Michigan Camp Meeting 2019: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Plenary

John Bradshaw

Kia Kaha

Mark Finley

Hope Beyond Tomorrow

Lightened With His Glory

Jesus Wins, Satan Loses

Pentecost Repeated

Shields of Brass

The Black Wall Street

Three Secrets of Lasting Peace

To Hope Again

The Second Coming

Our Father in heaven, in the name of Jesus we come.

We are thankful for every heaven-given opportunity to know and share Jesus.

Thank you that you've called us to be witnesses, lights in a dark world.

Many people have come from out of state to be here.

We have come Blessed but challenged and some of us are here today with our struggles and our burdens.

Many of us, we have stared our failings in the face already today.

And so as we are here Lord, we pray that this place would be for all of us a theater of your divine grace.

So would you, Lord, today unleash that power in our lives, hearts, minds, we pray.

Be merciful to the sinful human instrument through which you have chosen to speak today.

I ask that the limitations of fallen humanity would not prevent you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish today.

In Jesus' name, please say with me, Amen.

Please would you open your Bible to 1 Kings and chapter 10.

And when you get to 1 Kings chapter 10, you will begin with me in verse 1.

1 Kings chapter 10 and verse 1, and then we will quickly hasten on a pace 1st Kings chapter 10 verse 1 when the queen of Sheba Heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord.

She came to prove him with hard questions.

It's interesting we don't know where Sheba was.

I've been in Zimbabwe, people said it was here, Zimbabwe.

Someone said to me just last week, Sheba was in Yemen.

I had some Yemeni people tell me the Queen of Sheba came from Yemen.

What we know for sure is that she was the Queen of Sheba and that she came to Jerusalem with a very great train with camels that bear spices and very much gold and precious stones.

And when she was come to Solomon she communed with him of all that was in her heart verse 10 and she gave the king 120 talents of gold and of spices very great store and precious stones There came no more such abundance of spices as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.

And the navy of Hiram that brought gold from Ophiah brought in from Ophiah great plenty of elmug trees and precious stones.

Verse 14, now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in 1 year, interestingly enough, was 600, 3 score, and 6 talents of gold, 666.

What do you do with all that gold If you were to calculate the value of that gold at today's gold price, which is somewhere hovering around 1300 or 1400 dollars per ounce 06:16 ounces in a pound a talent assuming that a talent was what we think it was, somewhere in the vicinity of 70 pounds, and this brother was getting what?

He would have had to have had his own Fort Knox.

Well, King Solomon chose to do numerous things, including in verse 16, the manufacture of 200 targets of beaten gold.

600 shekels of gold went to 1 talent and he made 300 shields of beaten gold 3 pounds of gold went to 1 shield and the king put them in the house of the forest of Lebanon there's a conservationist lurking deep within me that doesn't much like verse 18 moreover the king made a great throne of ivory and overlaid it with the best gold can you imagine this kind of wealth all that gold flooding into Jerusalem every year, to the extent that Solomon decided that in order to utilize some of this gold, he would simply make ornaments out of much of it.

And so what was this that led to Solomon being such a successful merchant in precious metals?

Were you to look back to 1 Kings chapter 9, you would read where God spoke to Solomon and he said if you would be faithful I will bless you now we've got to be careful with that We don't want to make the mistake of trying to buy the favor of gold, trying to procure God's blessing through the giving of our means or the doing of our deeds.

We don't give to get, but we know that in giving we receive.

In fact, it's in the giving that we receive the most.

But then God is so gracious, so merciful, He figures that if you are responsible enough with your means to support Jesus on prophecy, if you would say, I will forsake a meal out, we won't buy that new car this year, I'll buy a second-hand car instead, that will free up money that I can put into the Lord's work.

If you have that kind of responsibility about you, God may well say, here have more money because I perceive that you are likely to use it in the best of ways.

By the way, when the devil sees that we are tight-fisted and closed hand and we have very shallow pockets, it may well be that your material blessings are coming from the devil who knows that with more of this he may drown you.

God promises faithfulness and we want to be faithful.

Not just the first 10%, not just the first 10% and whatever you are predisposed to give as offering, it is all God's.

And God said to Solomon, and by extension to you and me, if you are faithful, I will bless you.

But God blessed him in his faithfulness abundantly.

But God said to Solomon, if you are not faithful, the consequences will be significant.

And we pick up the story in 1 Kings chapter 14 and we discover That faithfulness turned into faithlessness pretty quickly.

1 Kings 14 and verse 20, The days which Jeroboam reigned were 2 and 20 years, and he slept with his fathers, and Nadab his son reigned in his state.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, reigned in Judah.

Rehoboam was 41 years old when he began to reign and he reigned for 17 years in Jerusalem The city which the Lord did choose out of all the tribes of Israel to put his name there his mother's name was Nehemiah she was an Ammonitess And Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord.

And they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they had committed, above all that their fathers had done." Ladies and gentlemen, the Bible says, Resist the devil and he will do what?

Now that word resist is not a passive word, it's an action word.

It means you have to take some initiative.

We aren't listen Israel went from the height of blessing to the depths of vile misery Almost overnight you are gonna see what happened in a span of just 5 years 5 years We aren't to watch and then look out upon the city and say, is not this great Adventism which I have built?

You know there were great revivals in the coal mines in Wales.

You go back a hundred or so years, maybe a little more, great revivals.

And churches are being retrofitted and used as pubs and houses.

And there are a few people darkening the doors of the church in Wales and you all are thinking Wales really it wasn't long ago and England was alive and pulsating and throbbing with love for God and the preaching of the gospel.

It is a very short distance between blessing and people choosing to run out from underneath that blessing.

The future for us is guaranteed only in Christ, only as we cling to Jesus.

Now somebody said the Bible doesn't need to be defended, it's like a lion, let it loose and it'll defend itself.

That may be so, but your heart must be, your mind must be, your family must be, your home must be, your faith must be, your church must be.

It's not far from faithfulness to faithlessness and we're about to see this.

Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord, verse 23.

For they built them high places and images and groves on every high hill and under every green tree and there were also sodomites in the land and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.

There they were in Egypt, in heathen, atheistic Egypt.

But God preserved his people down there in slavery.

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