Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

A Light Was Kindled

C. Raymond Holmes

A Light Was Kindled - Part 1

Heavenly Father, we're so thankful to be here again at Camp Meeting for this marvelous yearly spiritual feast.

We pray that your Holy Spirit would be present at every meeting, anoint every speaker, every presenter, and may your name and your word be lifted up and glorified.

Now the study of the history of the Reformation is both inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring because the Holy Spirit moved mightily 500 years ago, as we'll see as we go along.

But sadly, there was, during the Counter Reformation that followed, a lot of persecution, beheadings, people were burned at the stake because of their new faith.

The established church prosecuted Protestants, the Waldensians and the, I can't remember the name now, French Protestants.

And the sad part, the depressing part, is that Protestants even persecuted Protestants.

I want to dedicate this seminar to the late Dr.

Walter Kukkonen, that's a Finnish name, a Lutheran theologian who was my spiritual mentor and friend.

To quote from the book of Job, he was my Elihu, who said to Job, surely you have spoken in my ears and I have heard the sound of your words and the ear tests words as the palate tastes food.

When my wife first became a Seventh-day Adventist and I was in a dilemma, Professor Cooken listened to me for 2 days I spent at his home.

And after listening to me for 2 days, until I completely unburdened on him, he said to me, he said, Ray, you need to ask God what he's trying to say to you.

He did not respond to me on the theological doctrinal level, but on the affective level where my need was the greatest.

And when he spoke those words, it was as if God himself had spoken to me, because it virtually gave me his approval and his permission to investigate further.

And I remember I drove from his home in Homewood, Illinois to Andrews University.

I was driving a Volkswagen camper and I parked in the seminary parking lot and I went in.

My purpose was to just take a look and meet as many people as I could.

And then I went home and the rest of the story unfolded.

But many years later, He and I kept contact for all those years in between, because like I said, he was my friend.

And it was about 10 years ago, I called him on the phone.

He lived in Minneapolis, and we talked for quite a while on the telephone, and his last words to me in that phone conversation were these.

He says, I have concluded that this church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that I had been a part of, is a Christless church.

And I thought about that because we hung up right after that and I thought, I have to go down to Minneapolis and see him and sit at his feet and say, what do you mean by that?

And I was making plans to do that when on Thursday of that week, I talked with him on Monday.

On Thursday, his son called me and he told me, my dad died this morning and he told me he wants you to do his funeral sermon.

And the funeral was And the funeral was on Saturday.

I had 2 days to get prepared and drive down to DeKalb, Illinois.

A Lutheran seminary professor and theologian asking a Seventh-day Adventist retired seminary professor to preach the sermon at his funeral.

So in my sermon I told the story of his last words to me.

And I said, we'll never know what he meant by that, but it does give us something to think about.

So he says he's concluded that that Lutheran church denomination was a Christless church.

It happened because sola scriptura, the Bible alone was being abandoned.

And when the word is abandoned, Christ is lost.

Because Luther himself said, the Bible is the cradle in which Christ is laid.

Ellen White said this, God will have a people upon the earth to maintain the Bible and the Bible only as the standard of all doctrines and the basis of all reforms or changes.

She says, The opinions of learned men, the deductions of science, the decrees or decisions of ecclesiastical councils, as numerous and discordant are the churches which they represent, the voice of the majority, not 1 nor all of these should be regarded as evidence for or against any point of religious faith.

Before accepting any doctrine or precept, we should demand a plain, thus saith the Lord in its support.

That's from the Great Controversy, page 595.

The theme of this series, this seminar, is taken from John 1, verse 5, and it reads, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

As long as the light shines, the darkness does not and cannot overcome it.

If you turn the light on in a pitch dark room, what happens?

But if you turn the light off, what happens?

Back in the 1960s, when I was still a Lutheran minister, excuse me, and by the way, the Adventist church that I pastored for the last 24 years is less than a mile from the last Lutheran church I pastored.

And when I left that Lutheran church we had 600 baptized members.

Now they're lucky if they get 35 people to 1 service.

