Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2011

Christ’s Way to Happy, Growing Churches

Don Eckenroth

Forward to Zion

Creative Outreach Ministries That Work

This is the top of the morning to each of you.

We're going to have a good time this morning as we open up our subject today, which is Creative Outreach Ministries that Work.

And we're all looking for, you know, we're all looking for those things.

I have a few slides I want to go through to begin with, sort of set the table, and then I hope that we can spend most of our time in me sharing with you some of the things that we've done and how we've done it, and then giving you opportunity to ask questions and make comments and so on and so forth.

Okay, so this is gonna be an interactive time.

And brother, I'm gonna need 1 of those sheets as well.

I have it on my computer, but it's up there and I can't get to it from here.

Number of years ago, the Reader's Digest did a survey on Seventh-day Adventists.

They asked their readership what they knew about Seventh-day Adventists.

I know this is old and other surveys, many surveys have been done since this.

But this sort of encapsulates the whole thing.

I mean, this is what we meet in our communities.

The misinformation about Seventh-day Adventists, okay?

Adventists live on fruits and vegetables.

This is 1 of the things that came out of that survey.

Adventists are old-fashioned in dress, and they do not play musical instruments.

They need to come to camp meeting, right?

Oh my, who do they have us confused with?

They have us confused with Mennonites and Amish and, you know, they're good people, but they have us confused with them.

And who do they have us confused with about musical instruments?

Some branches, the more conservative branches, Church of Christ.

Adventists are ignorant of the real world, especially the exclusion of medical help.

Do they have any idea that Adventists operate the largest Protestant health system in the world?

Wow, how do people get these ideas about us?

Adventists are associated with the watchtower.

Well, when it comes to medical help, who do they have us confused with?

Of course, you meet this misinformation about us relative to Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.

It means if we are going to be effective in reaching these people, we've got a mountain to climb.

What these people see about us, if a survey, if Gallup had taken a survey in 31 AD, what do you suppose they'd have found?

All you have to do is glean the Gospels to find this stuff, see?

Well, how did he go about breaking down all of these, all of this misinformation, all of this prejudice against him.

Christ's method alone will bring true success in reaching the people.

That is why, if we want to be successful, we need to spend our time focusing on how Jesus did evangelism, how he broke down the prejudice, all of these things that people were saying about him.

In Acts 10, 38, we find these words, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing what?

He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil for God was with him.

You see, what argument would not accomplish, loving ministry, helping people with their felt needs, 1 their hearts, open doors, as we saw yesterday from that statement from the servant of God.

This has a way of opening doors to human hearts, and that's what we've got to find a way to do.

And so we think our mountain is big, Jesus' mountain was bigger, see.

But he went around, instead of combating it, you know, talking against it, creating, you know, all kinds of animosity in the community, He just went around doing good.

I've looked for it as I was putting these slides together.

I looked for it, and I need to get on the internet and see if I can find it.

Ben Franklin is quoted as saying, when other people say bad things about you, live in such a way nobody will believe it.

Live in such a way that nobody's going to believe what they're saying about you.

And you've heard Rick talk about, you know, all of the angst that has developed because of the book he's written, see?

What did Jesus say about loving your enemies?

Franklin says, live in such a way that nobody believe it anyway, see?

Okay, I'm gonna try to move through this.

That's why we need bridging ministries, because Christ's method alone will give true success in reaching the people.

When people said bad things about him, Jesus, as Peter said later, he did not revile again.

When he was reviled, did he revile again?

And if you do good in your communities, as you begin to reach people in your communities and interact with them, and they find, they're going to find out you're totally different than what they've thought.

Roy Gane

Sanctuary for the Final Generation

Our Father in heaven with everything that that means.

We can feel the beautiful, soft, clean, refreshing breeze that you've sent.

We want to feel the refreshing breeze from your Holy Spirit, that divine wind coming in, moving upon us in a mysterious and mighty way.

There are no doors on this structure anyone can get in, but we believe that with the power of your angels you can shut out evil influences as you barred the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

So please station your cherubim with flaming swords at the entrances to this place.

