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

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart

Daniel Towar

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart - Part 1

Our Father in heaven, today we want to thank you for the opportunity and the privilege to learn more about preaching.

And particularly, we want to 0 in on the conclusion of a good sermon.

That would be the appeal for people to accept Christ, to accept Bible truth.

And we pray your blessing as we open this class.

I pray that our time will have been well spent here today and that Jesus will receive the honor and glory for that.

Okay, when we were in Romania on 1 of our mission excursions, they were thrilled to have us there because we had not been scheduled to come to this particular church.

It was in an out of the way place and it was difficult getting there in a Dacia.

We used to say the Dacia's gotcha, that was their automobile in Romania.

And as we traveled those bumpy roads we called it the Valley of Ha because the car would go up and it would go down and would bounce us all around and we finally got to the little place called Fontanelli and when we got there we had a meeting.

We'd already had an earlier meeting at the city site.

The city site was in Bistritza, about 100, 000 people there, and there were several hundred people that arrived for that meeting, and that wasn't publicized either.

It seems like a series of miracles looking back because We were picked up from the Bucharest International Airport, on a tiny field or something like that it's called.

And 1 of the people that was there to pick us up was my translator.

They had paid him to come to our series of meetings 2 years prior to this.

We had gone there, he was 18 years of age.

His mom wanted him to come to the evangelistic series, and So they bribed him, literally, they paid him in order to get him to come.

Now we had about 25 meetings, he came to 4.

And I don't know what that says about my preaching at the time, but he quit coming after 4 meetings even though he was being paid.

And here I am teaching this class, you know?

Anyway, so he was the first to greet us when we came back 2 years later.

And he translated 61 presentations for me over the next 6 and a half weeks.

Everything I said in English, he said in Romanian.

And it was a wonderful time, and I'll tell you more of the story a little bit later.

But we got to our meeting site in the city and they'd done no preparation and there were hundreds that showed up.

They had 2, 3 days to put posters on telephone posts in town.

And then we went to Fontanelle and there was absolutely no preparation for that except word of mouth 1 day and the upstairs to that church, it was a house church, was full of people.

And not only that, not only was it full, but at the end of that meeting, they fed us a supper.

I usually don't like to eat late at night, but it was all prepared, it was all made.

It was salad, soup, entree, probably had cabbage rolls, if you're familiar with Romania, and then they had like a cake dessert.

We weren't even hardly hungry, but we ate it out of courtesy, and it was delicious food, and we appreciated it so much.

And there was a woman that seemed anxious to talk to us, and she said this, and I will never forget it, and I don't even tell the story very often.

This is probably the third time in the last 25 years that I've shared this story, but she said to us that her son had passed away, the head elder of that church, the month before we arrived.

He was 32 years of age, his wife was there, He had 2 young children, 2 daughters.

And so we heard the heart-wrenching story about how he had gotten sick.

The whole town had showed up for his funeral service.

And she said she had had a dream weeks before our arrival.

And there was an angel that told her that the Lord was going to send them comfort in their affliction.

And the ones who would bring the comfort were Americans.

And they were going to bring you comfort in the hour of your affliction.

And she looked at us and she said, you are the very ones I saw in my dream.

And that was a richly rewarding experience.

I wish I could tell you more about Fontanelle, but I wanna let you know going into this, that God has us on a mission.

I do believe what Pastor Sligar has been teaching us in the early morning service that we are in a war.

This is serious business and if the Lord of heaven cared so much about us back there in 1995 to send an angel to tell a dear saint in a church in the outback of Romania with 10 active members, but they filled their little church with people.

If he cared so much about them and us to do that, he cares about you.

He has a message He can give through you.

The promise is given in the book of Isaiah 55, in verse 11.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth.

It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereunto I send it.

Your greatest failure may be God's greatest success.

It's not a test to preach to 20, 000 people, Mark Finley has said.

It's not a test to preach to 10, 000 people.

He has said, if you want to preach to 10, 000, preach to 7 like it is 10, 000.

It's not a computer that we need more of.

I use computer, but you know I've had times when my computer goes down and I just tell the people, we still have the Bible.

Your message has to be Bible based and not computer based.

I praise God for computers, but you don't have to have 1 to be a successful preacher of the gospel.

We're not called to success, but to faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

We need more of Christ, and we can use more of Christ in our messages too.

I have a friend right now, I'm giving him Bible studies.

It's part of our personal witnessing, where I'm an elder of our local church.

And he said to me, he says, you Adventists, I think you have it right.

And I texted him today, and he's praying for me, and He's praying for this class on decisions.

She said if we're not preaching Christ in our messages, This is out of Gospel Workers, about around pages 140 to 160.

Read the whole section, it's all very good.

She said we're doing the work like Cain did his sacrifices.

We're bringing impressive looking fruit, but we're not bringing the Lamb of God to the people.

In America, among all Christian churches, 1 church closes every day on average.

So Christian churches today are in trouble.

Sometimes you might be tempted to think that Seventh-day Adventist Church, even your local church, is in trouble as far as, is it going to be alive 5 years from now?

