Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Plenary

Jim Micheff

As a Witness

Ron Kelly

How Low Can the Church Go

Cheers to Philippi - The Double Knotted Church

MI Conference Direction

The Clinton Campaign, the Johnson Amendment, and the Mission of the Church

Mountain, Molehill, and Mission

Different or the Same - Christian Standards in the 21st Century

We've prayed before, Lord, hopefully by ourselves today, and then hopefully in many other groups, in seminars and other locations, and even tonight, Lord, on this platform in this place.

I am completely dependent upon You, Lord, to make this live.

And we are all completely dependent upon You for the work that needs to go on in our hearts and minds.

Perhaps the changes, perhaps the resoluteness for lives that are already focused the way I'm going to talk tonight.

May we realize 1 life is too short to show how much we love you, and help us to focus them the right way.

This is my prayer tonight in Jesus' name, amen.

The picture of the red car that's about to appear on your screen is not an actual replica, it's not an actual picture of the car that changed my life, but it looks pretty close.

I was a young pastor and 30 years old and had just come to a new church and the head elder had a vision.

Now some of you know the head elder, some of you are probably related to that head elder who I still revere as a father in the faith, a spiritual man.

You know, after you've taught a full life at 1 or more of our institutions like he did at Indian Academy and Broadview Academy and some other places.

And God blesses you sometimes with a little way to relax and to have a little bit of fun.

This was a car that he really enjoyed, but God started moving on his heart.

And he came to me 1 day and he said, Pastor, I have an idea.

And if you're going to be a leader, you need to be a good listener.

And so I thought, well, let's listen to the good idea.

And he said, you know, there's a program coming up in the church called Net 95.

And Net 95 is something that I think should happen here and he says I'm willing to sell my little MG and donate it might have been all of the money to get the equipment to do net 95 and I thought to myself oh boy how do I tell this man I think Net 95 is a terrible idea.

Now I hate to confess that to you, but you know some of the older people are much wiser.

Most of the older people are much wiser than the young people.

And Elwynn Scholl was a man of prayer and a man of persistence.

And so Elwynn Scholl would come by and see me every once in a while and say, pastor, what do you think?

And then eventually he came by and he said, pastor, I sold the car.

And pretty soon, it was looking like it was going to be impossible for me to say, sorry, we can't do that.

So he put his money in a tithe envelope, and it went in a fund for Net 95.

And we bought 1 of those great big dishes, the kind that looks like they ought to be used at a mountaintop observatory or maybe for a satellite company.

And you know, we were 1 of about 600 churches that joined in the first Net Series.

And I can't tell you how thrilling it was to me on the first night when that signal came in and there was Wendley Phipps singing, lift up the trumpet.

And then Elder Finley came on and as he was preaching about Daniel chapter 2, my heart thrilled as the Spirit of God moved through the man, the message, and the medium of satellite technology.

And at the end of net 95, we baptized a biologist, and a nurse, and a lawyer, and a businessman, and a paralegal, and about 2 or 3 other people.

And those individuals were all relatively young, and over a period of time with the commitment to serve Jesus they actually became some of the leaders of the church totally transforming the experience of that church in Indiana all because a man had a vision, a man had commitment, a man put his money where his mouth was, and a man who prayed didn't give up.

And I want to praise the Lord for those godly people who believe that this message ought to go forward.

The Bible says this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached into all the world for a witness unto all nations and then the end shall come.

This is tucked away in the chapter on the signs of Jesus coming, but Jesus won't leave this topic alone.

When it comes to the last parting words, he says, go ye therefore and teach all nations, Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you and lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world." Now, what I love about the Bible and especially about the teachings of Jesus is how simple they are.

He set the bar at a place that most could reach it easily, and even more could reach it with a little bit of effort of understanding.

And With some good teaching, it's not hard to embrace the meaning.

I want to combine with it that Scripture that was on almost every Seventh-day Adventist church sign for a generation or 2.

You remember those signs back before we had message boards and electronics.

There tucked away, the writing wasn't very large, but we had this message.

I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and tongue and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come.

And worship Him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of water." I learned that as a pathfinder.

It's important that we understand the message.

I've done a whole series of sermons just on those 2 verses, and they are deep and beautiful and awesome.

But there is a problem inside of Adventism, and rather than talk about Adventism, maybe I should say there's a problem inside of Adventist.

Maybe what I should say is there's a problem inside of me.

There is a real tendency for us to come to know only the church and not the Lord of the church.

There is a tendency for us to become accustomed to the good life, the American dream, and not really dream about what Jesus has in mind for us.

Now I'm going to put a definition up on the screen.

