Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Plenary

Jim Micheff

Who Are You? The Remnant and Its Mission

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

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

That are going to be marching on Sunday and the adventurers.

I think it's marvelous that we have such a program as Pathfinders and Adventurers and Little Lambs and Eager Beavers that teach character building principles.

And then of course when they're completed we are able to recognize them and give them the honors and achievements that honor those achievements that they've made.

1 of the things that I always liked to do was when I was able to do that, I would be able to come and join them for an investiture.

Investiture where we would give them those pins that they had earned for completing those requirements.

And I actually was scheduled over here at Cedar Lake, right across the road, on a Sabbath.

And right after Sabbath, the church service area, in the afternoon, I was supposed to be in Mount Pleasant, which is not too far away.

So I enjoyed being with those kids in the morning during church time.

Had the time to visit with them and spend some time with them, and then I looked at my watch and I thought, oh no, I'm going to be late to my next appointment.

So I quickly said goodbye to them, took my coat off, my uniform off, and I hung it on a hanger and I put it on the back, you know, right behind my seat and hung it right there by the window.

And then I started off towards Mount Pleasant.

Now some of you guys that are around here know that it's a little shortcut if you go down 46 and then you go down Warner Road.

And so as I'm heading down 46, I called my wife just to have a nice conversation with her while I'm driving.

And when she says, be careful, I said, no problem, I'll be careful.

Well, I turned off of 46 on Warner Road, and there's a spot there, and those of you who are local, you know there's a long stretch, it's kind of flat, has very little shoulder, if any, on the side of the road, and very deep ditches.

And so I'm intent on trying to be on time where I'm supposed to be and I'm driving along talking to Gail and all of a sudden I see a very unique car come towards me.

And this unique car has this effect on me that every time I see it I look to see how fast I'm going.

And when I looked at my speedometer I realized that I was well over the speed limit.

And I said to my wife, I said, oh no, I'm going to get a ticket.

I said, I'm gonna get a, you were, weren't you watching how fast you were going?

I said, no, I'm sorry, sweetheart, I gotta go.

I looked in my rear view mirror and I could see that the taillights came on this car.

And it stopped, but it couldn't get me right away because there was 2 more cars coming and they had to come, and so I saw him trying to turn around, back and forth, back and forth until he got around, and then he flipped his lights on.

And I thought, well, you know, I might as well just, you know, there's no place to pull over.

So as soon as I came to the first road, it was a gravel road, I pulled off on this gravel road and I just waited.

Rolled my window down, got my driver's license, my registration and I just waited.

And sure enough, that car came around with some gusto.

And as the tires hit from the pavement to the gravel it kind of spun out and a cloud of dust came up and he pulled it behind me and stopped and I could look in my side view mirror and I'm watching and he gets out of the car and he slams the door back and he starts walking towards me and now he's a man on a mission.

And I'm looking at that, and I'm thinking, oh man, I'm really in for it this time.

But he gets as far as the back of my car, and he sees something hanging in my window.

And he stops it right there, and he's looking now at my uniform that's hanging right there on that hanger and for about 30 to 40 seconds he's just looking studying at that uniform he's trying to figure out what it is And as he's looking at that uniform, his whole attitude and his whole expression changes.

And he kind of looks at that, and now he's not as aggressive as he was.

And now he comes over to the window, and I have it down, and he takes his sunglasses off, and he says, What?

Now, I don't know why I said it but I looked at him and I said I'm a pathfinder and he looked at me like And I knew instantly he wasn't thinking what I was thinking.

And so I quickly told him I'm a minister, and we have a situation where we have boys and girls work together.

It's kind of like Boys and Girls, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

And we teach them Christian values, and then when they earn certain requirements, we give them awards.

And I was just heading for 1 of those awards.

He took a deep breath and he said, well, we can't disappoint those kids, but would you please slow down?

It was the uniform that caught his attention.

And it was the studying of that uniform that made him wonder, who is this guy?

