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Northern Idaho Regional Campmeeting

Norman McNulty

Our Great and Urgent Need

And it's good to be here at Northern Idaho Regional Camp Meeting.

Today is the first day I have ever set foot in the state of Idaho.

So I feel privileged to be here with you.

I flew into Spokane last night and spent the evening with Pastor Larry Kirkpatrick, who I was friends with from back in our time in Southern California when I was at Loma Linda, and he was the pastor of the Mentone Church, and I know he pastored here at Bonner's Ferry until pretty recently.

And he's going to a meeting in California this weekend, so I at least got to see him last night.

But it's good to be here, and I think the Lord has some great things in store for this camp meeting.

I know he's already blessed, and he's going to continue to bless as we go through this week.

So before we start, I would like to offer a word of prayer, and we're going to get into our message for this morning.

Father in heaven, I thank you so much for the opportunity to come before your people, and I pray that as we listen to the Word today, that you would give me that which you would have me to speak, and that Christ would be lifted up, and that our hearts would be convicted of the necessity of following Jesus completely.

So I pray that you will speak through me in a special way this morning.

And I pray all these things in Jesus' name.

The title for our message this morning is our great and urgent need.

And when I look at the world we are living in today, friends, you have to be in a spiritual coma to not realize that we are living in momentous times.

When you look at what's happening in the world with what the Pope is doing and what the United States is doing, and When you look at what's happening within God's remnant church, friends, we are a church in crisis.

Don't try to sugarcoat it and act like nothing is going on.

And the general conference session is starting 3 weeks from today.

And now more than ever, we as God's people need to be serious about our walk with Jesus.

It's not enough to know what's right to be facing the final crisis, because friends, we are facing a final crisis of this earth's history.

And I'm not here to predict any dates or set any times, but I am saying that the Bible tells us, and the Spirit of Prophecy clearly shows us, that a final crisis is coming upon this world, and we need to be ready to meet that crisis.

And it's not enough to know what is right theologically anymore.

We need to have a living experience with Jesus as we face this final crisis.

And the very fact that we're just 3 weeks away now from what is shaping up to be the momentous general conference session in my lifetime, and I suggest that it's probably the most momentous general conference session in any of your lifetimes.

Some of you are older than I am, but I can almost guarantee you that we've never seen anything like this before since 1888.

Maybe 1901, but none of us were around back then.

That leads me to the following statement, well known from Great Controversy, page 494, where Ellen White says, before the final visitations of God's judgments upon the earth, there will be a revival of primitive godliness such as has not been witnessed since apostolic times.

Friends, the future of Adventism is a revival of primitive godliness.

And sometimes when I look at the church today, it's as if when we come to a crisis, some of us are trying to maintain a laity to see in unity.

Yet when I read the Bible, which says everything that can be shaken will be shaken, so that which cannot be shaken will remain." Friends, a shaking is coming, and I would prayerfully urge you to be praying that God's people will rise up to meet this crisis head-on rather than trying to go around it.

And that we will face it with a revival of primitive godliness, because that is the future of Adventism.

The future of Adventism is not continuing in a conformity to the worldly culture around us and saying, all is well.

That is not the future of this church before Jesus comes back.

The future of this church before Jesus comes back, the church that goes through to the coming of Jesus is a church that experiences a revival of primitive godliness like we have not seen since the days of the apostles.

And that leads us then to our, another famous statement from Selected Messages, Volume 1, page 121.

Because the future is a revival of primitive godliness, Ellen White now tells us our great need.

A revival of true godliness among us is the greatest and most urgent of all our needs.

Now I happen to be a physician and if, and thankfully as a neurologist I don't have to do codes where people are having their hearts compressed or whatever to bring them back to life.

That's not something that I particularly enjoy doing, although I have done it in my training.

But if you are called to revive a patient, it's because they've died.

And I've actually seen the monitor where the patient's heart had stopped and we pushed epinephrine and other medication and we're doing chest compressions and that heart started beating again and we had brought them back to life.

And when Ellen White says a revival of true godliness among us is the greatest and most urgent of all of our needs." You know what that means?

It means that we're spiritually dead as a church.

We say that we're rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing, and we don't really understand or know that we're actually wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked.

This revival of true godliness that we need is evidence of our lukewarm Laodicean condition.

There must be earnest effort to obtain the blessing of the Lord, not because God is not willing to bestow his blessing upon us, but because we are unprepared to receive it.

God is not going to pour out His Spirit on people who are not ready to receive His Spirit.

We want to follow Jesus, we want to be His disciples, we want to experience revival, but there are conditions to receiving this revival.

