GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Mark Howard: White Out? Whatever Happened to the Gift of Prophecy?

Mark Howard

By a Prophet - God is Still Leading His People

All right, we want to go ahead and get started here this morning and what I would like to do is begin with a word of prayer and then I will tell you what we're here for and We'll get into our study.

So if you bow your heads with me, please Heavenly Father the Father I pray that Your Spirit would be with us in this time that we have today.

Lord, the same Spirit that inspired the prophets has given a last day manifestation of this gift.

And Father, it is crucial for us to understand the nature of this gift among us, the Seventh Day Adventist.

I pray that you would bless the time that we have and give us understanding in spiritual things.

Okay, now what we're talking about here in 6 parts, this is the first part, is the gift of prophecy in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I wanna give you a little bit of background on my own self here so that you'll understand maybe a little more of why I'm doing this.

My name is Pastor Mark Howard, by the way.

I am a pastor in the Michigan Conference, and I'm the new director for the Arise Michigan program.

As the Arise, some of you who are familiar with Arise, the program that's been in Michigan is moving out to California.

And it's pretty close to here, as a matter of fact.

And I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, and was, I'd say, a nominal Adventist for the first 13, 14 years of my life, at which time my parents left the Seventh-day Adventist Church, largely due to questions they had about the gift of prophecy and about the teaching of the sanctuary.

And so it's been a really a burden of mine and a pleasure of mine to be able to address those topics.

I teach for the Aria School every year on both of those subjects, the Spirit of Prophecy and the Sanctuary.

And when I was about 26 years old and the Lord reached my heart and I made a decision to become a Seventh-day Adventist myself.

Those were big burdens of mine to understand.

From a biblical foundation, why we believe what we believe, and this thing about the gift of prophecy, and of course the Seventh-day Adventists.

Does everybody here a Seventh-day Adventist?

And if you're a Seventh-day Adventist and you're in Adventist circles and Adventist churches, it's not uncommon that you hear about Ellen White.

In fact, I'm afraid that today sometimes it's even more in a negative way than in a positive way.

And 1 thing that I wasn't hearing, that at least I felt wasn't clear to me, was where our biblical basis is for the gift of prophecy.

How many of you are familiar with the name of Dale Ranslaff?

Dale Ranslaff is a former Adventist minister and 1 of the premier, if you want to use that word, internet critics outside the Adventist church.

And Ransaf made an interesting point in 1 of his magazines I read some time back regarding the gift of prophecy and how Adventists have been dealing with it.

And this was from a magazine, Proclamation magazine, of November, December 2006.

And this is what he says of the Adventist Church.

He says, the Church, that would be the SDA Church, sees that the questions about Ellen White's prophetic veracity are creating a serious problem.

You'll have this in another handout by the way, but I didn't have it in the handout you have today.

The Adventist church sees the questions about Ellen White's prophetic veracity are creating serious problems, but they also see that without Ellen White, Adventism loses its distinctiveness.

Instead of admitting that her legacy has separated Adventism from evangelical Christianity and has colored every doctrine, they are attempting to give her a figurative facelift and to introduce her to new members and young people as a warm, human, accessible role model and biblical commentator.

Now what he's saying in essence is this, our way of dealing with a lot of what's, you know, the negativity in the Adventist Church about Ellen White, is we've tried to present Ellen White to young people as a warm, friendly, loving lady.

And that's fantastic, because I believe Ellen White was all those things.

But I commented to somebody recently that I don't read anywhere in the Bible where the Lord presents to us how kind and gentle Jeremiah was, so that we are ready to receive the prophecies of Jeremiah.

In other words, it's a good piece of information about the background or the characteristics of the person.

But what I wanted to know was what kind of...

What's the biblical foundation for this belief in the gift of prophecy?

I mean, the evangelicals say that Seventh-day Adventists are out of the park on this 1.

They say, Seventh-day Adventists, you guys are...

You believe in the Bible, but then you also believe in this Ellen White thing as if they're separate.

As if to believe in Ellen White is not to believe in the Bible.

And so I began to research that and that's what I've put together and that's what we're going to be sharing here.

Do we have a biblical ground to stand on with this belief in the gift of prophecy?

Do we have biblical ground to stand on in the belief of a last day prophet?

I want you to note your handout for this.

