GYC 2014: At The Cross

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

How We Can Be Sure Christ Will Soon Come

A. Leroy Moore

1. God Taught Me How to Study His Word

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at the Cross in Phoenix, Arizona.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

I think it's time for us to begin our seminar.

Father, thank you for your many blessings.

Thank you for this important congregation and meeting of young folk.

We pray that the Holy Spirit will be present to guide our minds and our hearts that we may be able to receive the blessing You have planned for us.

Our study for this session is how God taught me to study his word.

And we begin the story of my Christian battle at 7 years of age.

I had just moved with my family from the state of Oregon to Washington, where we had begun working in a hop camp.

We were still migrants, hadn't found a location yet.

And while we were there, I was introduced to 2 things in a way that I'd never been introduced before, and that is liquor and tobacco.

And they were drinking everywhere, and there were tobacco stubs everywhere you go.

There was, and nowadays, relatively few people smoke, but in that time, everyone seemed like everyone smoked, and there were cigarette butts everywhere.

I'm not sure just how Satan does it, but he is able to stimulate our curiosity.

I had not been introduced to that before, but now at 7 years of age, something drew me to raise the question, what do they put those unclean things in their mouths and suck them for?

And somehow I was tempted to experiment, to see what it was all about.

I heard the voice of God's Spirit very clearly saying, don't do it.

And I understood that God was signaling me not to do it.

But there was another voice that I didn't yet recognize.

And that voice was very calm and assured me that I could go ahead and experiment and it would be alright.

That if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

I could go ahead and then ask God's forgiveness and everything would be fine.

Well, it took me a while to make, after making the decision to secure the matches that I would need.

There were plenty of cigarette butts that were quite long.

So eventually I had 6 siblings around me all the time, so I had to wait until I was quite sure no 1 would know until getting the matches.

When I did, I picked up the largest, longest cigarette butt I could find and locked myself in the outhouse.

It wasn't but just a few seconds later that I was in a panic.

That voice that had kept assuring me, everything's all right, no problem, you can do that, it'll be all right.

And suddenly that same voice changed completely, and the voice then was, you're lost, you can never be saved.

Not because I'd sinned, but even though I was only 7, I realized then that to plan a sin and plan the confession of that sin would mean that when you had sinned and confessed, that confession would have very little value because you planned to confess before you sinned.

And therefore, I was under the satanic driving force of final destruction.

You've sinned against the Holy Spirit, you can never be saved.

Now for 8 years I confessed that sin, well at least for most of those 8 years.

To begin with I confessed it probably hundreds of times a day.

And the first few days, that's all I could think of was to ask God's forgiveness, but never had any assurance that I was forgiven.

For 8 years, I was hoping that I might be able to be accepted of God, but had no indication that I would be.

And after 8 years, we moved from the state of Washington to California.

And while I was there, I stayed for a period of time with a cousin and walked about 4 miles each way every day to school at St.

Helena, California, where they had 10-grade school.

And during that period of time, I gave my special attention to the my special attention to the question of being able to convince God that I was savable.

In other words, I was hoping to prove to Him, and I spent considerable time in prayer.

I walked 4 miles each way, going and coming.

During those period of time, I did a great deal of praying and talking to God.

I really wasn't hearing him much then, but I was telling him how much I wanted to be received by him.

As it was, I, after a few weeks, there was a young fellow by the name of Laverle Emerson who came on vacation.

He had been studying at Merced, California, And he was telling me about how you could go there and you could work for tuition and boarding.

And when I arrived, I found that he was working on a dairy farm.

And the gentleman who had the dairy farm was gone at that point, but he had returned very soon after I came back.

And as I started working on that dairy farm, it wasn't very long before LaVerle and his brother, who were both there, were invited by someone in town to stay with them.

In fact, the farmer himself retired from his work.

And I was carrying the full responsibility for the dairy.

I grew up working hard and so, and milking cows and so forth, that was not a hard thing for me.

So it was that I was, had my alarm set for 345 every morning.

I had to be in the barn with the cows by 04:00 in order to be through in time to do all the cleaning and so forth and be able to have a little breakfast and be ready to go to school.

Well, that was quite a challenge because that was 7 days a week And it meant that even on Sabbath, I was spending nearly 8 hours a day in the barn with the cows and with the cleanup and so forth.

Actually, during that period of time, I was very distressed because the moral climate was not good.

And I was faced with temptations of a nature that I had not been faced with before.

And I knew that unless I had a change of some kind, internal change, I would not be able to hang on and maintain sexual purity indefinitely.

I felt that I was at the crossroads and I felt that if I didn't find the answer then, I never would.

I felt that I was at the point of no return.

If I didn't have the answer, that I would soon be at the point where I couldn't return.

And so I prayed to God, And I said, Lord, whatever you ask me to do, I'm willing to do.

Now, you understand that I had no assurance that I could be saved.

But I was still hoping that I would be saved.

The fact is that I had to come to the place of total submission to God before he could do his work within me.