Anyway, back in the 60s, I was attending a meeting of Lutheran pastors in the UP, and 1 of the subjects that we were discussing was the interpretation of and the authority of the Bible, the Word of God.

And I felt obliged to defend the Bible's authority.

Imagine having had to do that at a meeting of ministers.

And 1 of the pastors who was a recent seminary graduate, he came up to me and he shook his finger in my face and he said very vehemently, He said, the day is coming soon when people like you will not be allowed in the Lutheran ministry.

Well, that event, together with the vacation Bible school material for that summer in that Lutheran church I was pastoring.

My wife was the VBS superintendent that year, and she had ordered the VBS material, and when it came, she opened the box and began to look through it.

And she came to me and she said, we can't teach this.

She said, it's evolution, it's not creation.

Because the theme was on creation, but it was teaching evolution.

And I looked at it and sure enough, I packed it all back in the box, sent it back to the bookstore, and I wrote a letter and I told them why.

Well, the event of that meeting with the pastors and that problem with the VBS material, all of that began the process of disillusion that eventually disillusion that eventually culminated in our transition into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

And what this illustrates is that the authority of the Word of God, the Bible, is still the central issue for the Christian church after 500 years.

It's still the issue, and it's the issue for us.

In fact, he was the man I succeeded in my first Lutheran parish, which was in the UP, Trout Creek, Painesville, and Ewan.

We visited him on Thursday as we came up here.

But a couple of years ago, he sent me a copy of the latest biography of Martin Luther.

It was titled Martin Luther visionary reformer.

And I read it of course and I was struck by this statement by the author.

He says, the cause of the Reformation turned out to be momentous in a way that neither Luther nor Staupitz.

Staupitz was the Roman priest that was the head of the monastery in which Luther was a monk.

He says, the cause turned out to be momentous in a way that neither Luther nor Staupitz could imagine.

A cosmic contest between Christ and the devil to be settled on the last day." Unquote.

That sounds like a Seventh-day Adventist statement.

In the latest biography of Luther, written by a Lutheran.

Anyway, we need to ask what is the mission of the church?

And Jesus, speaking to his disciples, made it absolutely clear.

Matthew 28, verse 18, And Jesus came and said to his disciples, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." there is the Trinity teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." Where were they to go?

All nations, everywhere, the whole earth, all people.

A Light Was Kindled - Part 2

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this new day.

We thank you for being able to be here at this yearly spiritual feast in the Michigan Conference.

We pray that you would bless every speaker today and every presenter and every attendee, especially Lord be with the children, the young people.

And Lord, we pray that you would exercise your sovereign power and protect this campground from any dangerous storms or any other mishaps.

We ask you to be with us here in this room and bless our time together.

Well, we're talking about the Reformation, in a sense commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

And yesterday we were talking about the times, what the times were like in 1517, 500 years ago.

People began to question things, spiritual as well as physical.

And I mentioned that 1 of the major events that occurred in 1456 was when John Gutenberg invented movable type and printed the first Bible in Latin.

And people for the first time, the very first time, it's hard to believe today where We have so many different translations of the Bible in many, many different languages.

It's hard to believe that in the early 1500s, the average individual church member didn't have access to the Bible.

All he had to go by was what the priest said and what they were taught from the Catholic catechism.

And so when the first Bibles were printed in the vernacular, that was a major event in human history.

So a new age was dawning, and it had a powerful intellectual and spiritual impact on life.

The Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, was a time of great upheaval.

And as a matter of fact, the known world had gone through the time depicted in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, recorded in Daniel, the book of Daniel, as the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, as Daniel writes, all together were broken in pieces.

And after the legs of iron, which symbolized the Roman Empire, after the legs of iron had fallen, and there was disorder and fragmentation all through Europe, Centuries of confusion and a painful search for stability followed after the fall of the Roman Empire.

And later the Emperor Charlemagne had set up a new empire on the Roman model.

And his greatest conquest was against the Saxon tribes of Germany.

And Charlemagne's greatest purpose was to destroy Christianity.

And so many very harsh laws were passed against people who refused to be baptized, who refused to baptize their children.