Shut us in with you, away from distractions, purify our minds to get this big picture, this grand message that you have for us just before your second coming.

And we can see, Lord, that we, your people, have been and are in a Laodicean condition.

Our lack of wanting to make preparation for your coming, proclamation of your message of love, the burning desire, the most important things in our lives.

We have let other things get in the way, and in that we have done wrong.

Help us now to have our thinking rearranged by your word.

May this message come straight from you to your people, in Jesus' name, amen.

We're gonna look at the big picture, very big picture.

We're gonna start with Leviticus and we're gonna end up in Revelation.

I've never attempted to do this, I'll have to confess to you this morning, but I think you're gonna see some things come together that you've never seen fit together before.

You're gonna see a unity in the end time message that you've never seen before.

And I think it's gonna strangely stir your hearts as it has stirred mine.

The question we're going to look at is, what does the sanctuary teach the end time people of God about preparation for the imminent Second Coming of Christ?

They thought it was a secret rapture and it turned out to be an unsecret rupture.

We're not going to be trying to do that here today.

But we believe that the end is imminent, could come any time.

If we set a date, that may be too far in the future.

Okay, judgment at the sanctuary on the day of atonement.

Judgment in the sanctuary on the Day of Atonement.

There were 2 phases of atonement at the sanctuary.

The 2 phases consisted of during the year people would bring their offerings to the sanctuary, like sin offerings for example, and they would lean 1 hand on the head of the animal as an unspoken confession of sin.

Or if it were a hidden kind of sin, they would orally confess to get it out in the open.

And they would then take the life of the animal, the blood was put on the horns of the altar, and this was the way for the debt of sin to be removed through pointing to Christ's sacrifice.

On that basis then God could forgive His people.

This was the way in which the people would bring their sins to God and leave it with Him.

It wasn't their problem anymore, they were cleansed from that.

But it was still left at the sanctuary, it was in His ballpark.

In what sense when sin is forgiven does God still have something to do with it that He has to deal with.

The sins came into the sanctuary during phase 1, Leviticus 4, but then on the Day of Atonement, once per year, Leviticus 16, these sins were removed from the sanctuary along with ritual impurities.

When you sweep out a room, you start from the inside and you sweep out, right?

The priest goes into the Holy of Holies and begins there and progressively cleanses the sanctuary from the inside out.

Now, throughout the year, earlier, we see that if the whole community sinned in Leviticus 4, or if the high priest sinned, which of course involved the whole community because he represents them, then the blood is applied first of all before the veil, which I'll have to, I can't explain to you fully right now why this is in front of the incense altar.

You'll have to read what I've written on that.

And then the blood goes, according to Leviticus 4, verses 7 and 8, or rather verses 6 and 7 and 17 and 18, the blood goes on the horns of the incense altar.

That means that the blood is moving, those applications of blood are moving towards the ark, representing the fact that the sin is moving into the sanctuary.

And there are other indications that throughout the year during phase 1 as the people were bringing their sins, leaving them with God, they were going into the sanctuary on the Day of Atonement they come out.

What goes in must come out just like what goes up must come down.

Alright, now that's a basic principle but it's very important and we're going to build on that.

On the Day of Atonement also when this was going on the high priests alone could go in and be with God.

But just as when Queen Esther told the people of Susa fast with me as I go in before the king.

The people were to enter into and participate in the experience by doing 2 things.

According to Leviticus 16, 29 to 31, they were to afflict themselves, that is practice physical self-denial, fasting and other things, and they were to keep Sabbath.

In this way, they were to not worry about anything earthly.

And you don't think about doing any work, you just focus, concentrate on God.

In this way they were to show loyalty to God on the Day of Atonement when the final second stage of atonement for their sins was being accomplished.

God had already freed them from those sins.

As it says, when we're forgiven, our sins are removed from the east as far as the east is from the west.

It's like they're cast into the depths of the sea.

And Corrie 10 Boom said, there's a big sign out there that says, no fishing allowed.

So, when God forgives us, He really forgives us.

