2021 Maryland Men of Faith Conference: No Fear

<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>

Maryland Men of Faith

Justin Kim

Navigating Through Politics: Lessons from Adventist History

This media has been presented to you by the Maryland Men of Faith, where men are challenged and encouraged to form the character of Christ.

For more information, please visit www.mmof.org.

You are in the seminar entitled, Navigating Through Politics, Lessons from Adventist History.

I am not a student or an advent fan of politics by any means, but I was asked to present this topic because we are, at least in North America, in a very polarized political milieu and figuring with all the topics about fear that politics was apropos to that.

Today, this is a PowerPoint presentation, and we're gonna look at different quotes, especially from the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy from Ellen White.

She has a lot to say, well, not a lot to say, but she does mention about politics and some elements about history within the Avenist denomination.

So that's the perspective I'm coming from.

This is being recorded, and we hope that if you have any questions or any comments or insults, that you put that towards the end of the presentation.

And we'll have some time for dialogue after that.

But we do want people who are listening to this recording, for them to appreciate the entire presentation in its whole.

I know that the glucose is now slowly being diffused through your body because of lunch.

So I do want to encourage you that if you do feel the specter of sleep coming upon you, to stand up and you have that luxury to do that.

Or if the person next to you is being possessed by another spirit, just take this elbow that the Lord anatomically created to be the sharpest part of your body and just jam the person next to you as hard as you can.

You have permission from the speaker to do that.

But you can walk around and we have some water in the back and if you don't drink water some poor soul has to bring that water back.

That is a waste of gasoline and resources and we don't want to be wasteful, okay?

So before we get into the message prop, I'm going to ask that you bow your heads and we'll ask for the Lord's blessing.

Gracious Father, we ask for your blessing upon this presentation.

Transcend this PowerPoint into points of power practically in our lives.

Lord, inspire our minds, speak to our hearts, and Lord, we ask that you shake us out of our fear, help us to fulfill our role as men in these last days, and to bless my brothers in a very special way we pray in Jesus name.

Politics often overrides gender, race, religion, language, and ethnicity.

This is a quote by some statistics or an article in the Stanford News by a Stanford scholar.

I'm going to wonder what kind of Asian he is.

Please don't ask me if I'm North Korean or South Korean, because I'm going to ask if you're North American or South American.

In our culture, it is pretty strict in that we want our children to marry others of the same culture.

They shouldn't marry white people, black people, purple people, they should stay yellow.

And this quote says that even more than culture, even more than language, people identify politically.

Politics is a very hot topic, especially if your identity is rooted in it.

How many of you, we have Thanksgiving coming up, and what are the 3 topics that you should not talk about during Thanksgiving dinner?

I talk about sports a lot during Thanksgiving.

I mean, I went to, I was pastoring in Michigan and The Detroit Lions lose every Thanksgiving, every single 1.

And we talk about sports, but obviously you don't talk about sexuality.

Yeah, you don't want to talk about sexuality.

You want to go to a men's seminar and go to a particular seminar where they talk about that stuff, but not during Thanksgiving dinner.

So we are in, and by the way, for this purpose, We're talking about the North American context, but this does apply because politics you'll find in every other culture in every other Culture a nation around the world Just to get our our nomenclature in our terms when we talk about politics.

We're talking about the role of government, specifically the role of power.

How is power, how should it be exercised?

You have the right wing and the left wing.

The right wing tends to lean on saying, hey, reduce the power given to government, and then the left wing is expand the power of the executive.

These are not restricted to political party.

These are not restricted to 2 groups in every culture, but you do have these 2 tendencies.

We get left-wing and right-wing from the French.

When the Republic was started, you have the monarch was sitting there, and the 1 sitting to his left, they always wanted to increase his power, and the ones sitting to his right always wanted to decrease his power, so we still have the remnants of these terms still with us today.

The role of power and how you view it is your politics.

It has nothing to do with political party, and We'll talk about that a little bit later.

If that particular person has that power, should they exercise it?

Too often in a church we talk about, like, oh, I hate the church.

It's actually improper usage of the term.

For example, if you're trying to get something passed through in your church board and it doesn't get passed, it's not politics.

It's not expansion of power or limitation of power.

They don't allow you to do what you wanted to do.

You were in the minority or there's some interpersonal beef that you got, or veggie beef if you're vegetarian, and you've got to get that resolved.

What we're talking about in church politics, for example, in Seventh-day Adventist Church, our GC president is Elder Ted Wilson.

According to the way that our church is structured, and I do a seminar on church structure, which is a different seminar, that he has certain powers that he has given to him by the Constitution, given to him by our bylaws, and that he should exercise those.

So, for example, if he were to come to the Newmarket Seventh-day Adventist Church and he comes and says, you know, Mark, I don't like you at all.

As GC president, I say excommunicate Mark Mashburn, you are no longer an Adventist church.

The only entity in the Adventist Church that has jurisdiction to do it.

By the way, excommunicare, we don't do that in the Adventist Church.

Please, I gotta watch my, because some people are like, oh man, he's a Jesuit.

So, who does have jurisdiction for local church membership?

They have every right to say, you are a member, you are not a member.

When you get baptized, your pastor said, hey, how many in favor for bringing this guy or bringing this gal into the church?

And then the local church board has the right to say, hey, we don't think this person should be a member of our church.

This person was seen in El Brado, and he was drinking like 9 gallons of alcohol, and he puts it on social media, and he hates the Seventh-day Adventist Church and he hates Jesus Christ, we just don't think he's a great witness and he's not a great Seventh-day Adventist.

And so this is not a decision on salvation, Amen?

We pray for that person and we should work doubly hard for those people that we not excommunicate but this fellowship.

But the GC president doesn't have that jurisdiction.

Now if the GC president were to say, hey our church is now going in this direction and for a world mission we're not going to go to every city, every urban city, and then relocate finances for urban ministry, does he have the jurisdiction to do that?

The General Conference is in charge of a world mission.

If a local church were to do that, do they have the jurisdiction to do that?

Back to Menu

Navigating Through Politics: Lessons from Adventist History

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

02 When Adventists were Activists

57m

Defending Religious Liberty in an Age of Deception

03 The Truth Behind Christian Nationalism

50m

Jesus for President

33m

His Invitation

04 Reconciliation, Unity, and Latter Rain Power

1h 1m

Norman McNulty Weekend

01 Prophetic Peril in America

48m

Week of Prayer

The Prayer of Jacob Under Religious Persecution Part 2

53m

Religious Liberty 2022

Adventists and Religious Liberty Go to the Fair

58m

End-Time Events & Religious Liberty Implications

Secularism’s Role in End-Time Prophecy: Revelation 11

1h 2m

All the World Marveled

Preparing For the Lion’s Den

58m

Kingly Power: Christian Leadership Series

01. Kingly Power, Alliance, and the Way Forward

51m

Sound Doctrine