I do have these listed there in your handout.

It says there, in Seventh-day Adventist, we claim, we have, I should say, have claimed the great Protestant principle of sola scriptura, that means the Bible only.

Some allege that we contradict this principle by our acceptance of the prophetic gift, the testimony of Jesus, as manifested through the life and ministry of Ellen G.

In consideration of this, there are 3 questions we must ask.

Number 1, does the Bible support our belief in the gift of prophecy?

Now that's not speaking of Ellen White, that's speaking of the gift of prophecy in general.

What does the Bible have to say about the gift?

And I really want to emphasize this to you this morning.

This first section is going to deal with that.

There are a lot of people that have questions about the gift of prophecy, not so much because of anything Ellen White does, but because they have no clue what the Bible says about prophets.

Most Christians, when you talk about prophets, they don't even talk about prophets in their church.

They don't know what a prophet is, they don't know what a prophet does.

Well, how are you going to judge somebody as a prophet if you don't even know what a prophet is?

And so we have to figure out if the Bible speaks to this idea of the gift of prophecy that would support our current position on it?

Does the Bible support our belief in the gift of prophecy in general?

Number 2, does the Bible support our belief in a last day manifestation of the gift of prophecy?

And number 3, does the Bible support Ellen White in the role of the last day prophetic messenger.

Questions that we need to ask, and questions that are biblical answers to.

This is going to be our purpose in this series.

Now this particular segment this morning is called, By a Prophet.

It's taken from the book of Hosea, and I hope you have your Bibles with you, because we're going to be spending a lot of time in them.

Now, Hosea is after the Old Testament book of Daniel.

Most of you should know where Daniel is if you don't know where Hosea is, or aren't real familiar with it.

We're going to Hosea chapter 12, And you've got it there on the sheet, well, it's listed there, the text is at any rate.

It says, By a prophet the LORD brought Israel out of...

Now how many of you have studied this idea of the Exodus from Egypt and realized that that picture of the Israelites leaving out of Egypt and going into the Promised Land parallels the Advent movement as God is trying to take us out of the world of sin into the heavenly Canaan.

How many of you are familiar with that idea?

Who was the prophet that God used to lead Israel out of Egypt?

And the Bible tells us here in Hosea that God led Israel by a prophet.

In fact, if you read the history, there were often times they wanted to be led by anybody but Moses.

And today we may say, well I'd rather be led by somebody else than a prophet.

If God used a prophet and led his people, not only led them out of Egypt, but it says by a prophet they were preserved.

By Whose Authority?

You should have received a handout when you came in the door.

I just want to tell those coming in, in some unfortunate ways, if you're just coming in here, this is a series of 6 parts, so you'll get a little bit of what we talked about.

We laid some foundation in the last study that we're going to continue working with throughout the series.

Somebody had asked me during the break, and I understand in our first session we kind of looked at what the Bible has to say about the prophetic ministry, and the role of it.

And while that's probably not In the foremost part of everybody's mind, if you ever run into sharing your faith with anybody, it will be when you have to talk about the spirit of prophecy.

There are a lot of questions, as I said in our last session.

We can't have a clear understanding about the gift of prophecy until we understand what the Bible teaches about it.

And we can talk about Ellen White all day long.

So last period, what we did was we tried to look at some of the things the Bible told us about prophets and prophecy.

And I was asked during the break about a lot of people have more questions about some of the comments Ellen White made and what to say to people when they're trying to evaluate Ellen White or they're arguing with you about Ellen White and some of the statements I mentioned like at the end of the last class we're talking about riding bicycles and some of these other things, what to eat and what not to eat.

We're going to be spending a lot of time in getting into those details.

This particular session is called By Whose Authority?

And what we're going to do in this session is, once again, lay a Bible foundation for how God in the scripture expects us to relate to the prophetic ministry.

Once again, If we're going to look at Ellen White and evaluate her ministry, especially as those of us who claim that she's 1 of the identifying characteristics of this remnant church, we need to understand what the Bible says about this ministry, this gift of prophecy.

And so we're talking about authority in this 1.

And this afternoon we're going to be talking about inspiration and hermeneutics.

Specifically how to understand what was written, how to rightly interpret what Ellen White has written, how to consider time and place of what was written and make sense of it.

