WYC 2008: Something Better

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GYC West

Don Mackintosh: Something Better -- Present Reality and Adventist History

Don Mackintosh

A Revival of Restoration (Health) Ministry

Father in Heaven, we're thankful today we can just come together, we can study together, we're thankful for the setting that we can be in.

We pray for those that are struggling with fires here in California, that you would draw near to them, you would put the fires out, would light a fire in their heart though, this would remind them of their need of You.

And we thank You and we come in Christ's name.

Well, You know, I love going to WYC and SEYC and GYC and LNOP and QRS and TUV.

Truthfully I like, I really enjoy being with people like you And I feel a privilege and a responsibility to be able to talk about this subject that we're going to talk about.

And we're going to kind of look at some things in Adventist history and then go back to the future, so to speak, looking back and then forward.

And we're going to use a text to kind of guide us in terms of our subjects and you might want to look at that text with me in Matthew chapter 4 and verse 23.

In Matthew chapter 4 and verse 23, we have a text that's repeated again in Matthew 9, 35, and it's kind of like a text that's going to guide our different presentations.

Matthew 4, 23 says, Now Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness, and all kinds of disease among the people." So, this is an interesting text.

It tells us where Jesus was, what He was doing, and then what happened as a result of the next verse.

Then his fame went throughout Syria, and they brought to him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon possessed, epileptics, paralytics, and he healed them." So, a powerful text telling us exactly what Jesus did.

But before we come back to that text, which we will, it's going to provide us kind of a framework.

And 2 students that were students from Battle Creek, Battle Creek College way back in 1891.

And they were having this conversation, which of course the word conversation is interesting, it's the root word conversion, that's where it comes from.

When we talk to 1 another we kind of can convert each other to the way we're thinking or we might make someone, you know, turn away, convert them to the opposite, depending on how we talk.

So I'm going to talk a little more about those particulars of the conversation in a minute, but these 2 people, Percy McGann and E.A.

Now later on, these men would become key leaders at the College of Medical Evangelists, that being Loma Linda.

And Edward Sutherland would be the president, first president of, you know, ASI.

He would be the president of Madison College.

Now, they had this conversation and I'm going to tell you more about that in a minute, but the conclusion of their conversation I thought was interesting.

It was actually quite radical and maybe even seen as unwise and dangerous, which is something that young people I think would be interested, radical, unwise, and dangerous.

Maybe not you guys, but most young people.

So, this was their radical conclusion they came to.

They decided and declared, now you ready for this?

They said this, they said that they wanted to, and I quote, follow the Bible and spirit of prophecy explicitly in their lives and ministries.

Now you might be thinking, and I hope you are, that sounds pretty good.

I think most people should believe that, or at least you know I think that most people did believe that back then.

However, unfortunate as it may seem, it was not so basic even back then as far as the spirit of prophecy was concerned.

Because back then, you see, according to the historians of the period, and I quote from Warren Ashworth, who wrote his dissertation on Edward Sutherland, he said this, it was common belief among Adventists that the messages written by Mrs.

White and the testimonies were only for the people to whom they were specifically addressed.

So they look at it and they say, oh that's great, that's a great message because it's not for me.

And they would, They would say, you know, we don't need to listen to that.

So as a result, many took a dismissive approach to the testimonies, or at least we could say a cafeteria approach where, you know, they would select this or select that.

And long before the book titled, Selected Messages, was thought of, many were already creating their own.

They were selecting the messages they wanted to hear.

Now, as you might imagine, the simple decision that they made to follow the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy explicitly was bound to cause conflict, and it did.

How many of you are familiar with any of that kind of conflict?

No 1 is raising their hand, but I hope that you here are listening on the tapes, raising your hands.

From Walla Walla to Battle Creek and from Battle Creek to Berrien Springs, people really took issue with the simple stand and the implications made by these 2 young men.

Finally, after exhausting every opportunity, their circumstance that was being without a job in McGann's case, without a wife as she had died under the strain, well, without a job in Sutherland's case and without a wife in McGann's case.

It opened up a unique and radical opportunity for them to experiment in doing something very radical.

And that would be forming a school on the basis of their same principle, the Bible and the spirit of prophecy.

So, even though there were many detractors, some in very high places, there were also people who gave strong support.

And 1 of them had the last name of White, which helped.

So we're going to talk more about that in the second section here.

The second section I'm going to talk about, this first 1 I'm going to talk about restoration, that is health.

But they were going to start this school.

Now White believed that the role of the new school, that is Madison, and by extension all such work was to complement and even challenge the Laodicean status quo.

And the challenge was simply to follow the Bible and the spirit of prophecy.

You're not Laodicean if you follow the Bible and the spirit of prophecy explicitly.

Now if you choose not to, then you're fulfilling prophecy nonetheless.

So, there was another ASI member long before Southern Louisiana who had similar views.

You know, you may be familiar with this guy.

He didn't have a name tag, but now he does.

He would say things like, it is written, you know.

This was not George Vanderman or Mark Finley.

And he'd say things like, how readest thou?

