Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2014: Accountability

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Forward to Zion

Eugene Prewitt

Accountability and the Judgment

I want to tell you some good news and then I want to tell you about how truth works.

And then we're going to practice using truth the way it works with Revelation 14, 6 and 7, but first the good news.

First the good news about AudioVerse, you heard that little advertisement just a few moments ago?

March, May and April, March, April, May would be better to say, huh?

Those 3 months were banner months for that website.

We've had 1.25 million downloads just in those 3 months.

That's like having a camp meeting that has 13, 000 attentive listeners in attendance every day of the year continuously.

Not just 13, 000 people who attend because they skip some meetings, but these are 13, 000 who every day are choosing to go hear a meeting because they want to hear it.

It means that any time, day or night, 24-7, at least on average, there are more than 500 people listening to 1 of those present truth messages at that website.

More good news, in Australia there has been a rising or a raising up of a new literature evangelism program spearheaded by children between the ages of 16 and 22.

Children who attended a youth camp just 3 years ago when they were 3 years younger than that.

And when they attended, they got a vision of what was going on in the world and decided they would not wait for the elders in their continent or subcontinent to make something happen, they began to do it themselves.

They arranged for shipments of pallets full of pallets of books to go to Australia, they began selling them all over the east and southern part of that nation.

And today the leader of that movement, not even 18 years old yet, is in the Middle East working as a literature evangelist for the summertime under a mentor that was recommended to him as someone who could really teach him how to pioneer the work, you know, in a way risking his life to forward the work in Australia later.

Just a short distance from there in terms of the size of the world, in Indonesia, Do you know about Indonesia?

That that is a country that is the fourth most populous nation on the planet, following only India, China, and our own nation.

It has more Muslims than all of the Middle East combined.

And there in Indonesia, there is a little amazing fact school where the students who come don't typically bring any money.

They come because they want to study how to be missionaries in their own country, and the way they pay for their studies is by going door to door in their own nation, selling the Great Controversy, that's their best-selling book, to their Muslim neighbors.

The Great Controversy is a beautiful book for Muslim persons.

The first chapter is the destruction of Jerusalem.

Then as you get towards the end, that book is about Jesus coming back as the judge.

Muslims believe that Jesus came back as the judge of the earth.

And so 7, 000 of those books went out between last October and this January, just in that country by those AAFCO students going door to door.

Go north from their ways and in the country of India, you know of the 4 I mentioned, that's the most populous 1.

In India, the 3 angels' messages are being received widely.

Well my wife and I were there in just 2 weeks, 7, 000 new people were baptized just in 1 province of India alone.

But that blessing creates problems because there are not nearly enough ministers to take care of those newly baptized people.

So what happens when you baptize so many people is you look among them to try to find someone who's the most qualified of all to kind of head them up.

But that man himself has just heard the precious truths for the first time.

And if he came out of Hinduism instead of Christianity there, these truths involve so many new and strange things.

I think you understand this if you think about it.

Isn't it true that you can hear beautiful truth and love it and believe it and hardly retain any of it 3 weeks later?

Or at least retain only the very large outline details and forget almost everything else?

And so when I was there training ministers with Amazing Facts, I had, I found out that the ministers of the gospel there probably knew less about the messages in the Bible than the children in this room.

Amazing Facts has taken on a challenge there and now has a school that's training 120 pastors a year in India to give more—these are men who are already pastors, These are not young people who want to become ministers, but those who've already been chosen but have had no thorough training, bringing those men out of their fields for just a few weeks and giving them a practical training.

Move a little bit west from there and come to Ukraine.

That's where my wife and I were for most of April and May.

In Ukraine, you know, when the Iron Curtain fell, the church in Ukraine really grew to the point that there were more than half of the divisions of Adventists were right there in that country.

But after just a few years, it became more difficult to reach people in Ukraine, where initially you could do a mailing and get thousands of attendees, then later you could do a mailing and get tens of attendees.

And people began to say in Ukraine that traditional evangelism doesn't work anymore.

When traditional evangelism doesn't seem to work, people want to get creative.

What besides preaching the Word of God might work?

Well that might be entertainment, that might be having fun, that might be having cafe ministry.

I mean you might find all kinds of other ideas, but you know those things never have worked.

In Finland where they've been used the very longest, the churches almost fallen like the churches that were doing that.

Those churches have been shrinking, not growing.

AAFCO started a school there just a few years ago and to the dismay of gainsayers decided to do a conventional evangelistic program and to do a mailing, but before the mailing to go door to door and start Bible studies, you know, some months before the meeting.

And what was discovered, which was no surprise to anyone who has experience in evangelism, what was discovered is that if you go door to door and meet people and study with them, they come to meetings much more readily than if you mail them a piece of paper.

And now evangelism there is working, conventional evangelism, but with that little added thought that you need to do some free work of going door to door and meeting people where they are, but a little more good news, if you go west even further you'll come to England.

England, you know, that's part of Western Europe which is post-Christian and even post-belief.

I mean the idea, what we call this generation, I just forgot the word for postmoderns, that's the word I'm looking for.

That idea, it means that we don't think we can actually find the truth so we give up.

That's just the way I'd summarize the postmodern concept.

Since we can't get there, let's not waste our time trying.

That's England, right where they have been for some time.

So of course, at least in England, conventional evangelism can't work.

You can't just invite postmoderns to come out and hear prophecy, they don't even believe the Bible is legit.

That's the way people have been thinking in England for a long time.

And so it's no surprise that church has been shrinking there during that period of time.

Except for at some point it stopped shrinking and began to grow, but it was kind of a trick because that growth, what was happening is the number of English believers was going down but the number of immigrants, immigrant believers is going up, and that created kind of a picture that the church was still slightly growing.

Can you picture how something like that could happen?

That immigration could give an appearance of growth when in fact the church is shrinking?

Amazing Facts started a school in northern England just, I don't know, this must be 6 years ago now, and they tried this radical thing in Birmingham of going door to door and asking postmodern people, or at least people that happen to live in Birmingham in a postmodern age, asking the people there if they'd like to take Bible studies, what they found is a similar receptivity as if you did that in the deep Bible South of the United States.

We know it's similar because the leader there was trained to do Bible work here in the United States and he's now there doing it.

And he found that even people who classified themselves as agnostics or atheists or even Muslims, when someone who looked sincere and beautiful in the character sense would come to the door and with peace and joy and offer to study the Bible with them that many people would just say, yes, even in a postmodern age.

And they've been doing every year there in the EFCO program a conventional series and having the kind of productivity that you'd expect, why?

Which is just my way of telling you that the Word of God has not lost its power, That it still works, it still accomplishes what it was sent to do.

If it's sent on a mission, it doesn't return to God until it does what it was sent to do.

Where God's Word is being used, it's being productive.

Now I want to talk to you about how truth works, and that's a Bible study.

We are on phase 2 of a three-phase message.

Second Peter chapter 1, beginning in verse 12.

Wherefore, I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though you know them.

There's such a profound idea in the first part of verse 12, let's just see if you can see it.

Do you see in verse 12 that Peter's writing to people who might know these things already?

Do you see that in verse 12, that they might know them?

And the question is, since they know them, does he need to remind them of things they already know?

In verse 12, to remind them of things they already know?

Well should he remind them Once or twice or more than that in verse 12.

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Accountability and the Judgment

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