Karen's Story: My Steps Home

“Jesus is coming to pick up his friends.”  That statement, coupled with my desire to teach my children about Jesus, started a quest in my heart to know Jesus.  I knew religion!  I knew about the seventh-day Sabbath and its “rules.” I knew about Ellen G. White and the state of the dead. My head was full of data about Seventh-day Adventism, but Jesus was a stranger.  I don’t blame Adventism for my lack of relationship with Jesus. It was my own failing. It seemed that religion had taken the place of relationship in my heart. 

God wanted His place back in my heart. He set up individualized study paths for my husband, Royce, and me at the same time.  Royce’s subject matter revolved around the Sabbath and New Covenant.  I felt compelled to know Jesus. 

My family was instrumental in the founding of both the SDA hospital and college in Madison, Tennessee. In fact my mother-in-law took some classes from my grandfather at Madison College before she continued her education at Emmanuel Missionary College.  As a fourth generation Adventist I continued the unquestioning pattern of Sabbath-keeping and church attendance nearly devoid of any focus on Jesus. I was further impregnated with Seventh-day Adventist practice and beliefs in SDA schools from kindergarten through graduate school. It all seemed to hang together neatly so I was content just to go along with the flow. I actually loved reading The Signs of the Times as it pointed to the fulfillment of all I had anticipated in the culmination of Earth’s history.

When our children were young we decided it would be best if we attended church more regularly.  We went to several of the Nashville-area SDA churches but never felt like any of them fit. Soon after changing jobs in 2000, I met a surgical nurse who was also an alumnus of Southern.  When I asked him where he went to church he told me that he was no longer a SDA but was now a New Covenant Christian.  My expression betrayed the fact that I didn’t have a clue about what he had just said.  Slowly, over the next few months, he shared with me the beauty of the New Covenant. It took a lot of repetition for it to sink in.  It was counter-intuitive to my previous mindset but the appeal of freedom and intimacy with Jesus drew me to study and prayer.  

As I got deeper into the word of God it became apparent that I was studying my way out of Seventh-day Adventism.  Seeing the splendor of God’s gift of grace in the New Covenant made the writings of Ellen White stand in stark contrast. It was clearly evident to me that she was not a prophetess.  It was at this point in my walk that Royce and I decided to attend a grace-centered Seventh-day Adventist church in Franklin, Tennessee.  We loved the pastor’s sermons and we decided to make it our church home.  But God had other plans.

Around that time my sister urged me to listen to The Stone Cutter’s Bride by Sam Pestes.  These tapes began to fill in the gaps of understanding regarding the New Covenant.  They were further chinked by an eighty year-old family friend.  Ed had spent his life as an SDA, but the truth of the scriptures captured him, revealing glaring errors in the church of his fathers. As he shared his understanding of law versus grace in Paul’s writing, I began seeing it as Paul did and stopped looking at scripture through Adventist glasses. 

Embracing grace was a long ways away from a willingness to let loose of the Sabbath or the laws of Moses. I needed another divine encounter and she came to the YMCA. As we exercised together she shared that she, too, was raised in a legalistic church group. Her epiphany had come from the book of Galatians.  She suggested that I read it over and over.  Royce and I followed her suggestion.

The Lord will use anything at His disposal to break through to us, including the preacher at Grace Point SDA church. In one memorable sermon he made it clear that grace is a free gift and that there is nothing we can do to earn our salvation.  In that moment Royce and I felt the axe sever the chains that had bound us. We had been set free. We needed to live free. We could never be the same again. He’d closed that door.

Now that I was studying the Bible without a dogma to defend, The Holy Spirit was revealing things that I had never seen before. Paul’s writings were a joy, not an exercise in frustration. God had led me so far, but now what? I had never attended one of “Babylon’s” churches.  “Where do we begin, Lord?”  “On your knees!”  Though the Holy Spirit had led us by separate paths, Royce and I had ended up in the same place. After all, there is only one God. We knew that the work was only started and that He would never leave us or forsake us. We asked the Holy Spirit to guide us, and once again, unrelated people invited us to the same church where we now belong. World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee is an inter-denominational church that teaches pure biblical truth.  Our spirits are reborn.

The joy that is now in my life is like nothing I have ever experienced. I am free to worship Christ without a filter.  The scales fell from my eyes. I worship God with all of my energy, resting everyday in the work He did for me on the cross. At the beginning of this story I mentioned that I don’t lay my lack of passion for Jesus at Adventism’s feet. It was my own failure to respond to His overtures to me for fear they would lead me away from the Sabbath and my beloved culture of Adventism. Forgive me, Jesus for putting them above You.

 Royce and I would like to invite our family, friends and readers that remain in the Adventist religion to read Galatians and open their hearts and to understand that God changed the day of worship.  In Hebrews 4:6, 7 the writer says, “Therefore, God again set a certain day, calling it Today.”  Worshipping God is not about a day. It is about a person, Jesus Christ.  I pray that God touches your heart through our stories and that you too shed the yoke of slavery and the worship of a day in exchange for a relationship with God through His Son and our redeemer Jesus, The Christ.  Amen!!!