And so I asked God to show me what to do And what he did was to call for total sacrifice.

Now, when I say total sacrifice, I'll explain what I mean.

There would have been little that I could have done more than what he asked me for.

He asked me to spend 1 hour every morning and 1 hour every evening in study and prayer.

So here I was, already getting up at 3.45.

Now if I give an hour in the morning, that makes 2.45.

And my work lasted until 7.30 or so, where I'd grab a bite of supper and by 8 o'clock tried to be in my bed ready for sleep.

So that didn't leave me very much time for sleeping.

As a matter of fact, I didn't know what it was then, but later on I found that I had a problem of undulant fever.

And that is a very tough thing to deal with itself.

And so what God asked me to do was as close to the impossible as I could have come to.

Twice after I began my devotional study, which I took the book, Desire of Ages, for my devotions, I started reading through Desire of Ages, and I got to the end of the chapter.

When I got to the end of the chapter, I was deeply distressed.

I had no idea what I was supposed to experience, but I knew that something had to change.

And when I got to the end of the chapter, I asked God, I said, show me what to do.

I could, I was in despair because it seemed like I was, this is my last chance and my last chance was going and the voice that spoke to me before and told me to spend the time, an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, spoke to me again.

And God said to me, you go back to the first, go back to the beginning of the chapter, which I did.

2. How God Dealt with My Pride and Self-Righteousness

I see many of you were here last time and probably we have some new ones, Do we?

All right, we have several that are here for the first time.

We're going to be dealing, in our first session, we dealt with my experience as a seven-year-old child.

I committed what the devil told me was the unpardonable sin.

And for 8 years, I struggled to gain assurance that I could be saved.

And by the way, the issue of that being saved was even greater than normal because I knew from the earliest childhood that I was called to be a minister.

And therefore I had no earthly plans, no heavenly plans, no assurance of heaven and no idea what I would be doing here, because if I couldn't be saved, I couldn't certainly serve effectively as a minister.

So we're going to be talking about the mountaintop that I've just talked with you about, came down to despair again.

Now that mountaintop experience, for those few who weren't here, were a result of my having spent an hour every morning and an hour every evening with desire of ages, at 15 years of age, and that was a wonderful mountaintop experience.

But it wasn't very long before I had a problem.

Those of you who were here will remember that I was setting my clock at 2.45 in the morning to be at the barn, that is to have an hour of study and be in the barn by 4.

And then I had to, as soon as I came back from school, I had to go into the barn and worked until about 8.

And that meant that I had very short nights.

It was not an unusual thing that I had a hard time staying awake when I was trying to pray.

But that caused me a great deal of depression again because God had spoken to me and now I can't even stay awake.

And I would wake myself up and drop off to sleep almost immediately over and again and was very depressed as a result of that.

What I needed was an understanding of continuing saving grace.

Saving grace is not just something that we have when we're up.

It's something we have when we look to Christ instead of ourselves.

I could no more maintain an experience than I could gain it without Christ.

And you recall, I had to come to the bottom before I was ready to hear God's word and to trust and to accept Him, what he was showing me.

But there's no way to maintain that experience except as we depend on him.

And that was a very important thing for him to allow me to struggle through this.

And perhaps that was 1 of the important factors that he had in mind in calling for me to set my clock as early as 2.45 when I wouldn't be able to retire until at least 9 at night, which gave me very little time.

This particular morning, I had had more trouble staying awake.

By the way, some mornings and some evenings I was alert and able to commune with him.

When I got to the barn, the cows were not in the barn.

Now cows were milked regularly and we were milking regularly every day.

When cows are milked regularly, they're there usually because they want to be relieved of the pressure of the milk, which by that time has reached its maximum.

And so when I got there, I had to go look for the cows.

As I went to look for the cows, I'll never forget it.

I was so deeply depressed, but there were stars, many stars in the sky.

And so as I walked out toward the pasture where I would find the cows, I felt so heavy, it felt like my feet would actually sink into the ground.

And I walked along and I looked at the stars and I said, oh God who made the stars, if there's any help for me, let me know.

I felt just as light, that is the extreme sense of lightness was as great as the sense of heaviness before.

I'll never forget running to get the cows.

I don't know if I broke all records or not, But it seemed as though I was not—my feet hardly touched the ground and I was on there.

There was enough light so I could see fairly well.

At any rate, it was a wonderful experience.

And I knew that God had answered my prayer.

They came back when I called them, and I was able to do the milking and cleaning up afterward.

That cleanup took more time than the milking, because I had electric milkers, and you have to spend a lot of time scrubbing those things when you get through.

At any rate, that was a high point again.

God is good to give us signals when we need it, But he is also good enough to leave us to learn what it means to live by faith.

Now The experience of joy and lightness and so forth is wonderful and it gave me assurance, but that is not an evidence of faith.

A person who is not in communion with God may very well have a strong emotional feeling that they're in the right.

There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.

So God was good to me to give me some signals, and I appreciated those, but I had to learn to go beyond those signals.

