Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

Eugene Prewitt

01 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Our Father in heaven, I'm asking that you'll bless us here as we talk about what is right and true.

I ask for that gift and for your spirit, in the name of Jesus, amen.

So in Malaysia, let me introduce myself briefly.

I grew up in Alaska, and my parents had that moving bug where we moved a lot.

Partly that was because My dad was a smoker and my mom loved to teach church school.

And those 2, that's not a good combination.

So it resulted in lots of moving around for us.

And that final move was to Alaska because, it wasn't final, but in this story it is.

Because my mom thought in Alaska, they'd be so desperate for teachers, they surely wouldn't care about my dad smoking.

That's what she thought, so she applied, but my dad decided to go ahead and apply for a job in computer IT work, because that was his field.

So he had been working in Flint just before that.

My mom didn't get a job, but my dad got a very good 1.

And that is where God trained me and raised me and where I became a real Christian.

My family goes back here in Michigan a long ways to Alvin Marsh 7 generations ago, a bear trapper.

You know, trap the bear, shoot the bear, skin the bear, sell the skin, leave the guts, that kind of, that's what he did for a living, and he became the head elder and the first head elder of the Edenville Seventh-day Adventist Church.

He didn't eat the bear, so it's okay, right?

And someday I might tell you a bit about him, but not today, because I'm talking about me.

When I was just about 17, I got an idea that I don't want to have regrets a million years from now.

I don't want to look back at my short life on earth and wish I had done something else.

Like, many of you are at the age where you can actually look back already and wonder what you should have been doing.

And I decided as a young man to try to do what I had wished I had done a million years from now.

I'm just introducing myself, so you can even come 5 minutes from now and you wouldn't miss anything.

So because of that, I did not really get what you would call a formal education.

And if you only like listening to people that have advanced degrees, you still have a few seconds to walk out, because I don't have even an associate's.

If you wonder, what are my qualities for speaking?

What did happen to me is I found that academically, reading and studying science and math and history was very easy, and selling books was very difficult.

But at the end of the week, when I thought about where did I accomplish the most good.

Was it calculus and chemistry, or was it selling a few books?

I concluded that the thing that was hardest for me happened to be the most useful thing I was doing during the week.

That was at Oklahoma Academy, 1988 and 89, where that happened.

So I decided to continue in that canvassing business.

And it was that canvassing business that kept me busy until GYC started.

And this is the longest introduction I've ever given for myself.

And in 2002, we had the first GYC meeting.

Did any of you attend that in California?

And that might be it, because that Y stands for youth, you know, in the GYC thing.

And it was speaking there at the first GYC that kind of launched me as 1 of those traveling speakers.

And something that has bothered me since then, so that's been 19 years, I began to wonder Why is it that so many of the traveling speakers are Americans?

You know, we're only like 5% of the world's population.

Why is it that the Americans are the ones that are being flown around to teach and preach.

And I'll tell you what I concluded, just for your own edification.

I think it's because we have the writings of Ellen White in our native language.

I think it's because in this country, many people have read them and studied them and that that has produced a class of quality people of power that would not exist if people were not reading them.

And in many countries you don't have many of the writings.

And even, I was in Bangladesh 2 weeks ago.

In Bangladesh, I met a number of young, zealous Adventists who don't have any burden to ever read anything by Ellen White.

They don't have anything by her, and it doesn't bother them.

And I was just thinking if only they had had the resources that we've had in this country, maybe we'd have powerful Bangladeshi people that could be traveling around.

I probably shouldn't have said that, because this is on recording.

So anyway, canvassing and educational work, those are the things I've been doing forever.

That's where my wife and I live even now.

And West Malaysia, where we are, about 1 in 5, 000 people are Seventh-day Adventists.

I think here in Michigan, it's probably about 1 in 150.

I think in the Philippines, maybe about 1 in 90.

I thought I should be in a place where the people I talk to on a day-to-day basis don't have many chances to know the truth.

So 1 day there in Malaysia I was walking along when I saw a troop of monkeys that were jumping through the forest.

You know, when monkeys jump in the canopy, they tend to break a lot of branches.

Any place where there's a lot of monkeys in the jungle, there's a lot of branches on the ground.

And what happens is when a monkey jumps from here to here, he doesn't jump from here to here.

The reason that doesn't hurt monkeys is they never aim for the lowest branch.

So when the branch breaks, they just put out their hands and they catch the next branch on the way down.

If they were in South America, they might put out their hands, feet, and tail.

But in Malaysia, the monkeys don't have useful tails.

They don't have the kind of tails where they can hold on to things.

That's more of a South American thing than an Asian thing.

Anyway, so here was 1 of these monkeys, and as he jumped over the road I was on, the branch he landed on broke, and he put out his hands to catch the next 1, but someone had cut the branches along the road, you know, to make room for a crane or something.