It says right here, it's an adjective of or relating to a population subgroup within a larger or dominant national or cultural group with a common national or cultural tradition.

I want you to know that the Adventist church is at a pivotal place where if it's not careful, it will start looking like Judaism without the Shekinah glory in the temple.

We're in a moment in time where Adventism is 5 generations old for some.

It should only be 1 generation old for all of us.

If we're not careful, we will find ourselves relating to the church as a religious club.

And we'll go there on Saturday because we always went on Saturday.

And it's really a place I go because I don't really want to tell my mom and dad I don't want to go anymore, or it's really just a place I go because it's a habit.

We have the ability right now of becoming a group that has an ethnic identity.

We're a subgroup inside the American culture and a subgroup inside of religious culture and it's possible if we're not careful that we will become only an ethnic group, not a spiritual movement.

Now our society right now is becoming more and more narcissistic.

You don't have to look around too far to see that this is the I generation.

And there are people who have written articles on the topic of this next word, cool.

It's an informal word that says you're trying to be fashionable or attractive or impressive.

Now I've never really been a fan of the word.

It's okay to use it in certain circumstances, but I always found, I went to public school for the first 6 years of my life, and I always found that it was the cool kids that made my life difficult.

I can remember being chased home from public school by the cool kids.

I can remember my back against that cold chain link fence while the cool bully with several of his cool friends were threatening to do me in.

When I left public school and I went to church school, I didn't leave all the coolness behind.

There are people who are still quite focused on impressing others with themselves and our whole culture is like that.

As a matter of fact, the clothes you wear if they don't have the right symbol up here or on the back, if they don't have the right swoosh on the shoes or the right little faux leather patch right back here on the right side of the waist.

If the car isn't exactly right or the phone isn't the right model, whatever it might be, then our fragile Identities might not be what we were hoping they would be, not so impressive, fashionable, or attractive.

We weren't called to be cool, and we weren't called to focus attention on ourselves.

We were called to focus attention on Jesus, and by the way, Jesus was absolutely not cool.

As a matter of fact, Jesus at times endured the wrath of those that were cool in order to make sure those that weren't cool and were on the outs with the cool crowd actually understood what love and acceptance really was.

The problem was was that even though I was trained as a minister, I didn't realize I was subscribing as much to the cultural mantra of fashionably attractive or impressive as I was.

And God had a plan to liberate me from it.

He made me do some things that either I was going to be true to my calling, and you remember last night I talked about Moses needing to learn honesty.

It's that honesty when you know this is what I have to do and I know people aren't going to like it.

I had to do some of those things that absolutely was going to rob me of being fashionable or impressive or attractive.

And over a period of time, Jesus was taking the world's mantle of self-focus off of me and He was giving me a freedom to just be like Him.

I hope it's going on in your life, but I want you to be aware that when you can talk about God and the Bible in the church, but you can't look somebody in the eye and you can't talk about Jesus, there's a problem.

What I found in my life was that I could put the witnessing hat on.

I'm not 2 people between church and home, but even though I wasn't 2 different people at church or home, what I found was was that when I felt self-conscious talking about Jesus with somebody and I couldn't keep eye contact, I realized there were things in my life that were accusing me and I didn't have the freedom that I needed to have.

I'm convinced that our church now, with its wealth and its education and its recognition amongst the pantheon of Protestant churches, that we are hoping to hang on to something that doesn't produce the fruit of the Spirit and doesn't make you happy, we will have to go back to the place like the generations before us where we were respectable but we were different, and the main person we represented was Jesus.

I want you to be able to kneel down by your bed or wherever you pray, by an open window, wherever it might be like Daniel, and I want you to find the place where Jesus can speak to you, where it's not a spiritual monologue, and what happens is is that along the way what He asked you to surrender, you let go of, but what you get to embrace is a fuller sense of confidence in Christ.

Back to Menu

Series

Plenary

The Clinton Campaign, the Johnson Amendment, and the Mission of the Church

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Rediscovering Church

58m

Working Together

43m

David Guerrero Weekend

01 As It Was so Shall It Be: What Is A Christian Suppose To Do?

51m

Plenary

Why is Jesus Always Talking About Plants

1h

The Faith of the Faithless

34m

The Joy of Discipleship

53m

GYC 2012 Morning Devotional

Resurrecting the Church

52m

The Key to Finishing the Work

Taste and See

1h 8m

Dylan McWilliams Weekend

Our Tactical Advantage, Part 2

1h 4m

That Woman Jezebel

51m

Prophesy Again

1h

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

6. Wondering After the Beast

1h

Sound Doctrine