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Cedar Lake SDA Church

Mark Howard

Crisis Ahead

Heavenly Father, again we come before you in prayer and we just thank you for the privilege we have of worshipping together.

We ask Lord for the spirit of truth, that he would be present to lead us into all truth this morning.

Give us ears to hear and hearts to respond, Father.

I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart would be acceptable in your sight.

We ask and pray these things in Jesus' name.

The sermon today is entitled Crisis Ahead, and I mean just ahead.

Now I'm gonna tell you that when I prepare a message, I always ask the Lord what to prepare.

It was between this today and there, I wanted to share some experiences that I've had.

I shared the last time I was in the pulpit, we talked about our giving.

And I talked about how when you put God to the test and you're faithful in your giving, God will bless you.

And somebody challenged me after that sermon and said, well, be careful not to make it sound like anytime you give, everything's gonna be smooth sailing.

And I certainly didn't mean to intend that, but I was thinking through my life and I thought of how many times a God has worked miracles in my life, and I was going to share that today.

And I think perhaps because I want the students to be able to hear that, and they're not with us today.

And the Lord put this message in my heart today.

Now the message you put on my heart today is more Adventist-y, and what I mean by that is if you are not a Seventh-day Adventist, not that you won't be able to follow it, but what I'm going to be talking about today is in direct context of some things that are happening right in our Seventh-day Adventist Church.

In fact, right now, see Seventh-day Adventist Church is a worldwide church and we have ministry around the world.

When we give our tithes in this church, we're supporting the preaching of the 3 angels' messages of Revelation all around the world.

And I should say, if you're visiting and maybe you've not heard that, from a gospel standpoint, Revelation chapter 14, the everlasting gospel in the context of those 3 messages.

And because we're a worldwide church, we have regular meetings of our church and every fall we have a meeting called annual council or fall council or autumn council.

And just to give you a little bit of an understanding of this, this council is the yearly business meeting of the Seventh-day Adventist Church General Conference Executive Committee.

It includes currently at least 343, the 343-member executive committee made up of general conference officers, vice presidents, and department heads.

This whole sermon is not gonna go like this, but I'm just trying to give you an understanding of the framework here.

So in case you're like, what is the annual council?

Some of you know what a business meeting is like in a church.

Well, this is the business meeting for the World Church.

Includes general conference officers, vice presidents, department heads, as well as representatives from the entire world field, including division officers, union office conference presidents, some pastors, lay members, and members at large.

And the purpose of this council is to discuss how the work is advancing around the world.

Reports are given and finances are reviewed and policies are discussed and voted.

Inspiring testimonies are shared from around the world and seasons of prayer are held.

This fall, right Now as we're sitting here, a key item, agenda item, has been the discussion of some follow-through with a vote we took at our last, we meet quinquennially every 5 years as a world church.

People from all over the world come together for a general conference session.

The last general conference session was in 2015 and it was in San Antonio, Texas.

And something that we talked about there for the third time as a world church is whether we would ordain women to the pastoral ministry.

This is something that Seventh-day Adventists have not done because we believe as a church, now there are individuals who have different understandings, but as a church we don't believe it's biblical.

We don't believe that women are less important than men, we don't believe that fathers are leaders in the home because they're more important than the mothers, but we believe it's a role distinction that God gave as a world church.

Now this has come up for discussion and we as a church voted for the third time that we don't believe that it's biblical to ordain women to the gospel ministry.

What that means is there are other roles that we believe that women can serve in the church, even in preaching and teaching and what have you, but Not as an ordained minister.

Okay, now our world church, anytime Christians have misunderstandings, the first thing we ought to do is go to scripture to find what the answer is.

And as a world church, we do that collectively.

Following, and some of you, I don't know if you've studied this much, but in the Bible we have an example of that in the book of Acts, Acts chapter 15.

And in Acts chapter 15 there was confusion in the church over whether or not circumcision should be mandated throughout the New Testament church.

And so the Bible says that the various different leaders went up with their viewpoints to the council in Jerusalem and they discussed it, and as that council met, They came to an agreement that we don't believe that this is in harmony with all the teaching of Scripture.

And they made their decision as a church in the New Testament.

And then they encouraged that that decision would be carried out to all the different churches of the New Testament.

And everybody would be told that this is where we decided we are going to stand as a church.

Now some people get the idea today that the New Testament church was kind of willy-nilly.

They just went off and did whatever the spirit led them to do.

But you have to understand that the Holy Spirit has always led God's people to come together in unity and organization.

And we see that in the setting up of, you know, the apostles set up deacons over churches and elders over churches.

We find the same pattern in the Old Testament.

Our world church in 2015 made this decision and there were some unions in our church, in the world church, that said, we don't want to abide by that decision.

When you are a world church and you make a decision and you want unity and somebody says I'm not gonna follow that.

That's what the annual council's deciding right now.

And the current proposal on the table is that we, and I'm trying to make this, to abbreviate this, you can go to the general conference website and read Knock Yourself Out.

And I said this is kind of Adventist-y, but the reality is this is all through the news and the reason I'm addressing it here is because what I'm going to get into today is going to address some concepts that will totally undermine the mission of this church if you're not clear on them.

And we're going to go to scripture in a moment and see another place where this happened And I could have gone, I was wrestling over which place to go in scripture because there are many examples in the scripture of rebellion against God's authority.

I'm going to look at 1 of them or 1 of these crisis situations.

But I want to say that coming up this next week, The proposal on the table is that the General Conference move to work with these divisions and try to get them to come in line with what we've decided as a world church.

And if they don't come in line, then we'll have a step process for basically, what's the word I want to say, taking over those unions and reconstructing them.

Okay, this is from a business standpoint.

Now the unions will argue a spiritual standpoint.

I'm going to get into some of that a little bit more.

The sermon is not going to be addressing women's ordination and the fallout of that so much as the need for God's people to be united.

And here's the thing, and we'll get into this a little bit more in this message, folks, The biggest problem that we have in this world is not the devil.

It's our own carnal hearts that are not in harmony with spiritual principles.

That's why Jesus said we need to be born again.

He didn't say you need to be born again because there's a devil.

If that was a problem, just kill the devil, we'll be fine.

He even told Nicodemus, a man who is lifelong in the church, you need to be born again.

Because it's when, inevitably, in your experience, inevitably, At some point or another, you're going to come to a point where you are butting heads with the will of God in your life.

The question is, what do you do when you come to that impasse?

Do you yield or do you maintain your own opinion?

What do you do when you do that as a church, collectively?

When me and my friends in the church say, hey, I believe things this way, and we follow the counsel in the Bible, and we come together as a church, and the church decides something, what do we do?

I'm going to tell you that we are facing a crisis, and this is just the tip of it.

Now what I want to do is I want to go to John chapter 6 where our scripture reading was.

And let me say this as well, I do have a book That was written by Dr.

Quentin Waleen of the Biblical Research Institute on women's ordination and some of the underlying issues.

If you're like, what is this all about and what's some of the study?

It goes through all of the different questions about where we stand on this.

It was interesting yesterday at the funeral service of Adrian, and of course an 18 year old boy dies in an accident, and it's not uncommon for a person to ask why God, why did this happen?

And the pastor made the point to the people gathered at the service yesterday, God doesn't mind if you ask why.

You can shake your fist at God even and ask why.

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Crisis Ahead

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