And there are those who attack us by saying that the judgment that we talk about, the second phase, the Day of Atonement phase, removes our assurance so that we have to be forgiven all over again.

They don't understand the second phase of atonement, but you will by the time we're done here today.

Okay, so it doesn't mean that we need to be forgiven all over again, but God is dealing with our sins, we're going to get to that.

And this is a judgment between the loyal people who do those things, they show their loyalty to God at that time, and the disloyal who fail to do that.

So this is a real judgment among the nominal people of God, those who claim to have a connection with Him, within that group between those who are loyal and those who are disloyal just as in the camp of Israel you could find Caleb and Joshua and you could also find Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, right?

This wasn't judging the Malachites and the Moabites and the Jebusites and the Websites and all those out there.

It was just the nominal people of God, the Israelites who had claimed a connection with him.

So people today who claim to be Christians, their reason why God's judgment has to deal with their cases is because they affect his reputation.

What they do under his name tells the world and the universe something about him.

Just like what Colonel Oliver North did, you remember the Iran Contra hearings?

Said something about Ronald Reagan that he worked for and there had to be a distancing.

Ronald Reagan wanted to distance himself from what North did, see?

Answers to Objections Regarding 1844

Father in heaven, we're gonna talk today about the most embattled of all Seventh-day Adventist beliefs.

The idea that you are engaged in a special Judgment ministry at the end of time, just before your second coming, in the heavenly sanctuary with your headquarters and the Holy of Holies since the date 1844.

Please help us to understand in a way that we can explain to others.

May we understand the importance of this, knowing that we live in a special time just before the end.

I want to start with a quotation that I quoted from Philip Yancey, his wonderful book, The Jesus I Never Knew.

Have you seen that book, Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew?

And he writes in this, this is an evangelical author, and he writes this, so many times in the course of writing this book, I have felt like 1 of those disciples peering intently at a blank blue sky.

I look for some sign of Jesus, some visual clue.

He's talking about the ascension of Christ, right?

Like the disciples' eyes, mine ache for a pure glimpse of the 1 who ascended.

I have concluded, in fact, that the ascension represents my greatest struggle of faith.

It challenges me more than the problem of pain, more than the difficulty of harmonizing science and the Bible, more than belief in the resurrection and other miracles.

Now that's a pretty amazing statement because he's written 1 of the main books on the problem of pain.

Science in the Bible is a huge issue as you know right now.

Miracles and resurrection, but his greatest struggle is with the ascension of Christ.

The reason is because what's Jesus been doing for 2, 000 years since he left us?

It reminds me of a song that they used to sing back in the 60s.

I won't sing the whole song mercifully, but it goes, Why did you leave me here all alone?

Why has Jesus left us here all alone, all this time?

Well, I would submit to you, brothers and sisters, that the Bible in the book of Hebrews and other books and the book of Revelation and the book of Daniel, putting it together, tells us what Jesus is doing during this time.

He's been working for the salvation of human beings, and we know where he is right now and what phase of ministry he's involved with because Adventists have uniquely put together the prophetic time prophecies with the sanctuary understanding of the Bible.

They other Christians, many of them, realize that yes, Jesus has been ministering in a heavenly temple in the book of Hebrews, but they have never put that with Daniel and Revelation, and they've never figured out the time prophecies the way William Miller and his associates did.

Now you see what happened back there in 1844 was pretty much the death of the historicist approach to looking at the time prophecies of Daniel.

Before that, the reformers were historicists.

They didn't know all the details, but they were getting pretty close.

And William Miller and his associates refined things and refined them.

The problem was, as you know, that they made just 1 major mistake, and that was the nature of the event in 1844.

They said that Jesus was going to come because that's the cleansing referred to in Daniel 8.14.

And that's just not in the Bible, it never was.

But God allowed them to go through this great disappointment.

By the way, October 22 was not the great disappointment.

October 22 was the great appointment, okay?

I was ordained October 23, right after 9-11.

So hopefully my ministry has not been a great disappointment.