So there was nothing, and he fell all the way to the ground.

I thought I was going to see a monkey die.

But the monkey, not only did he not die, but he didn't even stop to brush himself off.

He landed and ran to a tree and climbed up very quickly.

We have dogs on our mountain, and dogs love to eat monkeys, but dogs can't climb trees.

So the dogs are just waiting for a monkey on the ground.

02 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

Our Father in Heaven, I'm asking you to bless our hour here, mostly by giving me wisdom to know what to say and what not to say.

Also by speaking to the minds of those here.

Teach them what you will, even if it differs from what I say.

Strengthen the influence of whatever I teach that is useful, and weaken the influence of whatever misrepresents you or your cause.

I ask for these gifts in the name of Jesus.

I was sitting there in Malaysia in a room that was similar shape to this, but that was the only similarity.

A lot of buildings in Asia are made like that because it's the nicest way to get air conditioning there.

And so I was sitting there and there was a man in front speaking, like I'm speaking to you, but you're paying more attention to me than I pay to him because behind him was a troop of monkeys.

And what I saw there in that situation is that there was a very steep mountain, 123456.

So There's seats for all of you and then 1 more seat left after that and that's it.

And but you won't be sitting together, I'll tell you that.

Now don't forget, you're in the midst of a story.

So there's a mountain right here, it's very steep.

And most of the trees on this mountain are about 20 years old because someone came to Malaysia and just logged the place of all the great, huge jungle trees that would have been so gorgeous to see.

Trees, you know, you can hardly imagine the size of those kind of trees, but they're not there anymore, so you won't see them.

But in the base of that valley are huge granite boulders, and those boulders were difficult for the machinery of the loggers to get around, so trees that were growing out of the boulders weren't cut.

Now as a consequence, the biggest trees in this area grow out of these boulders because they have a 60 year or 100 year head start and all the other trees.

Does that make sense to any of you what I'm saying?

So the type of monkeys that are in this forest are leaf-eating monkeys, and this particular group of them learned that they could climb here and they could manage to jump this.

And they were really enjoying themselves in that tree.

It had so many juicy little baby leaves, just what they love to eat.

The first 1 to do it, all the rest were doing it.

But on this tree, I mean I drew trees the way that people who don't know how to draw do, but if you had drawn the tree correctly, there would have been other limbs.

And there was 1 limb right here that's relevant to this story.

1 monkey that was here noticed that no 1 was eating the leaves on this limb.

So he jumped down, it was about 10 or 11 feet, and began eating and he enjoyed himself.

But when I saw that, I knew that he was in trouble.

Because monkeys don't have the kind of claws that squirrels do.

Monkeys climb the way you do, by grabbing branches and swinging and jumping, and that's how they do their thing.

And there was no way from this branch that he could get back up to this 1, and there was nothing to jump to.

He had just put himself in a little trap, and he didn't even know it for about almost as long as the guy in front was talking, he was eating here peacefully.

And when he was done, he went to the end to look for a place to jump and there wasn't any.

So he went back to the trunk, couldn't find anywhere to go, and he just went back and forth for quite a while in denial.

He just couldn't accept the fact that he was really in bad shape.

And when he did, he decided to do what you might try to do.

He tried to put his arms around that big trunk and to shimmy down.

And he made it only about to hear before he fell.

And do you have Bibles with you here in the seminar?

I should also turn to be a good example to you.

Proverbs 22, verse 3, it says, a prudent man, Don't you like that word prudent?

Like in England, prude has become almost like an insult.

But really, it should be a badge that we'd enjoy to have to be prudent.

It says, "...a prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are..." what?

What I learned from this monkey is the value of foresight.

That it's valuable to be looking ahead and to see what's going to cause trouble.

The monkey would have been better off before he went down to think about what comes next.

You know, I mostly deal with young people, and mostly you aren't young people, but mostly I deal with young people.

And when I asked them, what are some things that people do where they don't show enough foresight, they come up with a group of answers.

You might come up with a different group.

Can you think of anything people do that doesn't show enough foresight?

That in marriage, many people seem to think that all that matters is warmth and fuzziness and chemistry.

And I had a call from a lady in New York once.

You see, he was Catholic and she was Adventist, and they had made a deal when they got happily married, he would attend Mass and she would attend church, and that worked out pretty well, but they had a baby.

And as the baby got older, he went to both Mass and church, but he was coming up to the age where it was time for him to make his first confession to a priest.

And mom didn't want him to make a confession to a priest, and dad did.

I told her that your husband has as much right to raise your son as you do.

He has as much right to make a decision about your child as you do.

And there's no way that I can tell him that he should violate his own conscience or do what he thinks is wrong just because of what you think is right.

I didn't need to tell her, but it was definitely implied when I said that there was a mistake when she married the man.