1 of the conditions is that there must be an earnest effort to obtain this blessing.

If you think that you're going to receive this revival of true godliness while you're sitting around in your Laodicean atmosphere of Adventism, coming to church on Sabbath morning, and then the rest of the week having 5 minutes of devotions with the Lord, and maybe not even that, and you're consumed by your job and the cares of this life and the entertainment that this world is offering, That is not the earnest effort that God calls upon to pour out His Spirit.

And yeah, I would dare say that that is where many of us as Seventh-day Adventists are at in our spiritual walk with God.

God wants to pour out his blessing upon us, but if we're not earnestly seeking him to receive it, he can't give it to us.

Continuing in the statement, It says, our Heavenly Father is more willing to give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him than our earthly parents to give good gifts to their children.

But it is our work, now here are 4 conditions to receiving this blessing that will lead to a revival of true godliness, But it is our work by confession, humiliation, repentance, and earnest prayer to fulfill the conditions upon which God has promised to grant us his blessing.

A revival need be expected only in answer to prayer." So I want to spend a little bit of time talking about these 4 elements of confession, humiliation, repentance, and earnest prayer.

Now, I will tell you, me personally, as I see the General Conference coming up in the next 3 weeks, and I will be attending in person, not as a delegate, but as an interested church member, that I am under conviction more than ever that I need to make sure that my life is right with God.

You know, if you're just going to San Antonio, whether you're going to be there in person or watching from afar, and hoping that the vote will go the way you hoped that it will go, and you're not seeking God earnestly to make sure that your heart is right with Him, then whatever way the vote goes, it's not going to do you personally any good.

And the question is, are you spending time with God in prayer every day in confession?

And are you humbling yourself before him?

Are you coming to God with repentance and earnest prayer?

When you come to God to confess in your prayer life, you know Ellen White says in Steps to Christ that confession should be of a specific nature, confessing specific sins.

When you come to God in prayer, do you say, dear Lord, please forgive me for my sins, please help me to do better?

I'm giving that illustration because that's what I've done.

But when you come to God in prayer, what God is looking for, He's saying, he's looking for us to say, God, you are calling me to have a revival of true godliness in my life.

Please forgive me when I raised my voice at my wife today when she said something that made me irritated.

Please forgive me for raising my voice at my children, or when I did this at work, or when I said something about that brother or sister at church that I shouldn't have said.

And you know, I've had to go back to people where I've said something about someone else and said, you know what, please forgive me, I said something about brother or sister so and so that I should not have said.

That is the kind of confession that God is looking for.

Not just, oh please forgive me for my sins, in a generic sense, but we confess to God specifically, of a specific nature, the specific sins that we have committed as the Holy Spirit convicts our hearts.

Because if you're just confessing in a general vague way, you're not necessarily acknowledging the things that you are struggling with the most at this point in your life.

And if you just say, oh, please forgive me for my sins, you're acknowledging, yes, I'm a sinner and I need God's grace, but you're not allowing the grace of God to come into your heart to transform that area of your life that needs to change, so that you'll stop gossiping about that brother or sister at church, or so that you'll stop snapping at your wife every time she does something that annoys you.

That the Spirit of God can transform you so that because you've confessed that sin, the next time you're tempted to commit it, you recall how the Holy Spirit prompted you to confess that sin last time, and God gives you His grace to overcome it the next time it comes around.

But if you're not confessing it, then you're going to keep falling into it every time.

So it is our work by confession, humiliation, repentance, and earnest prayer.

And I might add, not only do we need to come to God in confession?

I would suspect that there are some of us here this morning who need to make some wrongs right with our brothers and sisters at church, or even in our families.

There's people that come to church that haven't talked to each other for weeks or months or years because of something that happened at a church board meeting or a business meeting or however the vote landed, and now we have sides in the church and I'm on this side and they're on that side, and we don't look at each other when we come to church.

Do you think you're going to be doing that in the Kingdom of Heaven?

The Holy Spirit wants to touch our hearts now so that we will confess among ourselves.

Not only do we confess, but it says it's our work by confession, humiliation.

When you approach God, are you acknowledging Him as the God of the universe?

You know, a lot of times when we come to God in prayer, it becomes so easy to develop a routine in our prayer life that we forget the need for humiliation as we come to God in prayer.

And certainly when you're confessing, that requires humility.

And when you're confessing to God, I hope you're not saying, well God, please forgive me for how I said this, but if they hadn't caused me to do this, I never would have done it in the first place.

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Our Great and Urgent Need

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