Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Let My Pastors Go: 1844 to Heaven, Why So Long?

Wes McDonald

01 A God Ordained Truth: A Man-Made Method

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

When we think about the mystery of God being finished, we're talking about the preaching to the world, the 3 angels' messages in our context, Finished in the days when the voice of the seventh angel was beginning to sound.

And I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the ministry of God should be finished, should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants, the prophets." Now, it wasn't fulfilled at the appointed time.

Well, It has to do with that little phrase, should be finished.

You know, it doesn't say will be finished.

It says should be finished during that time.

Now is prophecy, Bible prophecy, is it always finished at the appointed time?

Well, did Nineveh burn to the ground in 40 days?

No, it's what's called conditional prophecy.

So it has to do with the word should be finished.

That word in Greek, there's what we call moods.

You didn't know Greek was a moody language, but we have tenses and other things, but Greek actually has moods.

What it means, the subjunctive mood is the mood of possibility or potentiality.

The action described may or may not occur depending on circumstances.

So like with Jonah, you know, he wanted to go to Spain and he got swallowed by a fish.

And so he went over to Nineveh, he must have hated him because he really wasn't too tickled about going over there.

And then when they didn't burn up in 40 days, he got mad.

And so that prophecy was a warning which would have been carried out had they not have repented.

From desire of ages, we're talking about conditional prophecy, we mentioned that.

From desire of ages, page 633, God hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world, Acts 17.31.

Christ tells us when that day shall be ushered in.

He does not say that all the world will be converted, but that this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and then the end shall come.

By giving the gospel to the world, it is in our power to hasten our Lord's return.

We are not only to look for, but to hasten the coming of the day of the Lord.

2 Peter 3, verse 22, had the church of Christ done her appointed work as the Lord ordained, the whole world would before this have been warned and the Lord Jesus Christ would have come to our earth in power and great glory.

That was from Desire of Ages that came out in 1898.

So that this tells us that if the church had gotten its act together and warned the world, because Matthew 24, 14 has to be fulfilled.

This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world and then the end comes and Not until then.

So when you compare Revelation 10, 7, it is conditioned by the fulfillment of Matthew 24, 14.

And Ellen White tells us it is, and the Bible tells us, It is in our power to hasten or to delay the return of Jesus.

And so we have to change some ways that we're doing stuff.

Is it clear that if we're a hundred and, you know, a hundred and I'm just gonna say a hundred and 70 years, I'm not doing all the math right now, if we're that far post 1844 can you see that there's something wrong in our method and in our heart?

1 moment, I'm going to make this a little bit big again so I can see what I'm doing.

Let me know when that comes up, because I'm not going to pay attention up there.

So now, it is true that the gospel will be preached, but we've been preaching this forever.

Every so often you'll visit 1 of our churches, this is what you'll hear, right?

But the question is, who are we preaching it to?

Now, in these other countries, you know, 1 time I made the mistake of saying we're preaching to the choir, And I think it was Romania, I think.

And they says, of course you preach to the choir.

They're in church, you're supposed to preach to the choir.

So I had to learn how to be very careful not to use expressions that are only useful in American English, okay?

So I had to change my whole way of thinking, my whole way of writing and everything.

So I used something that would will work in every place I think except Mongolia, literally, the culture there, you don't knock on the door, you just talk to Adam and they'll come out.

Are we knocking on doors that are already opened?

We're knocking on doors that are already open.

You know, Jesus tells us, just 1 second here.

Jesus tells us in, oh my goodness I'm going too fast here.

He says, behold I stand at the door and knock.

If any man hear my voice and open unto me, I will come in with him and sup with him and he with me.

But Jesus does not knock on doors that are already open because he can just walk right in.

Notice that Jesus never forces himself in either.

So, In Adventist world, August 2011, there was a constituency meeting in Guyana and they had the president of the country speaking to him.

And this is what he told them, the Adventists in their constituency session.

He said, preaching to the converted once a week won't transform the community.

So Jesus' life was characterized not just by prayer, but by service.

So we need not just to pray in beautiful edifices, but we need to go to the communities where the people are.