Or like, you have heard it said, but I say to you.

So, when he said, you have heard it said, what does that mean?

He would point back to what had been written, and then he would say, but, I say to you, which is what?

It is written, that's the Bible, but I say to you, that's like fresh.

So it's kind of like the testimony, the testimony of Jesus, or the Spirit of prophecy, Right?

You have heard it said, but I say to you.

So long before there was Sutherland again he had decided, this person had decided to follow the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy explicitly.

He wanted to lead people to something better.

It says that we want something better and we want something better now.

And he turned the world upside down in 1 generation, or at least his stance did that.

And there's 1 text that we've already seen that aptly summarized how he moved, and that was Matthew chapter 4, verse 23.

And I think if we fully adopted this text as a WYC, it would equip us to effectively share Christ in the marketplace and in our scholastic and academic pursuits.

And I think that really, if we really, really adopted it, our next GYC or WYC conference would last about a thousand years.

I've got some Biblical proof, I've got questions about that.

So, this text and Jesus, Matthew 9, 35, went about all the cities and villages.

You know, in Matthew 4, 23, it says He first of all was in Samaria and Judea, but now He's going to all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom and healing every sickness and every disease among the people." So he went to all, about all the cities and the villages.

A Revival of Adoration Ministry

Father in heaven, we're thankful today that we can again come and consider your word and we ask that we could learn some lessons that could help us in our own lives and we thank you we come in Christ's name.

Kind of the text that's been guiding us in our presentation, this is part 2 of 4 that are looking at restoration, education, adoration, proclamation.

And in our first time together, we looked at restoration or Christ healing ministry.

This time we're going to look at education.

Now the interesting thing about teaching and what is it Deuteronomy 6?

Look at Deuteronomy 6 for a minute with me before we get into this.

But good teaching, what constitutes doing a good job teaching?

And look at Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 6.

Verse 5, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul with your might.

These words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, shall talk about them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up." So the first thing about good teaching is verse 6, these things I command you today shall be in your heart.

In other words, to have a heart experience with the Lord yourself, have those things in your own life, and then you shall teach them, verse 7, diligently to your children.

Now that word teach there in verse 7 is there's different forms of a word in the Hebrew language and that form of the word is the Hiphael form which is a causative form which means you shall cause them to want to know.

And so a good teacher is 1 that, a good Christian teacher is 1 that knows Christ so well that in his life and in his teaching or her teaching, it causes people to want to know more and more.

How many would like to be a teacher like that?

And if there ever was someone who would teach and people wanted to know more, it was Who?

And remember as we looked at those texts together in Matthew chapter 4 verse 23 and 9, 35 in our last session, we saw in between that there was this sermon on the mount.

This was his greatest teaching, I guess, passage.

It says in verse 2 of chapter 5, immediately after health ministry was successful came teaching.

And as immediately it says, and it's seeing the multitudes, the ones that came from the health, seeing the multitudes, chapter 5, verse 1.

He went up on a mountain, and when he was seated, his disciples came to him.

And he opened his mouth and taught them saying.

So immediately after restoration ministry came what?

And the education was of course started out with attitudes.

What kind of attitude are you going to have?

And probably the most significant 1 was, what do you do when people persecute you and say bad things about you?

And verse 11 says, blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kind of evil Against you falsely for my sake rejoice and be exceedingly glad for great is the reward in heaven for So they persecuted the prophets which were before you so this the attitudes the attitudes that people have are pretty key.

And this lax 1 of being rejected is 1 that sometimes young people struggle with and sometimes older folks as well.

You wake up in the morning and say, but I just really was looking for some rejection today.

I'd like to have some persecution and rejection.

But you know, especially sometimes when we're younger, we go, I wonder what everyone else will think of me.

Will they reject me because I cut my hair that way, or I didn't cut my hair that way, or I'm doing this, or I'm doing that?

And Jesus was constantly trying to teach his disciples how to deal with rejection.

He would take them to all kind of venues.

He would take them everywhere with him and where he'd get rejected, they would get rejected and you know, he would say things like 1 time he had 5, 000 people listening and then he said some things and they all left.

He was teaching him how to deal with rejection.

So a good teacher wants to know if you're actually still awake.

If you're comatose, they want to call the ambulance and get the crash cart, and all those different things.

And once they, you know, the Sermon on the Mount is so cool because it has the attitudes and it kind of goes from poor in spirit all the way down to rejection, and then it has the similitudes.

In other words, if you get your attitude right, then you can be a similitude.

You'll be like a light on a hill, or you'll be like salt.

Okay, those are all excellent ideas, but of course they have a modicum of truth.

But what I'm looking for in the haystack of your ideas is they really are sanctuary terms.

In other words, if you are a sacrifice, a living sacrifice for God, every sacrifice was seasoned with salt.

And every sacrifice was completely burnt.

So, you know, this whole Sermon on the Mount is actually a sanctuary message.

You've got the attitudes that then lead to the similitudes, and then what happens next, it says, your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees.