I want us all to realize tonight that as Christians, we wear a uniform.

Now that uniform may not be cloth, But that uniform is just as sure as you can spot a pathfinder in a crowd.

The uniform that a Christian wears is just as clear.

Paul describes that uniform by when he says, As many as were baptized, they put on Christ.

By the way, I really appreciate the talent that is around us in this conference.

And I'm teaming up tonight on this message.

Now I know it's the Lord that's going to give this message.

But I'm teaming up tonight with Aaron Cruz, who is just a genius when it comes to this kind of stuff.

And so he's going to be running my slides, our slides, and we are teamed up on this, so we went over this together.

The title of our time together is Who Are You?

When we're done tonight, I've been asking the Lord to speak to all of our hearts, to let us know who we are.

You can see what the theme is, knowing the time.

And right now there's confusion everywhere in this world.

God wants a group of people that know who they are, know what they believe, and know what their mission is.

So I want to spend, I just want to bow our heads in prayer and ask God to speak to our hearts tonight.

Father in heaven, you have a message to deliver to our hearts.

Now, we can speak to ears, and there are even times when those ears can be tickled a little bit, but we can't speak to a heart.

Only you can speak to a heart that will actually change the life.

So Father, tonight we're asking You to speak to our hearts.

We're asking You to make it clear who we are.

We're asking You to make us understand what the remnant is, and what that message is, and the importance and urgency of it in a way that we could not do if it wasn't for you sending your Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds.

And Lord, we want Jesus to be honored and glorified tonight, for He's the theme of the Bible.

We thank you for hearing and answering our prayer.

My mom was born into a Seventh-day Adventist home.

But I want to make it very clear that Seventh-day Adventists are not born.

In order to become a Seventh-day Adventist, you have to engage your will, your choice.

You see, there has to be a decision in your mind and in your heart that you are going to follow the Bible and its teachings.

For the fabric of our Christian uniform consists for an Adventist of 28 fundamental beliefs that are the foundation of who we are and what our purpose is.

Now my dad wasn't born into a Seventh-day Adventist home, but with my mother's help, my dad studies his way right into the church.

So when I was born, I had an advantage over many people.

I was born into a family, a Seventh-day Adventist family, who understood and had studied truth.

So as a boy growing up, as a baby growing up, all the way until where I am now, in the early start, I grew up with the understanding that there was a God.

He loved me, and He wanted to talk with me and communicate with me.

I grew up with the understanding that the Bible was the authority of life and the source of all truth.

And the Bible was not something you treated as a common book.

Dad was very careful to teach us, you didn't put anything else on the Bible.

But by the time I was 10 years old, I had a pretty firm foundation, a very firm basic foundation of who God was.

I knew a little bit about the great controversy.

I knew that there was a heaven and there was a devil on this earth.

Adam Ramdin

Where Do I Come From?

Our guide, and that as we spend these next few moments, as we turn our minds heavenward, touch our hearts, I pray, Lord, that you would speak through me.

The sermon title this morning is, Where Do I Come From?

It's a question we ask each other all the time, hey, where are you from?

In my introduction today, Elder Ringstaff said, Pastor Ramdins is our speaker, and he comes to us from.

It's standard, as we introduce each other, as we introduce ourselves, to often say your name and where you're from.

What city you're from, what state you're from, or even what country you're from.

Especially, obviously, when you're overseas.

And it's always interesting to answer the question.

Do they want to know your ethnic heritage?

Do they want to know what church you go to, and you kind of give different answers and you kind of figure out what they want.

When I lived here in America, sometimes people would try and be smart and guess where I'm from.

And I'd be talking to somebody and they'd go, oh, I'm trying to feel good about myself.

I learned from Pastor John Bradshaw, who's gonna be speaking later on, a really good way to answer that.

And I'd look back at them and I'd be like, and it didn't go too well when I was in the back hills of Kentucky, but I'd look back at them and I'd be like, you Canadians always get us mixed up.