In any case, the idea that we have now is we know, Now that we understand the nature of the event, which is in harmony with Hebrews and Revelation and also Daniel, we realize the nature of the event and the timing was right.

Now, when the event didn't seem to happen and nobody could see anything happen, They said, ah, the whole system of interpretation is wrong.

And most churches today accept preterism.

Now, preterism puts everything back in the past.

The Little Horn was Antiochus Epiphanes and all this stuff is back then, so therefore we don't have to worry about that.

If you go to a library and you get a scholarly commentary that is not by an Adventist, it's invariably Preterist.

That it's all in the past and that now we don't have to worry about the Little Horn because he's gone, he's gone long ago.

Folks, that was a view that is very ancient, but it was revived and pushed during the Counter-Reformation.

The reformers knew who the Little Horn was.

They knew who the Antichrist was, the same thing as the Little Horn.

I've been to Germany, to Wittenberg, to the museums of Luther there, and I've seen their publications and that kind of thing, And they knew who that power was.

But in the big counter-reformation push, they adopted 2 different views.

1 is preterism, the idea that it's in the past, not now, Of course.

And the other is that it's all in the future.

We don't know who the Antichrist is yet, the little horn, because he's way off in the future, and that has been adopted by evangelical futurist dispensationalists.

The left behind people are all futurists.

They think it's all in the future with the rapture and the time of trouble, the trouble time and so on that they speak of.

Now you won't find a serious scholarly commentary on Daniel with that approach because it's not a scholarly approach.

It won't stand up to even minimal standards of scholarship, so you can't even find that kind of book.

And we saw an example of that recently, right, with the Rapture Finger guy, with all these complicated things, claimed to figure it out and claimed it was biblical.

Well, just because you take things and you put together your own mishmash from things that are in the Bible doesn't mean it's biblical.

You have to follow the biblical principles of the way it's to be understood.

Now, Seventh-day Adventists have been historicists, okay, so it's neither in the past or in the future, but rather, we simply take the prophecies of Daniel the way they are, namely, Daniel is prophesying from his day with a sweep of history going through everything right to the time of the end, okay?

The others have historical approaches too, and they overlap to some extent, but we just take it right on through naturally, and that's a biblical approach.

If you just simply read the text without preconceived notions, you're gonna be reading it in a historicist way.

There are others who wanna make it all abstract.

We don't know what this means, it has to do with, or this has to do with this or that conceptual notion or worldview, and it becomes very, very abstract.

And then there's another approach that I would call hystericism.

Okay, Yeah, I think you've seen a bit of that lately.

In any case, what I like to do is when I start, I want to make you aware of this going on, but what we're gonna do here is ignore all of those.

We're not gonna say I'm Seventh-day Adventist, therefore I'm historicist, therefore I must read the text in this way.

Now, we're just going to get into the text and let the text guide us how we're going to read it.

But just, you don't need to worry about that.

By the way, I'll mention this, that the approach of the Counter-Reformation, The reformers, as I said, identified who that power was that was existing in that time as the little horn that was oppressing God's people and was vaunting itself up by counterfeit worship and all of the rest.

But the counter-reformation, by going with futurism that way and preterism that way, you notice that the same power adopted both preterism and futurism simultaneously, which is a very interesting thing because they're mutually exclusive.

You can't have 1, I mean, if one's right, then the other's wrong and vice versa.

They adopted both of them simultaneously because they didn't care which way it went.

But what we're going to do is just start with Daniel.

And the first question we need to answer, though, is, this is the overall question, Did the pre-advent judgment really begin in 1844?

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Creative Outreach Ministries That Work

1h

Sanctuary for the Final Generation

59m

Answers to Objections Regarding 1844

1h 12m

Galatians 5&6—Flesh Versus the Spirit

20m

Galatians 4—Two Covenants

20m

Galatians 3—The Law in Galatians

25m

Galatians 2—Justified and Crucified

21m

Galatians 1—Another Gospel

19m

Anchored

32m

Bara: The Kalam Cosmological Argument

41m

The Coming Economic Crisis

1h

Help in Daily Living

42m

Sound Doctrine