Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2014: Accountability

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Forward to Zion

Eugene Prewitt

Accountable to God Only

Our Father in heaven, we need You to save us.

Would You find us and then find a way to protect us and teach us what is true as we look at Your Holy Bible.

I put some things together last night, I knew that our theme is accountability for this conference and then I found out that our founder or 1 of the founders of this camp meeting, Brother Sullivan, is a counselor.

And as I put those things together it just began to click to me how our theme became accountability.

I don't know if that's clicking for you but it did for me.

Accountability is connected to the word authority.

That is you're accountable to someone who has authority over you, or sometimes you make yourself accountable to someone as a kind of a peer relationship.

But usually in life, accountability is related to authority.

You are accountable to the magistrate, the magistrate is accountable to the king, the king is accountable to the emperor if there is such a thing.

Accountability follows a line of authority and in our denomination right now, in our church, the issue of authority is becoming a complex, confusing, and discouraging issue.

Well what happens, for example, if our church has a meeting in South Africa and votes that we do not approve of a homosexual lifestyle, and then a short time later in the Netherlands a union votes that it's perfectly fine to be a homosexual inside the church.

You see there's an issue with authority there, It's something done by the general conference and then a contradictory thing done by an entity or what happens if the general conference says we're going to study the question of women's ordination and come to a resolution hopefully in 2015 but then various unions say that we're going to march right ahead and do what we're going to do regardless.

The question of authority is a complicated 1.

Congregationalism is maybe the end result of a concept of accountability that says, I'm accountable to no 1 but God.

And I want to talk to you about that today, the idea that we are accountable to no 1 but God.

There is a precious truth in the idea that I am accountable only to God.

But if we handle it in the wrong way, we can progress from that truth to a falsehood.

What I want to show you in the Bible is how the apostles take this idea that I'm accountable to God and how they develop it into counsel for how we live our life, it just isn't the way that highly independent people would expect.

In other words, the fact that I'm accountable only to God, our natural way to develop that is to say, therefore I can do whatever I think is best.

Does that remind you of any book in the Bible, I can do whatever I think is best?

In the book of Judges you have a whole period of the history of Israel when Many people did what they thought was best and some of them would listen to the local judges when they got in big trouble.

Anyway, that's enough talk, let's go to the Bible.

Turn your Bibles to Romans 14, Romans 14 and verse 10.

Romans 14 is 1 of those chapters that is instrumental in leading many people out of the Seventh-day Adventist church.

Romans 14 does that for people who I would call superficial conservatives, that is people who the way they learned the truth is someone showed it to them and they believed it, and the way that they were led out of the truth into error is someone showed them something else and they believed that too.

And if the way you learn the truth is someone gives you a study that shows you that the seventh day is the Sabbath, and then they tell you it's vitally important, you can just believe that, and then your entire foundation can just be pulled out from underneath you when you find Romans 14.

1 man esteemeth 1 day above another, another man esteemeth every day alike, let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind?

Anyway, I don't think that that will trouble people who are personally studious, but it does trouble people who are superficial in their study habits.

Let me just explain that trouble to you before we go to verse 10.

Romans 14 is about the issue of Passover.

That's why it combines the keeping of a day with the eating of herbs, because when Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, it was done on the Passover, during the Passover period, and that became a question to the early Christians whether Jesus was instituting a new ritual or whether He was modifying the ritual of Passover.

Those that thought He was instituting a new ritual, they did not pay any attention to the idea that you should eat bitter herbs on the Passover.

But those that thought he was simply modifying the ritual Passover by removing the eating of lamb, what would they eat on Passover?

Bitter herbs are what you would eat on the Passover.

So for those people, they would keep each Passover as a holy, sacred convocation.

For the others, they felt like that was honoring the ceremonial law and that that was in a way an affront to Christ because when Jesus died, what happened to that curtain?

So some people kept the law because they honored Jesus, the Passover law, and some people neglected to pay attention to it because they wanted to honor Jesus.

It was hard for the early church for centuries, that question eventually led to such debate that people fought over the date of what day to keep Passover, and that's how the Orthodox Church split from the Catholic Church, over the question of the date of Easter.

If that was confusing to you, I recommend going to bibledoc.org, that's my website, bibledoc.org, and looking up the article on Romans 14.

You're in Romans 14, look at verse 10, but why do you judge your brother or why do you set at naught your brother?

So there are 2 things that apparently we shouldn't do.

I should not judge you, whatever that does or doesn't mean in the passage, and I shouldn't set you at naught.

That is, treat you as if you're unimportant or you're invalid or somehow not precious in the sight of me or in the sight of God.

For we shall all stand, what does it say?

Paul takes this idea that I am accountable to God, and the way he develops it is by saying if we're accountable to God, then why are we holding each other so accountable, almost as if we were the judges ourselves?

The Bible says, judge nothing before the time, for the Lord will judge when He comes back.

The only way that God can get me, Eugene Pruitt, to heaven, the only way He can do it is by delaying judgment a long time." In other words, what God has done for each of us is instead of judging us when we first do wrong, He is forbearing to us.

He puts up with our ignorance and weakness and frailty, the fact that we do wrong repeatedly, he doesn't excuse it, nor does he come in and settle the question of judgment.

The Bible says it's appointed to man once to die and after that the judgment.

We have a lifetime of probation and it's not like probation in a penal system.

That is if you're sentenced to probation here in Delaware, they're watching you closely during probation.

What happens if you do the wrong thing during probation?

Aren't you glad that's not the way our probation is right now?

Our probation right now is so different that Even though we do the wrong thing several times in a day or week or month, God says it's appointed to us once to die and after that the judgment.

I want to speed up in this process of going though.

For it is written, as I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, every tongue will confess to God." That's the most amazing truth.

The truth is that Every intelligent being is going to kneel to the Lord Jesus.

This is why there are 3 judgments, because the angels right now, the judgment going on in heaven right now is not for the purpose of God discovering who is and is not going to make it.

God knows who will and who will not make it.

The judgment going on right now is for the purpose of the angels.

That's why in the most holy place of the sanctuary, angels were embroidered all over, wherever the high priest would look, he would see embroidered angels.

That was to show that the angels have an interest in what's going on there in the judgment.

Looking at that mercy seat were 2 golden angels, their faces were downward.

It was to show the judgment is for the angels.

The angels are going to bow, the holy angels, they have bowed already to be honest with you, every 1 of them has.

But then we also are going to bow at the feet of Jesus when we cast our crowns.

This is the purpose of the millennial judgment.

The millennial judgment is to show us, those who are going to be faithful, God is going to expose His judgment to our evaluation and we're going to see that He could not have done better than He did in dealing with evil.

In Revelation when you get towards the end you find that great white throne judgment.

It's because Jesus is going to convince all of the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed.

What God is going to do is He is going to persuade every intelligent being that He is right, and so every knee is going to bow.

12, you might say that verse 12 and 13 are the key passage of this short talk.

"'So then, every 1 of us shall give account of himself to God.'" I am accountable to God and God alone in a certain sense, in a certain ultimate sense, and what is the logical conclusion?

Does that lead me to an independent spirit to do whatever I think is right?

Let us therefore judge one—let us not therefore judge 1 another anymore, but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way." Do you see there that there are 2 natural developments from the fact that I'm accountable to God alone, 1 of them is for me to realize that not only am I accountable to God, but also you are accountable to God.

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Accountable to God Only

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