And by that time, and this is important to remember, the Roman Catholic Church was the primary enforcer of laws like that.

But Charlemagne's attempt to destroy Christianity finally failed And a new system emerged that was called feudalism.

And by the 11th century, new political kingdoms began to appear on the scene.

Nations were born during the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.

Tribes, Tribes, largely identified by language, began to unite as nation states, such as Germany and France and England, and Italy, and Spain.

And along with this, a largely agrarian economy, as we mentioned yesterday, this was way before the Industrial Revolution.

There was no industry, there was no trains, things like that, no factories.

Most people were farmers or lumberjacks or things like that.

But that agrarian economy gave way to trade, and that promoted the increase of the development of towns and cities, and money became the medium of exchange.

And as far as most of the people were concerned, that is to say the peasantry life was very hard and most of them did not own the land that they lived on.

Men and women worked long hours in the fields.

They lived in small cottages with mud walls and thatched roofs.

They burned a fire in the middle of the floor in order to heat and cook.

And the smoke went up through a hole in the roof.

Windows had no glass like these, and in the wintertime they would stuff bales of straw into the opening of the window.

Usually the beds that they slept on were nothing more than a pile of straw.

Sometimes it was big enough for the whole family to use.

Streets were filled with garbage and animal manure and sometimes even human.

And none of them were clean by the standards that we have today.

Their diet was mostly things like porridge, cheese, soups, and pork, and life expectancy was very short.

A lot of children died in infancy or in their early years from starvation or disease.

And so the idea began to prevail that peasants are to spend their lives working for the nobility.

Some of the nobility were kind to them, but many were merciless.

And in Germany, for example, there was an awful lot of discontent, class hatred, and undercurrents of revolt.

His father, whose name was Hans, grew up on a farm and later became a miner.

He was a rugged, rough, but a very devout man, a member of the Roman church, faithful.

But old German paganism was blended with their beliefs, and they believed that elves, fairies, witches were everywhere.

Evil spirits were the cause of storms and floods and pestilence and sickness, they believed.

Can you see why the people were enchanted by the teachings of the medieval church with that kind of a superstitious approach to religion?

1 day in July in the year 1505, young Luther, wasn't even 20 years old, I don't think, by that time.

He was walking along the road when suddenly the sky darkened and he was stunned by a crashing storm that suddenly descended.

And he was struck down by a bolt of lightning.

Didn't hit him, but it hit the ground nearby and he fell.

And he cried out, Saint Anne, if you help me, I'll become a monk.

So here the man who called on a saint, quote unquote, would later repudiate the idea, and the man who became a monk would reject monasticism.

That loyal son of the Roman Church would later shatter it, shatter its very structure, even identifying the popes with the Antichrist.

And as far as most people were concerned at that time in history, in Europe, the church was the only stabilizing force in that chaotic society, in that great time of upheaval and change.

And so the church eventually became the absolute judge of human destiny.

How did that happen between the time of the apostles and the early church and that of the Middle or Dark Ages?

The apostle Paul, for example, had written his epistles around the year 60 AD, and now they were in 1517.

Nobody has summarized it better than Ellen White in her book, Great Controversy, pages 49 and 50, when she says, and I've always been struck by her choice of words.

She says, almost imperceptibly, the customs of heathenism found their way into the Christian church.

The spirit of compromise and conformity was restrained for a time by the fierce persecution which the Church endured under paganism.

But as persecutions ceased and Christianity entered the courts and palaces of kings, The Church laid aside the humble simplicity of Christ and his apostles for the pomp and pride of pagan priests and rulers, and in place of the requirements of God, she substituted human theories and traditions.

The nominal conversion of Emperor Constantine caused great rejoicing, and the world, cloaked with a form of righteousness, walked into the church.

Now the work of corruption rapidly progressed.

Paganism, while appearing to be vanquished, became the conqueror, the conqueror of the church.

The spirit of paganism controlled the church.

Her doctrines, ceremonies, and superstitions were incorporated into the faith and the worship of the professed followers of Christ.