I think you'll find that very beneficial if you've ever wrestled with some of the passages or statements of Ellen White or you have friends that have struggled with that and you're trying to witness to them.

And then Tomorrow morning we will be talking about Ellen White and the internet attacks on her ministry and we will conclude then with some of, some alleged defenses of Ellen White in the church today that I think are doing more harm than good.

And so that's kind of what we're going to cover, all those different things.

And I want to go ahead and start with a word of prayer before I continue on.

I'd like it if you could bow your heads with me at this time.

Heavenly Father, Father, once again, I pray that the Spirit that inspired the prophets would illuminate our hearts and minds today as we are seeking an understanding from Scripture as to how we are to relate to the prophetic ministry in our lives.

So I pray Father you would guide us and give us this understanding now in the name of Jesus and for His sake.

Okay, I feel like I'm going to explode up here.

I've got all these different wires, you know.

Anyway, we are going to talk about authority.

You should have the handout with you by whose authority.

I want you to notice at the top of the page, in the introduction, it says, many of us tend to get very defensive when God calls for a course correction.

You ever have God convict you of something in your life that needs to change?

Let me just be honest with you, nobody likes it.

And if you say you like it, you're probably either not being honest or, I don't know, maybe you're just a little different.

But most people do not like to be told to change something that has become woven into their character of who knows how many years.

We immediately want to retaliate and demand that God change his position...

Of course, we don't directly challenge God, but...

Indirectly, by attempting to strip his messages of their authority.

For a person who professes to be a Christian...

A person who professes Christianity isn't going to say, well, I'm not going to do what God says.

What we say is, I don't think God cares if I don't do it.

In other words, that way I can still appear like I'm a good Christian.

And so when the word of God comes to me and challenges me to change my direction, I can say, well, I don't think God's...

I don't think he really cares that much about that.

Now I can still be a good Christian in good standing and at the same time refuse to follow God's counsel.

So of course we don't directly challenge God...

...But indirectly by attempting to strip his messages of their authority.

Now this is well illustrated in a radio conversation...

...And I know that it didn't, it's a story, but it's a cute story, between a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995.

This comes over the airwaves in this little story.

The Canadians on the radio to this US naval ship.

Please divert your course 1-5 degree, 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.

Americans, we recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.

You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.

Americans, this is a captain of the US Navy ship and I say again, divert your course.

Canadians, No, I say again, divert your course.

This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States Atlantic fleet.

We are accompanied with 3 destroyers, 3 cruisers, and numerous support vessels.

I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north.

I say again, that is 1 5 degrees north or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship." Canadians' response, this is a lighthouse, your call.

Now it sounds like they are getting real stubborn there for a while.

Like you know, well the Americans sure were.

But the bottom line is this, the lighthouse wasn't moving, was it?

And neither can the lighthouse of God's Word move.

And sometimes we're like that American ship, and we say, God says, divert your course, and we say, no!

The issue here is 1 of how we relate to authority.

We looked in our last session together about how the gift of prophecy has been used to guide God's church.

1 of those areas we looked at last time was the area of doctrinal understanding.

That's not just on a church basis, but on an individual basis.

Letter C at the bottom of page 1 asks the question, how has this been accomplished?

How does God's prophetic gift, and I'm not just talking Ellen White here, how has the prophetic gift ever been beneficial to God's church?

If the prophet doesn't have the authority, in other words, if we're not considering the voice of the prophet as something that's authoritative, in other words, the prophet speaks and we should be following it, if that's not the way you consider the voice of the prophet, why have a prophet?

If the prophet is going to give direction and we say, well, you know, take it or leave it.

And I have here, for example, I mentioned last time, when Nathan the prophet came to David and said, King David, thou art the man.

You know, after that affair with Bathsheba.

If David had said, well Nathan, that's interesting, I mean, that's your opinion, but I have a different view on the matter.

Then the whole ministry of Nathan would have been stripped of his authority...

And it would have been useless to the church, right?

And in the same way we could talk about Elijah.

When Elijah came to Ahab and Ahab said, are you the troubler of Israel?

And Elijah said, no, you've troubled Israel because you've led the people to worship Baal.

The Inspiration of Herman Who? Part I

Okay, my watch says it's 2.30, so we're going to go ahead and get started.