And I don't know how that worked out, but I'm just telling you, yeah, that's a good example, isn't it?

Drugs, and maybe even alcohol and tobacco and the whole bit.

I hope you won't get angry at me when I say this 1, but let me try to say it as tactfully as I can.

03 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

Our Father in heaven, I'm asking that you'll bless this session by giving me ideas of what to say and what to leave unsaid.

Fill us with your spirit according to your own plan.

So we're not done with Romans chapter 14.

And while I was here, because you know where we left off, I was talking about the Passover, how that was a doubtful issue in the first century.

And you've been Adventists, some of you long enough to know it's still a doubtful issue in this century.

You're not really late, it just says 30 right now.

I just started 30 seconds early, so don't feel ashamed.

Paul talked about the Passover in such a way as to help us to be tolerant with each other.

So someone came up during the 10 minutes we just passed and said, well what about people who are saying we need to keep the feasts today.

I think probably 1 or 2 of you would be in that group from a group this size, probably 1 or 2 of you would be in that group.

And I think Romans 14 verse 1 gives us a great guideline.

What it says is, receive those that have these doubtful disputations, but not to the point of disputing.

Receive those of a weak conference, but not to the point of arguing.

What Paul would say is that you and I can disagree about whether you need to keep the Passover, but as soon as you make that the present truth, you don't fit in the church anymore.

Because the church has a commission of what to take to the world.

It's the message for this time, and as soon as you make it something else, then you've just interfered with what needs to get done.

So I don't have any trouble at all with you believing that you should keep the feast, even trying to convince me that it's good to keep the feast.

I don't even mind if you convince other people it's good to keep the feast, but as soon as you say it's required, as soon as you want to teach that it's required when the church is saying it's not required, suddenly you're making this an issue.

And that's just what verse 1 says should not be permitted.

Verse 1 says that if you want to make an issue that isn't an issue in your church, you need to start your own group.

You make your own group, you determine for your group what the negotiables are and the non-negotiables are.

Now I don't mean by this that the church always gets it right about what is and is not negotiable.

I think I need to write some things on the board and I'll do it as I'm talking.

Your pioneers, By the pioneers in this sentence, it's just a fancy word Adventists use for the Adventists between the 1830s and the 1870s.

Those people when things were getting together.

When I say pioneers, I don't mean they're more special than you, I just mean they're a lot older, all right?

The pioneers were the ones that formulated a lot of the things that we teach today.

They came out of many different churches and they came together on a group of teachings.

But those pioneers, many of them came from an organization called the Christian Connection.

The Christian Connection was a denomination, it was a localized denomination in Massachusetts that had a very interesting set of beliefs that attracted a lot of Bible-believing people.

They didn't have another creed that you have to, you know, say, this is what I believe, blah, blah, blah, and now you can be a Methodist.

They didn't have a creed, but they did generally not accept the idea of the Trinity.

Generally, the Christian connection did not believe in the Trinity because they found it wasn't in the Bible.

If you don't have a creed except the Bible, then the Trinity really can't be part of your creed.

Does that make sense to anyone what I'm saying?

And their position on the Godhead was that there's God the Father and there's the Son and there's the Spirit.

But they probably didn't think of it in any way like the Catholics would say at that time.

The Catholics, when they would teach about these 3, sometimes in their artwork, they almost picture it as like 1 head with 3 faces.

There are some artworks, some sculptures made like this.

The theologians talk, saying some things that it's hard to even, like you can say the ideas, but it doesn't mean you understand them.

They teach that the son is eternally being born from the father.

Not that it was done in the past, or not that it's gonna be done in the future, not that it's happening now, but It's all at the same time forever.

So that there never was a time when the Son wasn't.

I think that whether you believe that or not, you really don't.

Because, I mean, if part of belief is comprehension, I think you can't comprehend that idea sufficiently to believe it.

We just, and then they would say that the spirit is eternally emanating from the Father and the Son.

So that since it's always happening, in 1 sense they are 1, but in another sense they are 3.

And the Christian connection, when they viewed that, viewed that as just a bunch of theological nonsense.

Like, you can't find any of that idea in the Bible.

And some of the people that came into our faith from out of that group included James White, and included Uriah Smith.

And you know what these men have in common?

They were 2 of the primary editors of our primary church paper for decades.

So other people that came into Adventism, like William Miller, he was a Trinitarian.

You know, William Miller, he was a Baptist.

And when the Adventists came together, 1 of the things they agreed on was the Sabbath, eventually.

1 of the things they agreed on was the investigative judgment eventually, but they never even tried, at least it looks like to me, they never even tried to agree on the issue of the Godhead.

And when you look at what our non-Trinitarian pioneers wrote on the topic, they wrote, I made a list of 7 of them, including J.N.

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Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

04 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

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