Luke 4.18, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, The recovery of sight to the blind, the set at liberty, them that are bruised.

Mark 2 17, Jesus said, he saith unto them, they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Do we find Jesus chasing after the people that already believed in Him?

From Great Controversy, page actually, it's 457, 458 in our version that we have of the Great Controversy.

02 Are Our Efforts to Grow the Church Actually Shrinking the Church?

Father in heaven, thank you that we're here.

And I ask that you'll just speak through me, give me the right words to speak in just the right way and a clear mind, we pray that we'll all be edified and that I can share and there can be learning, even myself.

And that the topic will be clear and we'll be changed by these things.

Now the title for the whole series is, you know, the Israelites, it only took them 40 years to reach Canaan.

The Adventists, why is it taking us now 177 years this year?

I did the math today, but I forgot what it was.

So, are our efforts to grow the church actually shrinking the church.

That's kind of what we're looking at today.

Lessons from the church, you know, from our early Adventist history till today, the role of Adventist ministers and the role of church members has changed over the years.

Some of, you know, when you join a church or maybe you're new to a church, you don't know that much about the history, you'll think it's always been this way.

And for many, many, many years, all denominations, ours included, have had 1 basic pattern for ministry.

And it hasn't been good for the growth of the church.

You know, we say as Adventists, and it's to our shame if you think about this, bear with me, we claim that we are supposed to and are doing everything we can to enlighten the world, the entire world as fast as we can with the free angels' messages.

But we want to be real sure that the pastors preach to us every week.

They chair the board meeting, the school board meeting.

So we're going to talk about, yesterday we went through the broad picture, the broad scope to where we understand what we should be doing and that we are not doing it and some things.

But today I'm going to show you a little bit of the journey that it took from when we were doing things closer to right until where we are today.

And then I'm going to show you on graphs what this effect has been, and it's going to blow you away.

First of all, I wanna talk to you about the early pioneers, something about their mindset, their hardships, their difficulties, what they went through and what this message meant to them and what it meant to them to get it out as fast as they could and so forth.

So we'll talk a little bit first about James and Ellen White and family.

You know, our early pioneers, they were married, they had kids, they were like anybody else.

They weren't all, you know, bachelors or, you know, stuff like that.

And this is something which James White said when he addressed, you know, he was speaking at the general conference session in Battle Creek, and it was printed in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 9, 1859.

And he said, we have no settled pastors over our churches, but our ministers are all missionaries, as were the early ministers of Jesus Christ.

Consequently, they are most of their time deprived of the blessings of home.

For Christ's sake and for the salvation of their fellow men, they sacrificed the society of dear ones at home.

They didn't see their family very much, their kids.

In fact, James and Ellen White, for a five-year period, had to place their children in the care of somebody else, because the both of them had to travel all the time, And yet they had kids.

So they sacrificed the society of dear ones at home, go forth into a cold, selfish world and wear out their lives in preaching unpopular Bible truth.

God bless them, but they must be sustained.

You see, at this point, the church was not yet really truly a denomination yet.

It didn't have legal standing like we think of it now, you know, a corporate standing.

They really didn't have a good way of sending tithes, taking in tithes and offerings and then sending it out where it needed to go.

These folks were a lot like the Apostle Paul, and the Apostle Paul didn't get a paycheck from Jerusalem, did he?

Okay, this is the way they did, but they did it because they couldn't not do it.

And God has made it the duty of the church to support them as they go on their mission of love.

While a great work is before the church, the time that remains in which to accomplish it must be short.

The last events of prophecy are being fulfilled.

And the last warnings for the church are being given.

Our ministers must be regarded as very economical in their expenses.

In other words, they were supposed to do a lot of work for nothing.

I mean, reading between the lines, it's kind of like that, kind of.

Maybe not entirely that extreme, but you've got the idea.

Most of them preached from 2 to 300 discourses a year.

2 to 300 discourses a year, and it is a painful fact that they often suffer hardships, care and deprivation for want of means." Now, that was written in 1859.

Let's see what happened in sequence after that in James and after that in James and Ellen's life.

1860, their youngest son, Herbert, died at age 3 from erysipelas.

Henry, which Ellen White called her sweet singer, died at age 16 from pneumonia.

