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

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Closing the Back Door

Olan Thomas

Closing the Back Door - Part 1

Closing the Back Door - Part 2

Closing the Back Door - Part 3

Closing the Back Door - Part 4

John Bradshaw

Closing the Back Door - Part 5

Our Father and our God, we're so grateful for life today.

We're thankful for the friendships that we build and maintain and continue at camp meeting.

But most of all, Lord, we're thankful for a friendship with you that we can maintain, grow, and continue here at Camp Meeting.

Bless this session as we share together how to discover, encourage, strengthen each other in truth, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, This is our final Spark presentation for this week here, but today we want to talk about affirming truth.

We've been talking about how to avoid losing members, right?

We've talked about a lot of different things and we had the exciting discovery in our first day for those who may not have been here that only 5% of people who leave the church leave because of doctrinal differences.

So the other 95% of people who, for 1 reason or another, leave your church, they're leaving for some other reason.

Usually, often, it's that they just sort of slip away.

They go camping 1 week, they go to visit grandma another week, and they don't show up for a few weeks.

Nobody seems to notice, and so it becomes easier not to come than to come.

And so we've talked about how building relationships so that when they are missing a week or 2, somebody notices, sends them an email or a text or a phone call or a friendly word, talked about a handwritten postcard, whatever we can do to remind them that we noticed, We noticed.

Even if you know why they're gone, still you could send them a bulletin and say, hey, here's what happened.

So we've talked about some of those things, but today we want to talk about affirming truth.

We talked yesterday about the gospel, right?

How we need to be empowered to build and grow our churches because we have a message to tell to the nations that no 1 else has, right?

A lot of nice churches people can join, probably friendlier than yours, probably more wealthy than yours, probably have more programs and services than yours can provide.

Because we have a message that's unique, that God has commissioned us to understand and then to share, right?

The 3 angels messages, the gospel in the context of preparing people for Jesus to come.

Very different message, very important message.

Our job as Seventh-day Adventists is to share that message, right?

We have a commission, a job description that no 1 else has.

No 1 else has the job description that we do.

That is to prepare a people for Jesus' second coming.

So now today, in our final session, we're gonna talk about affirming truth.

How do we discover truth so that we can rest trust in the truths of the Bible?

New members will be challenged regarding the new truths they've embraced.

Brother said yesterday here that his family didn't understand, couldn't comprehend what he was getting involved with.

You've heard this statement, no doubt, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

That's really what we wanna do in Bible study is teach people how to search the word themselves, right?

How to discover truth, how to grow in Jesus.

But of course, they have to find the right information.

You can read the Bible and come up with wrong conclusions, especially based on the assumptions that we come to the Bible with, Right?

We all come with assumptions, but if our assumptions dominate our Bible study, then we can come to wrong conclusions.

That's why William Miller, you remember when he studied, he said he put everything aside as much as he could, right?

He just took a Bible and a concordance and he studied and he didn't go past a verse until he felt like he understood what that verse meant, then he went to the next verse and the next verse and little by little of course it began to just unravel and open up to him.

So we want to feed people for a lifetime.

So the primary requisite, of course, to understanding the Bible is what?

Prayer and the receipt of the Holy Spirit, right?

Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

God leads his people in a spiritual sense.

But you are getting the air though that the rest of us aren't.

1 Corinthians 12, 14 and 15, the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to Him, nor can He know them." How many of us have a carnal nature, a sinful nature?

So if we stay in that, we really can't understand spiritual things.

Spiritual things come by submission to God, committing our lives to Him, trusting that He will guide us, especially that He'll guide us in the study of His Word.

Verse 15 says, because they are spiritually discerned, but he who is spiritual, he who has the spirit of God, judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no 1.

We need to commit to God to be able to understand what God's Word has to say to us.

So spirituality as it relates to the Bible includes prayerfulness, humility, and consecration.

That defines spirituality in the sense that we're using it.

Prayerfulness, humility, and consecration.

Now here's an important passage, perhaps a key 1 for us today.

Jesus says in John 7, verse 17, if anyone wills, if we want to know his will, God's will, it says he shall know the doctrine.

Whether it is from God, or whether it is of mine own authority, or whether it is of man, some of your translations will say.

So, Jesus has promised, I think we can take his word to the bank, don't you?

Jesus has promised that if we want to know his will, he'll reveal it to us.

We must want to do his will as we come to Bible study so that he can lead us and direct us and get us to where we need to go.

A couple thoughts from thoughts of the Mount of Blessing.

The soul that turns to God for its help, its support, its power, by daily earnest prayer will have noble aspirations, clear perceptions of truth, and of course, duty.

You see our problem is in Western culture, We've been trained that we can do it.

That's why we go to school, why we take training, we get certifications, we do.

We tell our kids that, you can do it, you can do it.

We need education, we need certifications.

But sometimes those things can get in our way, can't they?

We can rely on those things instead of relying on God, the source of our health.

I told you all here that for 6 years I served in Madagascar, 1 of the 10 poorest countries in the world.

And when I came back, people would ask, so why does the church grow there and it doesn't grow here?

When we left Michigan in 1989, If I remember correctly, we had 20-some thousand members.

When we came back 6 years later, the church membership in Michigan was 100 or 500 more.

Membership in Madagascar had doubled in the same period of time, setting them side by side, same period of time.

Membership doubled there, increased here.

But I went to churches there that were nothing but a carport.

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Series

Closing the Back Door

Closing the Back Door - Part 5

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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