WYC 2009: This Mind In You

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GYC West

Dave Fiedler: Thoughts on Thinking - A Brief History of Adventist Thought

Dave Fiedler

The Long Campaign: Lucifer, Lies, and Logic

Father, I ask your presence to be with us today.

Lord, I pray for the depth of mind and of heart and solemnity of thought for the topics that we deal with.

We want to treat sacred things sacredly and yet we want to be cheerful and kind and loving and so I just pray that you would strike that balance today for us each.

I pray that you would help us to see and to understand and to benefit from the incredible effort that you've made to preserve information for us.

And we just thank you for that, in Jesus' name, amen.

Where can I put this so I, Maybe I can hang that there?

We're talking about the great controversy basically.

Subtitle there, Lucifer, Lies, Love and Logic.

Jesus, He said to them, I saw Satan fall like lightning.

Now this is just after the 70 disciples had come back from their first missionary tour.

They came back and they said, even the devils are subject to us in your name.

And Jesus said something that to me has always been a complete non sequitur.

I mean, you know, it's a nice thought, but how did it ever fit there?

You know, the devils are subject to us in your name." And Jesus said something that to me has always been a complete non sequitur.

You know, the devils are subject to us in your name.

And he says, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

And then he said, originally it's not that the devils are subject to you, but your name is...

I could easily understand that, you know, human pride and the whole thing.

But I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

And then he said, Rejoice not that the devils are subject to you, but your name is...

Well if you're like most Adventists, you're thinking, give or take 6, 000 years ago when Lucifer was kicked out of Heaven.

Here's the first verse that probably comes to mind.

Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail.

Nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer, so the great dragon was cast out.

That serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world, he was cast out to the earth and his angels were cast out with him." Okay...

But notice something, We were talking about, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

And this verse doesn't say anything about falling.

So is Satan's fall from heaven the same as when he was cast out?

That doesn't show up with as much contrast as it does on some other screens, but you can see cast out there is highlighted.

Please notice the Bible reference, Revelation 12, 7-9.

You're just going to want to keep those verses in thought.

Okay, so this is when Satan fell like lightning from heaven.

Jesus made an interesting comment in this verse.

He said Now is the judgment of this world now the rule of this world will be cast out That's what drew my attention to this verse Now that's kind of strange because this cast out, Jesus is talking just before the crucifixion and it's yet future.

So does cast out really mean the same as fall like lightning from heaven?

And if there's a connection there, what's that do with revelation 12, okay is revelation 12 And some way or the other talking about the crucifixion Struck me as kind of this interesting sort of strange thought Okay, let's go ahead desire of ages 761 Christ bowed his head and died obviously the crucifixion He held fast his faith and his submission to God.

And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, now is come salvation and strength in the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night." Okay, that's interesting.

Before that we had fall like lightning from heaven.

Now, Ellen White is using Revelation 12, 10.

Remember the verses we just quoted from Revelation 7 through 9?

She takes verse 10 and ties it in with the crucifixion.

Are 7 through 9 talking about 6, 000 years ago and verse 10 is talking about 2, 000 years ago?

Why is she quoting that verse talking about the crucifixion?

There we have cast out and cast down highlighted.

After the crucifixion, Satan saw that he had overreached Himself.

Satan saw that his disguise was torn away, that the character he had tried to fasten on Christ was fastened on himself.

It was as if he had the second time fallen from Heaven." Really?

Huh...at the cross Satan fell from heaven at the time of the cross.

It's like there's something going on between these 2 events, of the expulsion of Lucifer and the crucifixion, that is somehow so similar that inspired writers tend to flip-flop them back and forth and get them all mixed up.

Actually, strategically located in the course of the presentation, Elwhaite said stronger things.

Kellogg vs. the Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

Father, now we come to more recent sacred history.

We pray that we would not be misled, or make false assumptions, or get confused.

We pray you would help us to focus on the points of practical personal benefit and value and to seek to understand but never to falter over that which we don't.

We just ask this favor now In Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, we're dealing with a time period, approximately 100 years ago.

I want to start off with 1 Interesting quotation.

As religious teachers, we are under obligation to God to teach the students how to engage in Medical missionary work.

It's 1 of those things that if you don't, there are consequences.

We're going to expand your concepts of medical missionary work.

In order to do that, we're going to have to cover quite a bit of history.

God's thoughts, concepts, practices, they're much more constant than that.

Medical missionary work, we're going to go back to a time period when there was no such thing as medical missionary work in the church because we hadn't heard that phrase yet.

There really was, but we weren't calling it that.

The first time medical missionary shows up in the review was 1893.

I'm sure Ellen White got that from Kellogg.

Kellogg had heard the term because other churches were using that expression, but it hadn't been an Adventist expression.