He says, look, they had an external form of religion, but it needs to be in your heart, truly within, 6 times.

You have heard it said, but I say to you, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, 6 times.

And then it ends, chapter 5, verse 48, be therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

And then it fillers up cognitive distortions at the end.

The wise man built his house upon the rock.

It moves from the sacrifice all the way to the most holy place.

The key sermon of Jesus was a sanctuary sermon.

But that's not what I was going to talk about.

Restoration education, we'll talk about education now.

Now, organizations usually go in a pattern.

You have the foundation pattern where the company is founded.

And then you have the infancy go-go stage where all right, it's a new little baby bouncing along the road.

The infancy stage is filled with great activity.

And I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old and a seven-year-old And I can assure you I know what I'm talking about.

The other day my little boy did a lot of artwork on the couch with what we call now a tragic marker.

It used to be magic, we turned it into tragic.

Father in heaven, we're thankful today we can again come together and we can spend some time together.

We ask a blessing on our time together and we ask that your spirit would be with us.

We thank you and we come in Christ's name.

I've been talking about little vignettes from Adventist history and what we can learn from those lessons.

And the 1 I want to start out with today is a guy by the name of, this afternoon, is S.N.

Haskell was, he was an early Adventist pioneer and administrator.

And he was so effective as an administrator that at 1 time he was the president of a conference on the East Coast and California at the same time.

He's like kind of my miracle guy, you know, like, wow, if I want to grow up, I want to be like this guy who could like be a conference president, I think it was like in Massachusetts or somewhere, at the same time in California.

He married a lady that he was deeply in love with, but who was crippled, or disabled, as they would say in California.

And so she was disabled and she helped him start a lot of stuff though.

Started the, Like the Adventist book centers, you've heard of those.

The literature ministry, a lot of that, started all that.

The school in South Lancaster, he was an educator, started a bunch of schools.

And Alan White liked, of course, the Haskells, they were close friends with them.

And what they kind of did was they kind of like, they kind of encapsulated the REAP concept.

Haskell would cook, you know, and the aroma would go out, people would come in and they'd have health classes and different things and they'd have students in their homes.

So restoration then led to education, they'd educate the people.

Haskell was this guy, I remember his story about how he was at a camp meeting once and he was preaching and he was teaching and the rain started to come down.

And the rain started coming down, and nobody could hear what he was saying.

We had this church in Wichita, Kansas, and it was a metal church, and all the hail came down during 1 of my sermons.

No, but I kept preaching anyway and no 1 could hear me.

But afterwards someone came and told me the story of Haskell and how, you know, when that had happened, he just started to call the people to the middle of the tent, and then he would call out a text, and then everyone would tell everybody the text, and he preached the sermon just by text because they couldn't hear him.

So the progression of the text are the things that led it.

And of course you have Haskell's handbook.

How many of you have got that little book?

And Mark Finley tried to copy him but wasn't quite as good.

Other people try and do it but nobody can kind of kick it up like Haskell did.

Even today, people, today they write books like his, you know, like they're trying to write Daniel and Revelation.

He wrote that already, books on the sanctuary.

And he wrote those books, and of course, he and Ellen White were very close.

He had a strong regard for the Spirit of Prophecy, and also, actually, personally, for Ellen White, because after his wife died, and her husband died, he asked her to marry him.

But she said, no, we're too good of friends.

Which is a good line, Ladies, if you're ever thinking of 1.

So, we're too good, we're too good of friends, right?

But Haskell was also this person that could be called upon who knew the Bible and the spirit of prophecy very well.

And they had this problem in Indiana, you know.

Okay, so you don't mind if I say sometimes they have problems in Indiana.

So they had this problem in Indiana, what's called the Holy Flesh Movement.

And this is what happens when people get this hyper view of being perfect.

You know, If they're perfect, then everything they do is perfect.

And if they happen to want your flesh and their flesh, then they're still holy.

And so if someone says they're perfect, this is a problem with it.

Because The longer they say, the more danger you're in.

Now that doesn't mean people can't be perfect.

It's just that God in his wisdom doesn't let you know about it.

He kind of keeps that from you because it might mess you up.

I mean, that's like this is much more true than it even sounds.

I mean, it's kind of funny too, but it's really not.

So, but sometimes things that are true Can still be funny.

I was wondering just before lunch about you know, the the you know What was his name?

He goes up to Mount Carmel and the prophets The prophets are calling out to their God.

Maybe he went on vacation So why don't you should jump higher or cut yourselves more?

Anyway, I thought that was funny when I read it the first time I mean it is true.

And it's also kind of Well, maybe not funny buddy because you know you had there was a serious thing going on But I still you understand what I'm saying.

So anyway, Haskell could be called upon at these certain times.

I'm not even to my PowerPoint yet, which should concern some of you.

And in Indiana, they had this Holy Flesh going on, and people were getting into all kinds of crazy stuff, all right?

I won't go into it all, but you kind of figured out with Holy Flesh, right?

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Don Mackintosh: Something Better -- Present Reality and Adventist History

A Revival of Adoration Ministry

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