It's interesting doing a seminar where you have...

Most of you, how many of you knew who Mark Howard was before this morning?

It's funny when you have like Sean Boonstra and Doug Batchelor and Ed Reed and all this And so I get a lot of, got a lot of people coming in and they're like, you know, I appreciated that presentation.

I came down here because everything else was full and this was the last room that was empty.

That's why I've noticed when we start, we end up filling up over the course of time.

Of course, people getting back from lunch, but What we're covering here is the Spirit of Prophecy.

And I'm going to be running the Arise program in Michigan as the current directors of Arise.

The current Arise are going to be moving out to California here.

In fact, some have already moved and they're going to run their school in Sonora, California.

And I have taught the class, the Spirit of Prophecy class for them for the past several years.

And it's a class that I usually spend about 18 class hours on.

And so with 6 hours here, obviously we're limited in the things that we are covering.

Now, I don't have all the presentations up there yet.

But if you want a more complete coverage of the topic and you're interested in this or you want to direct other people to it, you can go to www.arisemichigan.org and find some of those presentations there.

The topic for this afternoon, The first 1 is, the handout you have is the Nature of Inspiration.

It's going to be followed up with the Inspiration of Herman Who.

The inspiration of Herman Who is the title I've got for this and the next session, just because when you say hermeneutics, most people are like, Herman Who?

Hermeneutics is basically the study of how to read and interpret correctly.

And it's very important when we're dealing with the writings of Ellen White, in fact, you'll find that in these 2 topics, this session and next session, lie most of the difficulties with the spirit of prophecy today, with people inside the church and outside the church.

How do we deal with the writings of Ellen White?

What bearing does that have on our understanding of the gift of prophecy?

That's what we're going to be talking about.

And before we do that, I'm going to kneel and ask God's blessing.

If you'll bow your heads with me, please.

Heavenly Father, Father, we want to thank you that we are here and we have the opportunity to learn of you and to study and to grow in our understanding.

I pray, Father, that we would seek to grow not only in our head knowledge of the subject of the gift of prophecy, but Father, that we would grow spiritually by putting into practice the things that we learn.

I pray that your Spirit, who inspired the prophets, would bless us as we talk about inspiration this afternoon.

And I ask and pray this in Jesus' name and for His sake.

Previous handouts, if you're interested in getting them, you can talk to somebody in the back that you saw when you came in and got the other handouts from.

Somebody asked me about that the last session.

The Ellen White Estate, and they have a booth over in among the exhibits, is selling their CD-ROM of the published writings of Ellen White for half price here, which is a good deal, half price from the ABC.

And you'll get an additional $5 off if you tell them you attended this seminar.

They have some with the limited writings, and then 1 that's the complete published writings, and something else that somebody had asked me during the break.

If you want a thorough resource on Ellen White and the gift of prophecy, I would recommend the book by Herbert Douglas called Messenger of the Lord.

It's actually used as a textbook in our schools and very well written and comprehensive.

It's not necessarily the book you'd sit down and read cover to cover.

As I said, it's a textbook, but gives a lot of background on what we've talked about and more.

Series

Mark Howard: White Out? Whatever Happened to the Gift of Prophecy?

Ellen White vs. the World Wide Web

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Fundamentally Flawed? Considering Challenges to Truth

Trinity

49m

Mark Howard: White Out? Whatever Happened to the Gift of Prophecy?

By a Prophet - God is Still Leading His People

1h

Mark Howard: White Out? Whatever Happened to the Gift of Prophecy?

The Inspiration of Herman Who? Part II

58m

Adventist Apologetics: Complex Issues, Adventist Answers

6. The Final Generation (Panel Discussion)

1h 14m

Mark Howard: White Out? Whatever Happened to the Gift of Prophecy?

Betrayed with a Kiss

1h

EGW vs WWW

57m

The Bible or Ellen White?

Part 1: The Prophetic Gift and Ellen White

56m

The White Elephant in the Room

God’s Fascinating Prophetic Pattern

56m

Sanctuary Under Siege

5. Last Generation Theology

1h

A God Worth Knowing

17 A Voice of Reason

1h 8m

Ellen White Under Fire

1h 3m

Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

06 Toleration, Liberty, and Personal Freedom

1h 1m

Sound Doctrine