Is it going to be alive 10 years from now?

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart - Part 2

Father in heaven, we want to thank you that we could be here today.

Thank you for in your providence that you've led us here.

And I pray that all of us will learn together how we can be effective spokespeople for you.

We can also lift up the hands of our pastors and elders, and that you would lead a mighty revival in our church and many people into this true faith in these last days.

I'll say, okay, so the gospel challenge, I really believe that there are, there's a, this is a time for true revival within the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

And I believe a true revival is taking place.

I believe the Holy Spirit is beginning to be poured out.

And when you see people leave the church and various heresies come into the church, that's not an evidence to be discouraged.

It's an evidence to be encouraged in the Lord because you know that the time is drawing near for Jesus to come.

I also believe, whether you would share with this or not, and I don't want you to misunderstand this, but I believe the Lord is preparing for the Adventist church to have a great influx of members.

As some people are being shaken out, Ellen White herself said many more, this is my terminology today, are gonna be brought in, gonna be shaken in if you please.

And there's some true revivals going on out there.

And maybe it was 1 of these pastors, he had a burden on his heart that 20, 000 ministers in North America would begin asking through appeals in their churches for decisions for Christ every single week.

Why wouldn't we do this within the context of the Seventh-day Adventist Church?

I've heard many, many sermons through the years.

I've given a number of them myself, where the sermon probably wasn't too bad.

In fact, it may have been an excellent sermon, but as Louis Torres says, you can give an excellent sermon, but if you haven't given an appeal, it wasn't excellent.

It wasn't a good sermon if you haven't included an appeal.

And I've heard ministers, and I've done this.

You preach your heart out, and then you sit down.

Well, we need to be asking people for an appeal.

We ought to be giving them that appeal and asking them to make a decision for Christ, for the distinctive Bible truth that we have as Seventh-day Adventists.

We ought to be asking them for a decision each and every time that we preach.

It doesn't mean they have to come to the altar every time, but they can stand up, they can raise their hand, they can bow their head in silent prayer.

I have a handout from Mark Finley that goes through 7 different distinctive appeals, types of appeals.

But if some of you promise, say we're gonna be here 5 hours, I'd give you everything.

This is a big subject and there's not enough about it.

I'm thrilled that you're interested in appeals.

How many of you today would like to raise your hand and say, I'm interested in giving better appeals?

This happens to be the Troy Church pictured here, but there's 184 churches within the Michigan Conference.

I don't think any of us really know, but what would happen, why don't we try what would happen, if each and every Sabbath for the next year, say beginning of July, there would be an appeal made for Christ for a distinctive Bible truth, for the true church, for baptism.

At the end of the pastor's or the elders' or the layperson's sermon, and that appeal was made from the heart, and there was at least 1, just 1 person on average in each of those 184 churches that made a decision for Jesus that day.

Now you might say our church only has 10 people coming.

I believe with all my heart that if those 10 started hearing the pastor and you giving appeals every week, they'd say, you know what, I'm gonna invite my friend because that may be their best chance to accept Jesus.

And you might say, well, we need to accept the Sabbath.

Yes, include that too, include the Sabbath, the State of the Dead, everything else.

We can give more appeals than anybody else, right?

But if they accept Jesus in the context of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Sabbath morning, do you think those people will also be interested in coming back and learning more?

184 churches times 52 weeks, 1 decision every Sabbath on average in every church.

Let's just say the church with 10 members, they had a decision every week.

The church with 400 members, they had 1 decision every week.

That'd be nearly 10, 000 decisions in 1 year.

And I believe we're lacking on decisions for Christ because we're hearing a lot of excellent messages, but we're not hearing enough appeals.

And I can tell you this from pastors I speak to and from this pastor here, and when I did my doctoral degree on giving appeals, I can tell you this, we work hard, most pastors I believe, I'll give them credit, on this sermon week by week, we better.

Because people come to church, first 2 big reasons they wanna come to any church, Adventists or not, is because of the preaching.

And if the preaching isn't good, they're not going to come back.

They'll find another church, and if they don't find it there, they'll stop going to church.

But more than that, we also need to ask for appeals.

Raise your hand, stand up, bow your head in silent prayer, make that decision for Jesus.

We don't take enough time to write that out.

Now you have an appeal today and every day, and I promise that if nothing else, I'll make time for that at the end.

We'll skip by some really good stuff, and I'll just give you an appeal.

But we need to start taking time for that, okay?

So 9, 568 new decisions for Jesus this year in the Michigan conference.

And if 20% of them were baptized, that'd be 2000 baptisms in Michigan.

And that would be about 300% more than we're getting now.

Now, I don't know, we're somewhere around 700, 800.

A number of years back, about 10 years ago, we got close to a thousand baptisms in a year.

But even if we were recording a thousand a year, 2, 000 baptisms out of 10, 000 decisions, that'd be twice what we got in a high year, amen?

The Holy Spirit is just waiting to be put to work.

I walked down the hill with someone I'd never met, and I'm sort of a shy guy, actually.

