East Coast Korean Camp Meeting

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Andrews Korean Church

Plenary

Chester Clark

The Need to Know

Giving Up All

Where Are We

Father Abraham

Lamp Feet

Building Altars

This Is Good

Always Giving

Looking To Jesus

For me, I need to be reminded on a very regular basis of what Christ has done for me and how I can live for Him.

And, you know, we look back on times in our lives when we've had a conversion, maybe a reconversion experience, And we praise God for those experiences, but they really are daily experiences that we need to have, right?

And so for me, it's just a constant need to be reminded of what God has done.

So we're gonna start tonight with some pretty basic things.

But we're going to start and just see where this week takes us, I guess.

We're going to see some of the questions that come in.

We're going to spend some time tomorrow morning.

We're going to be looking at where we are in the stream of time right now, just in a very simple, practical way.

We're not going to be going deep into Bible prophecy, but just sort of, I think most of us have some idea of prophecy and end-time events, and just sort of take a look at where we're at, and if it's reasonable to conclude that we are living near the end of time, and if it is in fact reasonable to conclude that we are living near the end of time.

And if it is in fact reasonable to conclude that we are living near the end of time, then it's reasonable for us to be living in such a way that we're ready for Jesus to come.

And the Lord has given us a special message as a people intended to prepare a people to be ready for Jesus' coming.

And, you know, there are many Gospels out there, there's a lot of good news out there, and there's the basic elements of the cross and Christ that saves us, but Adventism is brought upon the scene of action at this time for the specific purpose of sharing an end-time message that will prepare people for Jesus' second coming.

And so we're going to be spending some time looking at that.

After tomorrow morning, I want to spend our mornings looking at the life of Abraham.

I've always been inspired when I study the lives of Bible characters and I see how they lived.

And I believe that, just to give you a little bit of a preview without going too far into the rest of the week tonight.

I believe that Abraham lived a life that was very unique.

He was called by God to live a life that nobody else could understand.

A singular experience on planet Earth is what Abraham had.

He had an amazing relationship, personal relationship with God.

And his life of faith was so impressive that Paul argues that he became not just the father of the Jewish nation and the father of many nations, but he came the father of all who would believe and the faithful of all ages.

And if it's true, if it's true, then it ought to teach us something about how we live in these last days.

So that's sort of what our plan is for the morning meetings.

Tonight we're going to be looking particularly at the topic of the need to know, just basic spirituality we're going to be covering tonight.

And I think that as we begin this, I'd just like to ask you to bow your heads with me for an additional word of prayer.

Father in heaven, I thank you that we have this time to gather together.

Lord, I know much prayer, much effort has gone into making this camp meeting a reality.

It's not just by chance that we're here tonight.

Your Holy Spirit has moved upon hearts, has spoken to us, has brought us here.

Your angels have guided and protected us as we've made our way here.

And Father, it's because you have a special plan for each 1 of us during these days together.

Tonight, we want to experience part of that plan.

We just want to ask that your Holy Spirit would not just fill this place, but it would be given room to fill each of our hearts, that we might be able to hear your voice speaking to us tonight.

As we open your word, still the voices, the busyness of our hearts, and may your voice be heard, we ask in Jesus' name.

Just to illustrate what we're going to be talking about tonight, I want to share with you a story.

Some of you may know about international reply coupons.

International reply coupons are, It's sort of like a form of currency in that it's designed to allow postage to be purchased in other countries for return mailing.

So let's say that I am going to mail you a letter in Italy, for example, and I don't have any way of sending a self-addressed stamp envelope for you to send it back because I can't buy Italian postage at the post office here.

So I will instead, if Italy's a participating country, I'll instead buy an international reply coupon that will allow you to go to the Italian post office and purchase the amount of postage required to send a letter back to the United States.

There's a fellow by the name of Carlo Pietro Giovanni, who began to realize that there was sometimes an exchange rate difference in this international postage, or the international reply coupons.

In other words, he might be able to buy these coupons in 1 country for less than the postage in the other country would cost.

