responsible for the raising up and preserving of the Church that we all love.

I am amazed that Pocahantas and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are having more influence on our children than the parables of Jesus. More people will come out to the church for Super Bowl night than for any spiritual program that you could work up--the exception might be some gospel rock group.

I know that something is wrong, because though we say that the center of our church and church life is Christ, that simply is not the fact of the matter. We are the center of our church life and Michael Jordan has a greater influence in the lives of the young men in some churches than even their fathers. I don't think that I am wrong. I don't think that this sermon about Love Bombing is built on a premise that we cannot, in fact, demonstrate.

Christ is boring to the average person, so it is no wonder that we are desperately trying to devise and contrive programs that will appeal to a generation that is turned off when you start talking about the "message" or about "truth." There are some who are not so bothered by hearing about Jesus though. That is because Jesus is something that you can conjure up in your mind.

However, when you talk about the truth as it is in the Bible that's when some begin to get nervous. Like: let's not talk about Truth; let's talk about Jesus. Friends, real truth cannot be separated from Jesus, and the true Jesus cannot be separated from the truth of the Scriptures.

While I am talking about the truth as it is in Jesus, let me tell you what happened to me not too long ago on the Internet. I got some e-mail from a minister somewhere in Tennessee. I think he pastors a church called the Creation SDA Church. The subject of the e-mail was something like-"SDA Church in Big Trouble?"

Well anyway, the burden of his message was that the church was so bad that it was time to get out. I e-mailed him back to the effect that if the church was so bad it needed us more than ever, and that instead of being the time to get off it was actually the time to hang on tight and to try to keep others from falling off. I mentioned that Moses didn't jump off when the Children of Israel sinned; in fact, when God wanted to destroy them Moses actually said, "If you do that, you had might as well destroy me, too."

Jesus was the same. He said that He didn't come to save the righteous but the sinners. He even prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Well, I told the guy that I was sorry that he felt that he needed to leave the church and start up a new denomination. The next day he answered me. You should have seen what he wrote. He basically said that I was dumb, not intelligent, couldn't see clearly and must be a part of the other side if I didn't agree with him. I wrote him back and asked him why he was talking to me that way when he didn't even know me.

He replied that he was only being like Jesus; he wrote that Jesus talked tough, too. It was then that I got a new insight that I had not realized before, and that is, that there are two ways to relate to Jesus. One is to imitate him and the other is to reflect him.

But watch out now. There is a difference. If you are into being mean to people, you can rationalize that you are only being like Jesus with the Pharisees or cleansing the temple.

If you are reflecting Jesus you will never be mean even though you may have to set the record straight once in a while and even clean up some things when the situation calls for it, but you will definitely not be mean. Do you see the difference?

I am not interested in imitating Christ, but I am definitely committed to reflecting Him. By beholding Him, the Holy Spirit is changing us. We are having a lot of trouble in our lives these days because we happen to be beholding losers or fantasy figures. This can be--indeed it will be before this is all over--the church's finest hour. You don't have to be a Christian to form some kind of a support group or to follow your favorite guru. There are groups that are totally non-Christian that form strong bonds and capture their members emotionally. I completely believe in the concept of small groups. But small groups should not be places where people simply transfer their dependency from some vice to the group. The group must not be a place dominated by some charismatic leader to whom we must be accountable. We are actually accountable only to the Word of God.

The Scripture says that when we know the truth we will be set free. We will work together, associate together, share together, but we mustn't become, as they say, co-dependent. When I attended Al Anon for a few critical weeks in my life, I remember a person saying that if they couldn't come two or three times a week they couldn't live a normal life. They had become dependent on the meetings.

Our only dependency, it seems to me, should be a dependence on Him in whom we live and move and have our being. Our relationship with each other, it seems, should be less one of dependency and one more of service.

There are commandos out there who are planting love bombs all over the place; they seem to have a form of godliness, but the bottom line is that they are not Christ-centered but self-centered, and they are, in reality, denying the power of the gospel.

They may claim to love their neighbors as themselves, but loving your neighbor as yourself is no license to sleep with your neighbor or his wife.

The Scripture warns us that there would be a time when there would be those who would preach what seemed to be a gospel of grace but it would actually be a gospel of sensuality.

Let us not be drawn to groups or form groups based on the premise of loving each other unless the rest of the truth about love is there, and that is first and foremost we love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our minds. And by that we mean that we will love and obey the truth of the Word, and by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit that dwells in our hearts by faith we will be led into an experience of total obedience to all of its precepts.

You might be thinking, "Pastor O'Ffill, don't you trust anything? How do you live?" I am actually a very trusting person. But in the arena of faith and morals I trust only the Word of God. The Lord is making His eternal truth clear to this generation, and the devil is right in there with a lie that is so much like the truth that, if you trust your five senses, you will be totally deceived.

We are not splitting hairs. We are doing what the Bible has called upon us to do, and that is to discern truth from error.

The song goes, "...and they will know that we are Christians by our love...," but it will be love that comes from a commitment to truth. Love that doesn't spring out of truth can cost you your life. If not your life, then your marriage. If not your marriage, your emotional health. I don't think I need to say more.

I want to close by reading you something from a book entitled, Counterfeit Revivals. It tells about a leader among the Charismatics whose name is Rick Joyner. He has been having visions lately.

In a vision concerning the end-time harvest, Joyner says that Jesus revealed to him that there would a "great reaping among Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and other sects in which there is a doctrinal mixture."

Jesus allegedly went on to point out that these sects would "be won by love, not truth." According to Joyner, Jesus is about to "enormously increase" our understanding on even such basic truths as "salvation and being born again." He even predicts that the end-time church will rise above differences in doctrine and "worship Him in unity." Ominously, he warns that anyone who resists this new "tide of unity" based on love rather than doctrine will be disqualified or removed from leadership.