But this is what often would happen, because in some people's minds, if you're from England, how do I say this politically correct?

You should be white, If you know what I mean.

I'm from England and they'd look at me and they'd be like, but...

And you know what they want to say, but they can't actually say it.

So they'd look back at you and be like, but...

And I knew what they were asking, but I didn't want to help them out.

So I'd be like, oh, I was born in Oxford, England.

Are you asking where my parents are from?

No, top right is where my dad, top left is my mom.

1 of the flag is the 1 with the stripes, is a country, a little island in the Indian Ocean called Mauritius.

Small little island that's off the coast of Madagascar, and that's where my dad's from.

The other flag is where my mother's from.

You may know that 1, may be more familiar, and that is the country of Iceland.

And so my mother's from Iceland, my dad's from Mauritius.

It's a very weird or very unique or strange combination.

According to my calculation with my historical research and my, you know, all of the rest, there are only 7 of us in the world and 5 of them are my brothers and sisters.

And fascinatingly there's another family who are also Adventists, same combination with the mother's Icelandic and the father's Mauritian, and they live in Australia and they have 2 children and the son is a pastor as well.

And so half Icelandic, and you say, how do you know that there's only 7 of you in the world?

Well, in Iceland, there's only 250, 000 people, well now 300, 000, there's only a small population.

If somebody marries a Mauritian, then you're gonna know it.

So there's only 7 of us in the world, Icelandic, and Mauritian, and kind of knowing where you come from helps with your identity and who you are in the present day.

Americans love to know where they come from, talk about where they come from.

You're like, which part of Ireland you from?

You know, like, Americans love to talk about, I'm half this Irish, and I'm a little bit Scottish, and I'm a little bit German, and my grandmother was Norwegian.

Like, Americans do really like to know their ancestry and and where they come from and it has boomed a multi-billion dollar industry today with ancestry.com and 23andme where people spit a bit of saliva in a tube and then you send off that tube and it comes back and it will tell you exactly what you are.

And last Christmas my family and I, all of us did this DNA test where we all spit saliva in a tube and we discovered where we come from.

And for years I'd always said what I just shared with you that I'm half Icelandic and half Mauritian.

And I was actually quite hesitant to do the DNA test because I was worried that I'd have a sneaky 10% of like Slovakian or a 5% of something else and there'd just be something else there and my half Icelandic and half Mauritian, what I'd always told everyone I was would not be true.

I put my saliva into the tube, sent it off and came back and guess what?

I was exactly 50% Mauritian and exactly 50% Icelandic with nothing else there.

Pretty amazing, As mentioned, my wife is here.

Those are our parents at our wedding in 2013.

There's my parents on the right of the picture, I believe, is my father and my mother, and then my father-in-law, mother-in-law, and then the shortest 1 is my grandmother-in-law.

And the picture was taken, She would have been 97, I think, or 96, and she's still kicking around now at 105.

She studies at Sabbah School every day and keeps her going.

And so that's my wife's side of the family.

There's our extended like nuclear, oh, well, I'm not exactly sure.

There's herself and her sister and Jason Sligar when he had some hair.

And their children when they were a little bit younger.

And then, here's another picture, and there is my wife's mother's extended side of the family with the brothers and the sisters and the in-laws and the children.

So my wife's side of the family, on her, she did the DNA test and from her father's side, there was a bit of German, actually some English as well.

There's my wife's mother, and then her 3 uncles, and then her grandmother sitting there.

We took this picture at the 100th birthday party of her grandmother.

My wife's mom is called Joan, and 1 of her brothers is called Dean, and 1 of her other brothers is called Glenn, and 1 of the other brothers is called Mark.

My wife is called Aiko and her sister is called Midori, and her grandmother is called Midori, and her mother is called Joan, and Her uncle is called Dean, and another one's called Glenn, and another one's called Mark.

So you've got this layer of Japanese names, and you've got a layer of names as American as they come.

And then you've got a layer of Japanese names.