And I was hoping he'd say hi to me, but he was a good-attentive guy like me.

He wasn't saying hi, and I wasn't either.

We sat together through the morning meeting.

I found out he's been baptized just 3 years.

He used to go to a church that my daughter and her husband pastored when they were here in this conference, and I was thrilled.

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart - Part 3

Father in heaven, we want to thank you today for Jesus.

Many of us are here because we heard a gospel appeal, a presentation.

Maybe it was during an evangelistic crusade like it was for me, and we made a decision, we came forward, we raised our hand, we stood, maybe it was as recently as last night as Elder Finley again gave an excellent appeal.

And Father, we want to serve you with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind.

We pray that your blessing would be in this class today.

Okay, so who preached powerful biblical appeals?

And we're gonna find out there is a theology about appeals within the Bible.

We've had an excellent appeals seminar here at camp meeting and it's been taught night by night by Elder Finley and on Sabbath morning.

He is, I believe, personally, this is just my opinion, I told you not to say that, right?

But I believe that, It's okay to say I believe, by the way.

While you're preaching, if you want to make a point in a good and positive way, when you say I believe, that's good.

But if you say in my opinion, That doesn't carry any water, okay?

And don't say okay after your sentences either.

So he's been giving an excellent appeals seminar because he's been doing this night by night.

It's worthwhile being there again tonight because you'll hear, Believe me, it's his fifth night, or fifth out of 5 presentations, and you won't want to miss it.

If you can't be there, listen in on the radio, get the tape, it's not a tape anymore, I believe you can download all these digitally, if I understand correctly, from camp meeting this year.

Elder Finley talked with us this morning.

He said, I'm going to give you a million dollar tip.

He said, all you have to do is find $1 million bill crossing the street in front of you, if there was such a thing, you would pick it up and you'd be an instant millionaire.

And he said, for some of you here, this will be worth more than a million dollars.

He said, you need to sow seed to be successful evangelists.

Secondly, he said, only God can grow the seed, and he gives you results in proportion to how much seed you have sown.

He can't bless something that you haven't sown.

So sow the seed as far and wide as many different ways as you possibly can, and then pray earnestly and let God grow the seed.

And he has, this is mine now, but he has his angels and his Holy Spirit, and he blesses people that work for Him.

Sometimes you'll sow a lot of seed, but there's other seed that God is aware of and He will bring people who didn't receive the handbill.

He'll bring people who've been thinking about this for years.

I talked with a young man, I told you the story yesterday, going to the early morning meeting together.

The Lord was working on his heart for a long, long time.

There is a seat right here for the A student.

I thought, Olga has the guaranteed A here.

God blesses in proportion to the amount of seed you sow.

And that will guarantee you a lot of interest in various stages of growth.

And there will be people in various stages of growth all the time.

If you do enough sowing and praying and trusting in God, and you keep having an evangelism calendar, you will win many souls.

You know what the Finleys do at their church, Living Hope Church in Virginia?

Every Monday, they have a health class for their community.

And that's a tall order, I know, but if you invest big and dream big, you're gonna reap big.

So every Monday, and I know it's a preaching class, so I'm preaching, okay?

Every Tuesday, they have a Bible study class for the community, they advertise it.

Every Wednesday, they have prayer meeting.

Every Thursday, if they have any business of the church, well, not every Thursday, but they reserve Thursday for board meetings or business meetings, something like that.

And on Sabbath morning, they come early and they pray.

Okay, but I believe it's Sabbath morning.

They pray early that the Holy Spirit will be there that Sabbath.

And they have a burden for their community.

He said the other day, I can't remember which 1, but he said he wanted to go to a small church, 30 members.

But really, when you think about it, those are the secrets, and that's what they're doing.

And I know evangelism works because we've always had evangelism as a pastor, and I've never been in a place where we didn't baptize souls from evangelism.

Continue going to the meetings, and if you really want a good seminar tonight, go to Elder Finley's meeting.

Every appeal is sowing seed, every appeal.

And the Lord grows the seed every time an appeal is responded to.

In another burden, I said the last couple days, I guess I'll just keep saying it again because I hope someone here will take an interest in this and I'm hoping someone who is listening where's that recording device I know it's around here somewhere.

Everyone who is listening, listen to this.

Well, you maybe didn't know that, but there's 184 churches.

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Series

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart

How Prophetic Preaching Touches the Heart - Part 3

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

The Plan of Salvation

03 The Plan of Salvation

1h 14m

Why Are We So Numb to the Cross?

45m

The Big Questions (Evening Meetings)

9. A Poisoned Lottery Ticket Winner

1h 38m

Jesus Friend of My Wounded Heart

The Healthy Mind

39m

Broken but Loved

1h

Love Versus Force

51m

Healing and Hope in His Wounded Hands

58m

Back to the Mission

The Battle Cry of the Remnant

1h 1m

Acts: First Generation Lessons for Last Generation Believers

6. Cutting Timothy

55m

It is Finished

37m

Eyeing Isaiah

40m

Kingdom of Fire

52m

Sound Doctrine