He was trying to teach me to trust him no matter how I felt and no matter what the circumstances were.

So I needed continuing faith in total saving grace.

Brothers and sisters, that is what you need as well.

Remember that we cannot do anything to save ourselves, whether it's before or after conversion.

Before conversion, that was my experience for 8 years.

But when I was converted, I was no stronger myself than I was before.

I had courage, I had faith, and I was able to gain victories that I had been defeated on over and over again.

The main thing that I had struggled with for years was novels.

And I was kind of like Mark Twain who said, it's not hard to quit smoking.

But as soon as I finished 1 novel, I was finished.

And then I had to quit after that 1, and then after the other 1.

Now, after I began to commune with God, I didn't need novels.

As a matter of fact, why I was addicted to novels was precisely what God was trying to do for me in the right way.

He wanted to give me something that would help me deal with life itself.

Novels do nothing to give you the right kind of understanding of life or to give you the meaning that you need in life.

But when you commune with God through the Holy Spirit, then it is that there is true meaning in life.

I didn't need them, and I had no temptation to even read novels.

Of course, with the program I had from 245 in the morning, it didn't give me very much time for that.

But nevertheless, when you're addicted, you carry on those addictions no matter what.

And I was in a position where I needed to know how to live from day to day with assurance.

I didn't understand it verbally at the time, but it became clear to me.

I mentioned before that I learned the principles of Minneapolis before I knew of what Minneapolis was.

The fact is, I'll talk to you a little bit later about what Minneapolis means, but the principles of Minneapolis, brothers and sisters, are Christ is our only righteousness.

Not simply Christ is our righteousness, but there is no other.

3. I Learned Minneapolis Principles Before I Knew about Minneapolis

And the title for this service may be a little different than what you're looking at in the bulletin, but I'm going to deal now with how God dealt with my pride and selfishness, self-righteousness.

It was through the desire of ages and personal experience that God taught me to understand Minneapolis principles.

That's what you have in your booklet there.

The purpose of the Minneapolis message was to humble in the dust the glory of man.

In order for me to understand the Minneapolis principles, I needed to be humbled in the dust.

And I'm going to be sharing with you how God led me to Minneapolis Principles before I knew anything about Minneapolis.

And First of all, I want to share with you what the essence of the Minneapolis message was.

The message of Minneapolis can be stated in different ways.

1, to focus on Christ crucified, and that is a very central issue.

The other is to unite the principles of grace and law, of faith and obedience.

This was also central to the Minneapolis message.

And without a focus upon Christ, our sacrifice, Christ our righteousness, We will not be able to bring these principles together.

And this is the main issue that we'll be discussing now.

It was while I was in Merced, California, a young man of 15 years of age, when God had given me victory over many things and I had blessed me and I found myself 1 day asking myself, what more should I do?

It was that voice of Christ that had spoken to me before, and the voice simply said, you are in danger.

I didn't know what my danger was, but it was in that moment that I first became aware of a danger of some kind.

I would have to learn what that danger was later.

A few years later, when I was at Madison College, I was sharing my testimony of what God had done for me, and I don't know exactly what I said, but the party that I was talking to made a statement that made a deep impression on my mind.

Well, apparently, whatever I was sharing with him, I stated in a way that sounded quite self-confident.

And of course, I was feeling confident in Christ, but that's not self-confident.

Whatever I said probably led him to think of my statement as self-confidence.

The fact is I didn't understand either 1 as to what was really meant, but they stayed in my mind.

I later that year moved back home to Pacific Union College and was attending school there, and during that period of time I was suffering spiritual defeat.

I wasn't sure why, but I was suffering spiritual defeat and was begging God to help me.

The fact is I was making my promises to God when I would fail and I would say, Lord, please forgive me.

If you forgive me this, this, once more, I'll never do it again.

Now that's a very poor thing to say to God.

The fact is that he's willing to forgive me.

But it is not for me to say I will never do it again.

I can say by your grace I will overcome the next time, but I cannot say that I will never do it again because I have no capacity for not doing it again, except in Him.

So I continued to make my promises to God instead of claiming His promises to me.

Now you'll see that I'm having to learn the same lesson over and over again.

As a matter of fact, 1 of the most important things about the Minneapolis message is to understand that we are always corrupt in ourselves.

What I am in myself will never be accepted by God.

No matter how hard I try, but what I am in Christ is always accepted by God.

When I claim his promises by faith, then I can rest assured that he accepts me and that he will give me the victories that I need.

But I cannot make those victories possible.

I was about this time, the Lord spoke to me again and indicated that pride would be my lifelong challenge.

And I was probably by this time, was 18 years of age probably, and I knew that the voice of God had spoken to me that this would be my test and my challenge.

Series

How We Can Be Sure Christ Will Soon Come

2. How God Dealt with My Pride and Self-Righteousness

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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GYC 2012 Seminar: Mission - The Unmistakable Mandate

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How We Can Be Sure Christ Will Soon Come

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