First time it shows up in the testimonies is 1901.

In English, we come up with words like benefit and beneficent and benevolent.

So, before we had medical missionary work, we had the benevolent work.

This was a term used by some of the Adventists from the late 1860's on to describe efforts to help people, especially the poor, the disadvantaged, or the sick, in practical, tangible ways.

Ellen White used that expression quite a bit.

But even more than that, she simply made reference to Isaiah 58, right?

Share your bread with the hungry, bring the poor to your house, close the naked.

In 1868, we formed the Seventh-day Adventist Benevolent Association to foster benevolent work.

This was largely in reaction to the failure of the church to provide for Hannah Moore.

You may or may not remember Hannah Moore.

You can read in Volume 1 and find the whole story.

She was a missionary to Liberia, which is on the west coast of Africa, just above the equator.

She had 20 years of all-rounded mission experience.

She came back to the States on furlough in 1863 and bumped into an Adventist minister by the name of S.N.

Haskell gave her a copy of Andrew's book, The History of the Sabbath, a couple of little tracts.

She stuck them in a suitcase, took them back to Africa, gets around to reading them over and says, this is wonderful stuff!

All my friends are going to want to hear about the Sabbath!

None of them wanted to hear about it and they fired her.

And made her pay her own way back to the States.

She lands in New England, spends a little bit of time there.

She says, I'm going to go to Battle Creek.

She lands there with a little bit of money left.

58 is not nearly as old as it used to be, but you know.

And her dresses were all 20 years out of date, because she'd been wearing them in Africa for 20 years and didn't want to spend the money that could be used for something more productive.

So she stayed at the sanitarium and was paying for her lodging there and hoping someone would give her a job and nobody did.

She was hoping that someone might put her up in their house and nobody did.

So she wrote to a colleague, Baptist, former missionary, living in upstate Michigan.

So She traveled to upstate Michigan, lived with this family, rather poor.

Tried to teach the kids, but soon she was too sick.

Her only room in the house was the upstairs attic.

It was unheated except for a stovepipe that came up from the stove down below and leaked smoke into the upstairs room.

The Door Was Open: But We Didn’t Go Through

We thank You for the whole occasion, for the weekend, for the efforts of those who've been working to make this all happen.

We just pray Your blessing in practical, real ways that will impact us each and better qualify us to live and work for you.

And on this session especially Father I just ask now that you'd help us to understand, help us to wade through some history, see the past as clearly as we can, and have the wisdom to take those lessons and apply them to the future.

Is there anybody that was not here this morning?

Very quick summary to get us into position, so to speak.

This morning, the immediate predecessor to this, we were looking at medical missionary work.

And we saw that it's a much broader, much simpler work than we sometimes think it is.

And that just being nice to people is a very important component of the gospel.

That's kind of an overly simplified summary.

And that not being nice to people, when we failed to do that, the counsel was, or the statement was, that we have no assurance of eternal life for we do not meet the demands of God places upon us.

So we saw that it was a significant, important issue.

We're going to look this time, this particular session, at what it was a little bit, how it's supposed to go.

Last session we looked at John Harvey Kellogg.

We saw that he warped medical missionary work, somewhat, by his pride And his irritation with the Adventist ministry, who had irritated him.

And they were not defensible in what they had done, but he was not defensible in what he had done.

As a personal reaction against Kellogg, we sort of turned our back on a lot of things that he stood for.

And so it was a case of kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

So, how's that all supposed to, you know, what's the Lord going to do next is really the question.

We're going to start first with this quotation.

If you were here before, you saw this before.

As religious teachers, we are under obligation to God to teach the students how to engage in medical missionary work.

To pick up on the story, about the same time that Dr.

Kellogg was self-destructing in Battle Creek, something new was going on.

Out in California, we had a whole thing going on down in Southern California.

Ellen White kept calling for sanitariums, plural, or sanitaria, perhaps, if you like the Latin.

And she kept saying, we need sanitariums, we need sanitariums.

And specifically, she was saying, Southern California, because it was a tourist destination, kind of a health-oriented tourist destination.

And she kept saying, we've got to reach these people.

We can reach them here, and then they go back to Michigan or well They hey, we already had Edmonds in Michigan.

They go back to their home states They go back wherever and the gospel will be spread that way.

We must reach this inflow, outflow of tourists.

So, the 1 person who was listening to Ellen White all this time was a fellow by the name of John Burden.

And he went out and he bought the Paradise Valley Sanitarium.

And he kept looking and looking and looking.

And hopefully you know the story about the purchase of Loma Linda property there.

If you don't, you really owe it to yourself to read it because we're not going to have time to talk about it now.

Sanitariums, there was a special connection that Ellen White more and more from about 1905, 1904 perhaps, 1904 on, Ellen White kept making as the purpose of sanitariums.

