Inside Story for Friday 30th of May 2025

By Andrew McChesney

Diana and Loren were planning to get married in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when they found out that they were expecting a baby. Diana postponed the wedding because she didn’t want the baby to be the reason for marriage.

After the baby was born, the couple moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Diana’s parents were living. They had had enough of life in Santa Fe.

Although Diana and Loren weren’t living as Christians, Loren wanted to get married in a church. He chose an Adventist church and contacted its pastor. He also asked his father, an Adventist pastor living near Chicago, to perform the ceremony. This presented a dilemma for both pastors because Diana wasn’t a church member and the couple wasn’t living a Christian life. But after much prayer, they said they felt impressed to “err on the side of love.” Loren’s father gave premarital counseling over the phone.

On their wedding day, Diana was surprised to see church members whom they didn’t know in attendance. Who attends a wedding of strangers? she thought. Her surprise grew when the church members gave them gifts.

Unpacking at home, Diana came across a small book titled Happiness Digest. She thought it was a book from the three persistent women who had visited her in Colorado. She began reading it, and she couldn’t put it down. When Loren came home from work, she excitedly said, “This is truth!” He said, “Oh, that’s Steps to Christ, written by a prophet named Ellen White.” The idea of a prophet confused Diana, but a desire sprouted in her heart to visit the Adventist church and learn more about what she had been reading.

When Diana showed up in church, members didn’t say a word. They accepted her as she was and even took care of her children so she could listen. When she overheard the head elder talking about Bible studies, she told him, “I want to study.” Loren interrupted, “I can tell you whatever you want to know.” He was embarrassed that he hadn’t studied with her. “No, I want to study the Bible for myself,” she said.

The elder, Lorell Herold, and his wife, Carol, came to their home every week for 28 weeks. As Diana studied, her worldly appearance began to change. No one spoke to her about it. No one preached about it. She simply lost interest in worldly things as church members loved her and as she learned about God’s love that was poured out in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Her enthusiasm for the Bible surprised Loren. He wondered what he had missed growing up and began studying the Bible on his own. The two decided to get baptized together.

This mission story offers an inside look at how God miraculously worked in the life of Diana Fish, development director of the US-based Holbrook Seventh-day Adventist Indian School, which received the Thirteenth Sabbath Offering in 2021. Thank you for supporting the spread of the gospel with this quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering on June 28. Read more about Diana next week.

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/25b-09-inside-story-part-5-love-and-marriage/

Daily Lesson for Friday 30th of May 2025

Further Thought: Read Psalms 133:1-3, Acts 1:4-9, and Revelation 5:4-7.

Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com

“During the patriarchal age the influence of the Holy Spirit had often been revealed in a marked manner, but never in its fullness. Now, in obedience to the word of the Saviour, the disciples offered their supplications for this gift, and in heaven Christ added His intercession. He claimed the gift of the Spirit, that He might pour it upon His people.”—Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 37.

The disciples were instructed to bear witness to Christ “ ‘to the end of the earth’ ” (Acts 1:8, NKJV), a work that would herald the return of Christ (Matthew 24:14). We are to continue what they started.

When Christ told us to carry the gospel to the world, He did not leave us alone to figure out how it might happen. The work is directed from heaven’s sanctuary. Our work is intimately wrapped up in Christ: He guides and empowers us. This is His work, not ours: we are asked to follow His lead. You will notice this is how it worked with Israel: God asked them to follow His instructions, and then He made the impossible happen. The Spirit is already at work in the hearts of our neighbors; we are asked to be there when the moment of decision arrives so that we can invite them to join God’s people as they stand with the Lamb on Zion. We do not have to invent new means and methods because we have never been in charge of the work.

Discussion Questions

<–Thursday

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/25b-09-further-thought-in-the-psalms-part-2/

Join the Hit the Mark panel as they discuss Sabbath School Lesson 9 – In the Psalms: Part 2. It’s the fastest hour of the week!

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/in-the-psalms-part-2-hit-the-mark-sabbath-school/

Daily Lesson for Thursday 29th of May 2025

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new black coating that renders objects painted with it nearly invisible. Created from nanotubes, it is many times darker than any black material previously created. This new material can absorb 99.995 percent of all visible light. Even the brightest light fails to make objects covered in this coating visible.

Image © Review & Herald Publishing from GoodSalt.com

Psalms 67:1-7 begins with an appeal for God to “cause His face to shine upon us, that Your way may be known on earth” (Psalms 67:1-2, NKJV). In the plan of salvation, God has provided a way for sinners to be readmitted to His immediate, glorious presence without being destroyed by His glory; and even now, in this life, the cross of Christ makes it possible for God’s face to shine on us.

But there is more: God intends that we reflect His light to the rest of the world. This was the task given to Israel: the temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations: “ ‘Even them I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’ ” (Isaiah 56:7, NKJV).

In this psalm, David reminds us that God wants His “way [to] be known on earth, [His] salvation among all nations” (Psalms 67:2, NKJV). Tragically, God’s people have often failed in this task. Israel’s record in the Old Testament contains some dark chapters, as does the record of the Christian church during the past two millennia. It is as if we have painted our hearts with an ultra-dark substance, content to absorb God’s light without reflecting it.

Sometimes, we treat God’s last-day movement as a kind of privileged departure lounge reserved for spiritual frequent flyers, and we seem quite content that the rest of the world must sit in the noisy, uncomfortable gate lounge, unprepared for the journey ahead. The remnant church of Revelation 14:1-20, however, is not content just to stand on Zion with Christ, basking in His presence. Instead, they fly across the face of the earth, urging the world to join them on God’s holy mountain.

<–Wednesday Friday–>

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/25b-09-that-your-salvation-may-be-known/

Daily Lesson for Wednesday 28th of May 2025

There is some thought that this psalm would have been sung upon the miraculous destruction of Sennacherib’s army (2 Chronicles 32:1-33, 2 Kings 19:1-37)—a story that appears to point forward to the final destruction of the wicked in Revelation 20:1-15. The people of God are inside the Holy City with their righteous king when the armies of evil come up and surround them, and then they are destroyed by God Himself.

Image © Kevin Carden from GoodSalt.com

One of the things that God corrects in the judgment is the mis­ap­­propriation of power that has taken place in our fallen world. Fallen humans no longer live for others or for the glory of God but for self. Today, in many ways, we are living with the consequences of choosing to believe that there is no meaning or objective moral standard in the universe. If there is to be a meaning, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that we must invent it for ourselves and pretend as if the universe exists for our benefit. Each individual, in effect, behaves as if he or she is a god.

(One might justifiably ask: How well did this philosophy work out for Nietzsche himself? Not too well, actually. He went insane, collapsing on a street in Italy after trying to stop a man from beating a horse. He then spent the next 11 years of his life in a semi-catatonic state before his death in 1900.)

However bad the problems are, as believers we are reminded to live with hope and not to judge the future by current events. It is easy to despair as we see the pillars of civilization being steadily eroded by the hearts and minds of the godless or by those whose views of God are not found in the Bible. We are currently living in a period in which moral values, even things as basic as human gender, male and female, have come under assault, at least in some parts of the world. Certain types of immorality, things that many people would have been ashamed to talk about, even privately, are now lauded and applauded publicly. That’s how bad things are getting.

<–Tuesday Thursday–>

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/25b-09-wine-and-blood/