Nobody has summarized it better than Ellen White.

What was it that had to be compromised in order to do all this that she described.

People had to be kept in ignorance of the Scriptures.

A Light Was Kindled - Part 3

Heavenly Father, once again, we want to thank you for a good night of rest and for this new day.

We thank you for your grace and your mercy that are new every day.

We thank you for your gift of salvation through Jesus, and we thank you for this camp meeting, this spiritual feast that we can enjoy, meet friends and listen to your word preached and taught.

Lord, we pray that you would build up the faith of the members of not only the Michigan Conference but the whole Seventh-day Adventist World church.

Lord, help us to be faithful to Your Word, come what may.

And so bless us as we share this time together this morning.

Well, yesterday when we were concluding our time together, we were talking about Luther's appearance in the city of Worms, Germany, where he was summoned by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth.

And we talked about the fact that he stood alone before the emperor, the secular authority, and the representatives of the pope, the religious authority.

He stood all alone to answer for his faith, and he had nothing to sustain him but the word of God.

He was not intimidated by the fact that he stood before the emperor and the papal representatives, and the papal representatives.

But he was overwhelmed by the truth that he and the emperor alike were answerable to God.

He defended himself on that occasion admirably.

He didn't lose his composure, he didn't lose his temper, he was calm, he spoke well, he answered every question, every charge with with reference to the scriptures.

But it was not enough, because Charles V, the Holy Roman Roman emperor was descended from a long line of Catholic monarchs.

Furthermore, politically, Politically, the emperor needed the goodwill of the pope.

So politics was involved in what was going on.

And finally, the emperor declared, this was his final edict after the meeting was over.

He said, quote, Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic.

The Pope had, and the Emperor was simply following the Pope's decision.

And the Emperor also said, when the time is up, 21 days, No 1 is to harbor him, that is to say, protect him.

His followers also are to be condemned, the emperor said.

His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man.

Now what was it that brought down upon that 1 lone man, the full ecclesiastical power of the papacy, as well as the temporal power of the emperor.

Well, it all began in the Augustinian cloister at Wittenberg with Luther's personal search for forgiveness and his discovery of the gospel that had been buried under centuries of ecclesiastical tradition.

And when he found the good news, the inevitable consequence was the peeling away of those traditions like you peel away the layers of an onion.

Luther had become a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg by that time, But his theology did not begin with books or on reflections on the reflections of others, but with his own personal search for peace with God.

As I mentioned earlier, he had a very sensitive conscience, And he felt that he couldn't satisfy God's standards of righteousness.

And though Luther was outwardly busy and very productive as a professor at the university.

Inwardly, he was in a turmoil of guilt, And he tried every resource that was made available to him by church tradition in order to find relief.

He tried good works, and he discovered that he never could do enough to make himself worthy.

He sought the merits of the so-called saints, and he ended with doubt that they could help him at all.

And he tried penance, going so far, as I mentioned, as scourging himself with a whip.

Penance required that the sinner must confess all wrongdoing and seek absolution from a priest, a priest confessor.

Many times a Sometimes, his confession lasted up to 6 hours.

Even bored the priest, because every because every sin in order to be absolved must be confessed.

And so the soul must be searched, the memory ransacked, the motives probed, and sometimes, when he was in confession, he would review his entire life because he was afraid he might have forgotten something in his confession, and he would start all over again.

His problem was not whether his sins were big or small, but whether they had been adequately confessed.

He worried that he had not remembered them all, and because he hadn't remembered them, he hadn't confessed them.

And he was deathly afraid that his memory protected his ego.

He was frightened because even after 6 hours of confession, he could still think of something that had escaped his memory.

And you can imagine the mental torture that that man was going through.

He had become his own accuser, and he was relentless.

The church had taught him that in order for sins to be forgiven, they must be diligently confessed.

To be confessed, I must be recognized and remembered.

If they are not recognized and remembered, they cannot be confessed.

And if they are not confessed, they cannot be forgiven.

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A Light Was Kindled

A Light Was Kindled - Part 4

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A Light Was Kindled

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