Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Personal Encounters with Jesus

Doug Batchelor

1. A Cold Confession

2. A Tree of Life: Zacchaeus

3. Seeing Is Believing: The Man Born Blind

4. The Secret Christian: Nicodemus

5. Finding Living Water: The Woman at The Well

Tonight I'd like to talk to you about the glory of sight and light, the light of salvation.

Now first I have to set it up and tell you the whole story.

Back in 1995, Mary Ann Franco, lives in Okeechobee, Florida, was in a serious car accident.

And it injured her and her spine and consequently as a result it did something to the brainstem.

She went blind from the accident and she spent the next 20 years living in a world of darkness, groping around her house with a cane And then to make matters worse, she had the accident initially when she was 50 and 20 years later, actually 21 years later when she was 70, she fell in her house, which is more prone to happen when you're blind, and hit her head and injured her spine and in a lot of pain and the doctor said you know you're going to have to have surgery.

And so she finally they set it up and she went in and she had the surgery on her neck And while she was in the recovery room, she's still kind of coming out of the drugs, she said to the nurse, you lady in the purple, please give me something for my pain.

And her niece was sitting there and said, Aunt Mary, what did you say?

She said, I like that lady in the purple.

And she said, first of all, how do you even see her?

And how do you know what color she's wearing?

Something happened during the surgery, and her sight came back.

And what was amazing is prior to her accident in 2005, she had been colorblind all of her life.

So her vision not only came back, but she, for the first time in her life saw color.

The doctor being interviewed said he has no way of explaining this and he's very reluctant to admit it, but he said this is as close to a miracle as anything I've ever seen.

And in her own words, she is so excited to have her vision.

She says she can see her friends, her pets, and she has never laid eyes on her 7 grandchildren to find out what they look like.

She deeply appreciates the simple things we all take for granted.

With her eyes welling up with tears, she told the news crew that was there, the sun is coming through the trees.

And she fully gives God credit and says it was a miracle that she went from blindness to sight.

You know, I don't know if you've ever thought about it, maybe when you're feeling melancholy, if you had to lose 1 of your senses, which 1 would you want to lose?

And it doesn't take long for me to know the 1 that I would miss the most is my sight.

I think someone said once about 80% of what comes into your brain comes through the avenue of your eyes.

Light is so important and yet much of the world is in darkness.

Darkness will cover the land and gross darkness the people.

Friends, we've never lived in a world where there was such darkness.

It's strange because we're living in an age now where we have more artificial light than we've ever had before, and yet we have more darkness than we've ever had before.

In the very beginning, Darkness was on the face of the deep, but God's Word spoke and light came into the picture.

God wants to speak light into this dark world again, and He's going to do it through His people.

And light is appreciated the most when it's the darkest.

I remember reading about a boy in New Mexico back in 1901.

And he was riding around looking for some missing cattle.

And just around sundown, he thought he'd better turn around and give up his search.

And he saw off in the nearby hills smoke rising out of the hills and he thought well that could be a brush fire I better see what's going on So he rode over and it turns out it wasn't smoke at all, but there was this vortex of bats, a virtual tornado of bats, so many of them that it looked like smoke, were just billowing out of his yaw in the earth.

And he thought, I've got to check this out without telling his family.

He came back a few days later, found the spot again.

He took some barbed wire he'd brought with him and some sagebrush and he made a ladder and he descended into this gaping maw in the earth and big old yawing chasm and he was the first modern person to see the inside of Carl's Bad Cavern.

Well, that takes a lot of guts or recklessness, 16 years old.

And 1 time he was way off with a lamp into the bowels of this dark cavern and he ran out of fuel and his light went out.

Now I don't know if you've ever been way down in a cavern or a mine and had your light go out.

Sometimes my friends and I, matter of fact, we're going next month.

We kind of do this man thing where we get together, a bunch of Christian men, and we go out in the deserts of Nevada.

We drive our trucks as far as we can and then we set up camp and we bring our quads with us, our four-wheelers, and then we go riding.

We've gone as much as 100 miles in a day.

We go exploring these old mines and I remember 1 year we went into these mines and we'd take our lights with us and old abandoned, They're just, I mean, they riddle the hills out there.

Old abandoned mines and there's signs everywhere warning, stay out and stay alive.

Of course, we don't pay any attention to that.

There's no fun unless there's an element of risk.

It's not fun unless there's any danger involved.

The Lord made us to go forth and conquer, Subdue the earth.

And I remember we got off in the middle of 1 of these caverns 1 time.

We kind of made a video, I hope it never finds its way to YouTube, that we had discovered the lost Ark of the Covenant.

But we turned off our lights and we were hundreds of yards back in these mines.

And it was so dark that you could not tell if your eyes were open or closed.

And you know, that's how much of the world it is.

They're just living in absolute darkness.

1 of my favorite verses is in 1 Peter 2 verse 9.

That we're no longer strangers and pilgrims, but we're a nation of priests that the Lord has called out of darkness into his marvelous light.

And for me, Christianity and the Seventh-day Adventist message in particular is so precious because I remember growing up in a world where life had no purpose.

The only thing in life was to try and have as much selfish pleasure as you can because you're gonna die.

And any of the morals and values that people taught me to me seem meaningless because I thought what made you think that's right or wrong?

There's no God, there's no purpose, who puts you in charge?

My right and wrong is just as good as your right and wrong.

We're just highly developed organisms that have happened by chance over millions of years.

And so when you spend 15, 16 years of your life thinking there is no purpose to life and you're just wondering how you're going to die and turn back into fertilizer and you learn the truth that there's a God and there's a God that loves you and there's a purpose and you're made in his image, you didn't evolve from some monkey.

And it is so exciting you want everybody else to know.

But now the world seems to be evolving backwards and even the church could be going from light to darkness because what happens is through overexposure, those things that should offend us, we get to where we're used to it, and it starts influencing our thinking.

And little by little, you can get used to the dark.

You can read in the Bible where it talks about Lot when he was living in Sodom and Gomorrah.

He said that he delivered, this is 2 Peter 2.7, he delivered righteous Lot who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked.

For that righteous man dwelling among them tormented his righteous soul." If it wasn't for Peter, we wouldn't even know Lot was righteous.

That righteous man dwelling among them tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds.

And as Solomon surrounded himself with pagan wives, that man that once loved the Lord and walked in the commandments of the Lord and built the temple of the Lord, his heart was turned away, little by little, by being surrounded by evil influences.

So how do we prevent ourselves and our values from being transformed into the values of the world?

God has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light, but through constant exposure, we can get used to the dark.

We can get where we can't see the difference.

You know, there are fish that live so deep in the ocean that no light penetrates and they've lost the ability to use their eyes.

Their eyes are just vestigial organisms, organs I guess you'd call them.

Series

Personal Encounters with Jesus

3. Seeing Is Believing: The Man Born Blind

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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Seven Reasons Why Satan Hates the Sabbath

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Revelation Made Simple

18. Revelations Spiritual Revolution for a New Millennium

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Plenary

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The Eleventh-Hour Labourers

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GYC 2012 Seminar: Christ - The Watchword of the Revolution

A New Way to Read, Part I

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The Seventh Day

The Seventh Day- Part 2

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1h 7m

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1h

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56m

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