So he could exchange the postage now for cash and earn an increase on his money.

And so this postage system was proposed as a way of investment.

Now this got people excited because you can only imagine If people were promised a 50% return rate, there's Carlo Pietro Giovanni there, they would see there was nothing, they would stop at nothing to be able to invest as much money as possible.

They began mortgaging their homes, investing their life savings.

A Boston financial writer wrote that this could not be accomplished legally, a 50% return on investment.

Carlos sued for libel and won $500, 000 in damages.

The Boston Post ran a favorable article about Carlo's company and the 50% return.

Below the article which the Boston Post ran was an advertisement for a savings account at a local bank which offered a 5% return on investment.

The next morning at Carlo's investment office and thousands of Bostonians waited in line to give him their money.

He collected $3 million just in that day.

That would be $34 million today he collected in cash on that 1 day.

The story spread like wildfire and people could not get their money to Carlo fast enough.

The problem was that Carlo wasn't buying international reply coupons at all.

For the amount of money invested, there would have had to have been some 160 million IRCs in circulation, but only 27, 000 existed.

Carlos was simply using the money of new investors to pay the exorbitant returns on the older ones.

And when the fraud was exposed and the company collapsed, investors lost $20 million.

And Carlos' name became synonymous with financial schemes that robbed Peter to pay Paul.

In fact, his full name was actually Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tobaldo Ponzi.

And today we know it simply as a Ponzi scheme.

Now what would have prevented these people from losing everything?

When I think of that, it's a tragic story.

People losing their homes, losing their investments, losing their retirement, their savings.

But there's nothing more sad than making poor investments spiritually, maybe even thinking that we're going to get a good return.

There are 2 things I think that people could have known to be able to keep them from the disappointment they experienced.

It was enriching Ponzi and paying off the new investors.

The second thing they needed to know was the character of the man that they trusted.

If they had known 1 or both of these things, they would have been spared the loss and spared the disappointment.

So tonight we're going to be talking about the need to know, because I think we need to know.

I think this is something that we can't just be haphazard about or half-hearted about.

I think we need to know a couple of things.

And I like to make, or to understand and to share the message in as simple a form as possible.

I remember as a kid and thinking about, you know, I grew up in an Adventist home and hearing about the last days and sometimes even being afraid of the last days.

I'm no longer afraid of the last days, but sometimes when I was a kid I had fear in my heart, and it wasn't just because there was gonna be persecution and I may be tortured or martyred or something like that.

I was afraid that the last days would come and I wouldn't know what I needed to know.

I mean of all the things there is to learn there's so much to learn in the Bible and how do you know what you don't know and what you need to know and if we're gonna be called before courts or called before rulers or judges or whatever and called to answer for our faith, how can we be prepared for that type of a thing?

And I've come to realize that there's only really a couple of things we need to know.

Now I'm not saying that we don't need to study our Bibles.

We'll get more into that as we go along this week.

But I'm convinced that God is going to prepare us for the things we need to know in our Bibles and the answers that we need to give are going to be given to us.

But there's a couple of things that we need to know.

Tonight we're going to be looking at 2 things.

Only 2 things that we need to know as we look at them tonight at least, 2 things that we need to know to be saved.

Who we really are is the first 1 and who our Savior really is, is the second 1.

And I am convinced that we can make it simple.

Back to Menu

Series

Plenary

The Need to Know

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Final Call

1- The Laodicean Dilemma

1h

Crisis At the Close: Gethsemane

52m

Plenary

Pentecost Repeated

55m

The Mad Mans Driving

44m

Lost in Paradise

42m

The Most Important Question

43m

Plenary

The One Thing Jesus Can’t Give You

55m

Evangelism by Dee Casper

01 Fight or Flight

1h

Hindered Prayers

35m

The Final Call

3- Wretched, Miserable, Victorious

1h

Cultivating Faith

Cultivating Faith

1h 35m

He Knows Me?

47m

Sound Doctrine