There's probably several factors to this, but 1 of the factors, and maybe this is broader than just this instance here, if you go back in history, in American history, you go back to World War II.

In World War II, there was rumor that the Japanese were gonna come and do something.

The end of 1941, the American government commissioned what's called the Munson Report, where they went over to the West Coast where all the Japanese were living and they researched amongst the community to see if amongst the Japanese-American community there was likely to be any insurrection or anything like that.

And the conclusion of the Munson Report was in November 1941 that there was no military necessity.

John Bradshaw

High Time

We sense that we are late in the history of the earth, and so believing it is high time, I pray that this morning you would arrest our attention, focus us on Jesus, encourage, fan the flames of our faith, be real in our midst, and dwell in our hearts.

We shall not ask you to send your spirit, we shall not, for we believe that when we arrived here this morning your spirit was here with power.

And so we pray instead that we would be here, present, alert, awake, sensible, and yielded.

Take our hearts and make them yours in this moment.

It's fascinating that they knew the trouble was coming They knew what type of trouble it was going to be.

They knew where it was coming from and yet they were a thousand percent unprepared.

If you were to take a look at a map of Minnesota and put your finger in what you figure to be the middle of that state, your finger would come down somewhere near the little town of Hinkley.

Now in the late 1800s Hinkley was 2 things.

It was a railroad town and it was a forestry town, a logging town.

The Hinkley sawmill had Tens of millions of board feet of lumber prepared and ready to go But in the late 1800s, I believe the year was 1897.

It was a long hot summer and Every inch of that lumber was bone dry tinder dry which is the sort of thing you hope for from lumber.

But at this moment, there was a fire racing towards Hinkley.

In fact, 2 fires, ultimately they came together before they reached Hinkley.

Did people in Hinkley, Minnesota not know what the phenomenon of a forest fire was?

No, they understood, but they didn't understand.

They knew there were fires coming and so they took some preparations.

Well, I said a moment ago There were thousands of percent unprepared.

So let's talk about the preparation Now, I don't know if you were as are as unfamiliar as I was with what a hog's head is I don't mean the head of a hog.

They filled hogs heads, 10 or 12 of them, with water.

These are barrels, large barrels, barrel, large-ish barrels, containing about a hundred gallons each.

They said, they tell us there's a fire coming and so we'll get ready and we'll fill some barrels with water, 10 or 12 of them.

So they had a thousand or maybe 1, 200 gallons of water and they had something resembling a garden hose.

I don't know what your garden hose is like.

I would like you to think with me how valuable a thousand gallons of water would be in the face of a coming forest fire.

The average backyard swimming pool contains 20, 000 gallons of water.

This was about 4 water beds worth of water.

To put it another way, about 3 teenage showers full of water.

And when the fire came, obviously their meager, tiny preparations were no match for what was a literal firestorm.

You know that forest fires are so destructive, so great, so strong, they generate their own weather patterns.

You will see a forest fire here, but out in advance of the forest fire, maybe even a quarter of a mile, gases will accumulate in the air and then suddenly they will ignite so that distant from the forest fire, the air will itself be burning.

No, it blows like a gale, like a tornado almost, almost.

The weather in advance or accompanying a forest fire itself is brutal.

So the people, understanding that now it was too late, now they couldn't run.

Some of them hid in their basements in their cellars.

Because a forest fire comes through and sucks out all the available oxygen.

And so people, families, Families, whole families, sometimes multiple families, hiding in a cellar, hiding in a basement, all perished, died, asphyxiated.

If you stumbled upon them, you would say, it looked like they were sleeping.

And I would say, you understand the state of the dead.

And they would not wake, some of them, until the resurrection when Jesus comes back.

They hid in open places, cover themselves with wet blankets, soaked blankets.

But it was a bad idea to do that and underestimate the fire.

1 little girl was under a blanket with her mother.

That strong wind just blew her little teddy bear out of her hand and blew it out into the field.

Her reaction, she stood up and ran towards it.

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