Discovering the New Covenant by Greg Taylor - exAdventist Outreach

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DISCOVERING THE NEW COVENANT
and many others, began boldly teaching the message of
grace. Lives began to change, and the Gospel was proclaimed.
Our own professors in the religion department at
Southern were clearly teaching the good news to the students.
Spiritual life began to spring up everywhere. They began
to teach differently about the judgment and Law. While
they did not repudiate SDA teachings, they approached them
from a grace orientation. They still taught the seventh-day
Sabbath, the investigative judgment and other core SDA
doctrines, but focused on grace rather than legalism. They
emphasized Ellen White’s grace oriented statements instead
of her legalistic, perfectionistic ones. I was blessed by these
men as they shared God’s love. It was at Southern that I became
an Adventist by conviction.
I studied education because of a growing passion within
me to teach in a church high school and help others in the
Adventist system to learn about Jesus, rather than focus entirely
on the legalistic rules of the church. I felt it was my
personal mission to take the good news to youth and young
adults who had been brought up in Christ-less legalism as I
had been. I became active in youth ministry in one of the
area churches and shared Jesus at every opportunity. By the
time I was a senior, the local SDA conference (a regional
association of Adventist churches with elected officers)
sought me out and invited me to become a pastor. By this
time, I was willing to consider serving in that role, something
I had sensed God leading me to from my childhood but
had resisted through most of my college experience. I accepted
the invitation and served as an intern for one year at
one of the local churches.
Meanwhile, Desmond Ford, a professor at Pacific Union
College in California, released his research revealing that the
investigative judgment doctrine was, in his estimation, not
supportable by Scripture. He had been so captivated by the
Gospel that he began to see that the idea of a judgment of
believers that could cause them to lose their salvation ran