This strong emphasis came into her writings, city evangelism.

We must do more than we have done to reach the people of our cities.

There is to be a working of our cities, as they never have been worked.

That which should have been done 20, yes more than 20 years ago, is now to be done speedily.

Henceforth, medical missionary work is to be carried forward with an earnestness with which it has never yet been carried.

This work is the door through which the truth is to find entrance to the large cities." You see why there's a connection between sanitarium and city work.

It's medical missionary work that is the entrance to the cities.

But they remind me of a story from Oklahoma.

Years ago, there was some intrepid reporter who tracked down 1 of the notorious Oklahoma bank robbers.

And a little reporter finds this guy in his hideout, and he says, I want to do an interview.

And the guy liked publicity, so he says, sure, I'll do an interview.

And the reporter sits him down, and he says, somewhere along the line, he says, why do you rob banks?

Well, that's a really cutting edge question for a bank robber.

And the guy thought about it for a while and he says, that's where they keep the money.

That's a pretty simple reason for robbing banks.

Is it God's plan for them to have big massive cities like this?

Should they have enough smarts to get out of them?

Are there all sorts of reasons why even non-Christians are thinking it's not such a smart thing to live in a city right now?

Picking Up the Pieces: Learn the Lessons, Get it Right

Okay, now those of you who are here first thing this morning, are you appropriately depressed?

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed and challenged?

If I were not convinced that it remains the work for this time, I wouldn't even bring it up.

Until we learn this and we get it right thinking we're taking the gospel to the whole world is fantasy land.

That's the way I'm reading it at the moment anyhow.

The very worst evil can come upon the churches when we think we're doing something that's going to finish the work when it has no chance of finishing the work because it's not properly portraying the character of God which is done through benevolence.

I hope you're feeling tolerable about it.

Our last session here is hopefully intended to leave you feeling more hopeful.

Picking up the pieces, learn the lessons, Get it right.

Whether I live long enough to see it, I have no idea.

I look at this and I say, wow, this could be a 150-year project for Adventism to make those radical changes, go back to some adaptation of this idealized thing that I just presented, and then do this in every city?

I don't know if I'll ever last long enough to see it happen.

Maybe I will be stunned beyond belief to see what the Lord can accomplish in a short time.

But anyhow, let's bow our heads to begin.

Father, we've read some challenging stuff.

Lord, I pray that you would help us to avoid the natural human reaction.

We can easily become fault finding and critical.

But deliver us from just shrugging our shoulders and saying it'll never happen.

Hope that something useful, tangible, practical will come, especially from this last presentation.

Give us your wisdom and your guidance, we pray.

God's plan for finishing His work on earth is actually achievable.

This plan requires the demonstration of God's selfless character by His people, largely through medical missionary work.

Opportunity to accomplish this was provided in a special sense a century ago when the Lord called for a new form of medical education to prepare workers to form the nucleus of multifaceted companies using a wide range of evangelistic skills and techniques.

We haven't fully documented that last 1 yet.

That's part of what we'll be going through now.

Now, when I say company, that does not mean a legal corporation type of company.

Hopefully, for those of you who have been here through 3 hours of this so far, that all makes sense, okay?

I'm going to have to interrupt myself because I must have 1 screen here that got marked, do not display, and I wanted to display it.

I got it printed, but somehow it's not here now.

Okay, we're going to have to just do some things orally for a moment.

In order to accomplish the kind of things we've been talking about, Elmight says there needs to be a decided change.

This is 1 of the influences within Adventism that is traceable to a very, very specific occurrence.

And I wish I could have this up on the screen for you.

Somehow it got moved or something in my file.

During the night of February 27, 1910, the unworked cities were represented before me as a living reality and I was plainly instructed that there should be a decided change from past methods of working.

Decided change from past methods of working.

For months, the situation has been impressed on my mind, and I urge that companies be organized and diligently trained to labor in our important cities.

It's from that statement and from that vision that is what we're talking about now, this decided change, and it's from that statement, she said, organized companies.

And from that we have a term that I'm going to be using, and I'm just trying to introduce it to you now, it's company evangelism.

Company, a group of people working together through multiple facets, multiple avenues, as a body, an evangelistic group body, you know, come in and attack a city, you know, for the Lord, okay, type of thing.

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Series

Dave Fiedler: Thoughts on Thinking - A Brief History of Adventist Thought

The Door Was Open: But We Didn’t Go Through

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Attachments

Parts

The Long Campaign: Lucifer, Lies, and Logic

1h

Kellogg vs. the Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

58m

The Door Was Open: But We Didn’t Go Through

1h 17m

Picking Up the Pieces: Learn the Lessons, Get it Right

1h

Sound Doctrine