James White had a stroke in 1865 at the age of 44, which put the both of them out of commission for 15 months following James' stroke.

Neither 1 of them did any travel for 15 months and they were at some health retreat and he wasn't really getting better.

Now, from Testimonies for the Church, Volume 1, page 570.

This was Ellen White's response after 15 months stuck and what she decided she and James had to do.

Now, are you beginning to get the idea that these folks were dedicated to the extreme?

Having become fully satisfied that my husband would not recover from his protracted illness while remaining inactive, and that the time had fully come for me to go forth and bear my testimony to the people, I decided, contrary to the judgment and advice of the church at Battle Creek, of which we were members at that time, to venture a tour in northern Michigan with my husband in his extremely feeble condition in the severest cold of winter.

It required no small degree of moral courage and faith in God to bring my mind to the decision to risk so much, especially as I stood alone with the influence of the church, including those at the head of the work at Battle Creek against me.

But I knew that I had a work to do, and it seemed to me that Satan was determined to keep me from it.

I had waited long for our captivity to be turned and feared that precious souls would be lost if I remained longer from the work.

To remain longer from the field seemed to be worse than death, and should we move out we could but perish.

So, on the 19th of December 1866, we left Battle Creek in a snowstorm for Wright, Ottawa County, Michigan.

Now mind you they didn't get snow tires on the car and just have a tough time getting there.

90 days could have taken them perhaps 4 or 5 days, you know, with a horse-drawn wagon.

She doesn't say that exactly how they traveled, but this would have been typical.

And it's freezing cold and it's snowing, and James has been just feeble.

My husband stood the long and severe journey of 90 miles, much better than I feared, and seemed quite as well when we reached our old home at Brother Roots as when we left Battle Creek.

Have any of you ever in your life in the church today seen anybody that dedicated like that?

Now let's see what Uriah Smith had to say.

03 More than Monotonous: Partnering with God’s Purpose, Plan, and Power

God's plan for the members of the church.

What does God want the church members to do in addition to living good lives?

In addition to pay, pray, and obey, returning tithes and offerings, etc.

Do we as church members need to make any changes to our ideas of what the church needs to do for us and what we need to do to help the church in its mission to save lost humanity?

Would we be candid enough to admit that it's very easy for us to choose which church we attend or what we do because of some benefit to ourselves.

How many of you would admit that maybe even this has been a factor for yourself or your family.

And so we look to the church as supplying our needs, and that's not entirely bad, but we fail to realize that as people who are already Seventh-day Adventists, the world needs what we have.

They need what we can give them as a benefit.

And so then the receiver becomes the giver, And this is where we failed.

We've become very satisfied with listening every week to messages that often we're already familiar with and maybe preached in a different way this Sabbath than how it was presented when the previous pastor was there and so forth.

But there's more for us to do than just simply attend church, go home, have potluck dinner, and go to work and just live good lives.

We have an essential part as lay people, an essential part to play in the spreading of the 3 angels' messages worldwide to even planting new churches in areas where we don't currently have 1.

For many years, as I think you know by now, I worked in health care and I was a nurse, registered nurse, did a lot of critical care.

Everything from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I was there for about, I don't remember how many years, anyway, on contract, on a contractual basis to them in the ICU.

During that time, I took care of a king at Walter Reed.

I had a lieutenant colonel who was Soviet, a Russian lieutenant colonel.

I had everything from little old ladies to babies to old retired colonels to people who were just whatever.

Now, Because I had my job, I was able to connect with people that no minister would ever be able to even meet, right?

I've been an electrician apprentice, maintenance mechanic in a wire mill, taught aviation at Southern Adventist, what's called Southern Adventist University now for a semester.

All kinds of different things, you name it.

You know, chief...anyway, did a little of everything, was never a master at any of it.

But in every case, I was working with the church's target audience directly.

The minister in the area would never meet them.

So whose responsibility was it to give them the message of truth?

And if I didn't do that, who was going to do it?

And like where I'm staying, I'm staying down here at the Maxfields Inn.

And because I'm there, then I need to connect with the staff that work there.

So last Sabbath, the ministers and some of the presenters, that they gave us a nice potluck lunch.

And they said, would anyone like to have some take home?

I thought it was so delicious, I wanted some.

I was eating leftovers even until yesterday, but I still had some more.

But the night clerk there, I says, why don't you try some of this?

And so I'm making friends with the staff and I have an ulterior motive because at the ABC I was able to get some copies of Desire of Ages and Great Controversy.

You know, we need to think about these things when we attend a seminar or camp meeting or this or that or the other.

Never leave home without it, your witnessing material.

You stay in a hotel, you're meeting people that the minister will never meet.

You need to think about your life on this earth in a different way.

It is this type of thing that helps Jesus return faster.

Today we want to talk about how lay people, normal people, regular guys, regular gals can do some stuff.

I'm gonna tell you what regular people have done.

And I think we have a little bit of a ring in the sound system.

Maybe I'll step back a little bit, maybe it'll help it.

So anyway, I'm gonna go to Spirit of Prophecy.

I'm going to tell you some personal experiences.

Lord willing, I'll take you on the on the web to a few sites, show you how to do stuff, how you can learn things, how you can get some lay training.

You know, I've heard it said over and over, the pastors are supposed to train and equip, but then after they train you and equip you, do they still need to stay with you the whole time and do what they've taught you how to do?

It's not a business doing things that way would go broke quickly, correct?

You wouldn't run a business doing, you know, only without ever seeking new customers in areas where you didn't have stores.

How did McDonald's hamburgers get so rich?

They set up small restaurants which high school kids could run in every town across the US.

The Adventist church needs to use the McDonald's hamburgers method of spreading the message, where we have small churches that are easy for lay people to manage, and they can get as big as the lay people can manage.

And put them on every corner in every city and every little spot in the road.

Okay, and you can't expect all the salary ministers to do that because there's just only so many of them, right?

And you remember our first night, our first afternoon, excuse me, I keep saying night, It's like I'm in an evangelism campaign.

We mentioned that the people on planet Earth, the total population was about 7 and a quarter billion.

And we mentioned that if you stretch them out 3 feet apart, it would go way past the moon and way beyond, maybe twice as far, I don't know, way out there and it would take like a hundred days, whatever the number was, and a thousand miles an hour just to pass by and wave at them.

And then I told you the number of Seventh-day Adventist ministers, both ordained and licensed clergy in the entire world in the Adventist church, and you run them 3 feet apart, and it goes about 15 or 20 miles or something like that.

What God has asked us to do is humanly impossible.

We cannot do it without the power of the Spirit.

But when Acts 20, verse 17 and 28, where Paul is telling the elders from Ephesus, feed the flock of God over the which the Holy Ghost has made you overseers, the Holy Ghost who is going to supply the power has expressly stated who He's going to supply the power to and through.

So when we follow those instructions and we send the ministers and make a better use of them by going into places like Paul would go where there's no churches, and then the elders of the local churches and the lay members handle that.

Then the manifold spirit of God is manifest through all of it.

Then the local churches run by the lay people win souls around them, right?

And the Holy Spirit can give you talents and abilities you do not possess now that you don't even know that you have.

Series

Let My Pastors Go: 1844 to Heaven, Why So Long?

01 A God Ordained Truth: A Man-Made Method

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Three Angels' Message

07 The Fourth Angel’s Message

1h

The Key to Finishing the Work

The Ultimate Rescue Operation, Part 2

1h 5m

Plenary Sessions

Illuminated With His Glory: Revelation 18

1h 2m

A Famine in the Land

46m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 8: Marching Orders

53m

The Key to Finishing the Work

The Ultimate Call

59m

Discerning the Times

1h 9m

The Key to Finishing the Work

The Ultimate Rescue Operation, Part 1

1h 9m

Acts: First Generation Lessons for Last Generation Believers

4. Antioch

59m

Religious Liberty

Adventists, Politics and the Final Crisis

56m

The Three Angels' Message

03 The Everlasting Gospel

59m

Sabbath School and Personal Ministries: Getting the Most Out of BSO

05 From Click to Christ: Winning Souls with BSO

1h 9m

Sound Doctrine