ARME 3: Leoni Meadows, CA - Aug 2010

Don Mackintosh

ARME Bible Camp

A Revival In Preaching

Now, isn't it been a blessing to have a blend of, what are we looking for here in this conference?

In other words, when you leave, you can't have too much of 1 and too little of the other, right?

You got to have something to take home that you can do, that you can do, right?

So it was in that vein of thinking that was recently reintroduced to me.

That last night the Lord saw fit to allow me to have back pain all night, can you say amen?

So I was able to put together actually some new slides for today's lecture.

So right after this, I'll probably die of exhaustion.

But at least it's good for you folks, alright?

Now if you should happen to want some of these slides, good luck.

But what I'm going to do with them is put them up on the website, my website, at afco.com, and it'll be under the director's materials.

Now, I did 3 presentations here, 1 on the heart.

That was the least attended but the most important presentation that the Lord made to me personally here at Army.

And I would recommend that you really watch that, listen to it on AudioVerse, whatever you wanna do.

And then the 1 that I did just before lunch was probably the second most important, and this is the third.

So just recommend you to go to the site and get those.

I ask in that heart presentation, what makes a good preacher?

How many think there are good preachers, first of all?

No minister should be measured by his ability as a speaker.

So maybe you all are out there saying, well, I wanna go to that church, I wanna do this and do that because I think that speaker's good.

And I've measured his ability and that's why I'm going there.

But no minister should be measured by his ability to speak.

And by the way, we're going to talk about preaching here, so I'm putting it in perspective.

Because it is the pleasant part of the work and it's comparatively easy.

You know, I absolutely happen to think that there are entire ministries that are built around this when this is not the metric God wants.

The Lord does not see as man sees, for man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

Look, if this Army Conference you did just 1 simple thing, and that was to give God your heart, that would be the most important thing.

And that would make you the most effective.

And that's probably what we should spend the most time about at Army, because it is the most effective.

You don't have to know much if you've given God your heart.

In fact, you don't even have to even be able to speak, and God can use you if you've given Him your heart.

I had a teacher in school, and they all had problems with me.

I don't know what was wrong with this teacher.

And, you know, but this 1 teacher, she really had, she really got to my heart.

She'd just look at me, and then I'd start to cry.

Because the way she looked at me, I just did not want to displease her.

She didn't say anything, but That lady was connected with God.

How many wanna have that kind of connection?

Where, you're so connected with God, you just look at people and they just go, how can I join your church?

So here's someone that's preaching excellent discourses.

I mean, Everything I'm about to teach you, they learn.

But out of the desk, he hasn't carried out the principles he preached.

So you can actually be an excellent preacher and be offensive to God.

He can talk fluently and make a point plain, but his preaching has lacked spirituality.

If you have people that pride themselves on the big words they use when they preach, array of words.

It doesn't matter if God doesn't have the heart, if the Spirit's not with them, right?

So if you miss everything else, if you miss the rest of this lecture, that's the most important thing.

Our first work should be to bring our hearts in harmony with God.

Sure, preaching is the God's ordained means to bring the gospel to people, right?

But if our hearts not with God, Doesn't matter.

So that's, I mean, if you get that, I mean, I'm not saying you can leave now, but I mean, that's the big thing.

Now, having that in mind, then, I do want to talk about preaching.

And right away, preaching is, by the way, just like a Bible study.

So the same thing you do in a Bible study, when you're doing a Bible study, you're doing like a Nicodemus sermon.

And by the way, any preaching, preaching is, by the way, Ellen White says, is only 10 percent of the work.

90 percent of the work is coming close to the people you preach to and doing a Nicodemus-type Bible study with them.

So what you're learning right now in Army, if you're learning, well, look, I just want to learn how to study the Word and share the Word, it's the same thing a preacher needs to know how to do.

And by the way, when you become a bishop, it says in the Bible, I read through all Timothy last night too because I had some time to kill.

When you become a bishop, it's defined by your ability in the Greek tenses of the word to love visitation.

That means a true preacher is 1 who loves not just articulation, but loves visitation.

And they love people to come to their homes.

How To Study the Bible

Well, for those of you who were not at my yesterday seminar, the breakout seminar, that was probably my most important seminar so far.

And we talked about the real, real meal deal in terms of witnessing and really in terms of coming in touch with the heart of God and being effective in witness, and that is to give the heart to God.

And you don't have to know much scripture.

I mean, they're going to hate me at Army for this, but you don't really have to know much scripture if you've given your heart to God.

I mean, you'll want to know more scripture if you do that, but even just a little bit will totally make you a powerful witness.

My little girl, she really loves Jesus and she only knew 1 text and the text was do not rebel against the Lord.

So she followed me around the house and she kept saying that all day, do not rebel against the Lord.

It was the most convicting day probably at our house in a long time.

When I went to the refrigerator, do not rebel against the Lord.

Sitting by the television, do not rebel against the Lord.

Going down the road, tempted to go a little faster to get there more quickly, do not rebel against the Lord.

And I'll tell you what, I still remember it.

It was a powerful message, Do not rebel against the Lord.

I think it was Martin Luther who said, just 1 little word will slay the devil, right?

Peter said, help me Lord, I'm sinking, help.

So, you know, even if you're connected to God in heart, You can say 1 word and people will respond to the message.

I remember a story of another time in communism in Romania where They had told everyone they couldn't have God and couldn't have religion, and they were making it very clear that nobody could worship and this and that, and they went on 1 of the holy days of the church to give a two-hour talk why God didn't exist.

And then after that, they asked the Orthodox priest to come up, even though I'm no friend of how the Orthodox have treated some other groups, but this was the Christian representative, and he got up, and he only said 3 words, Christ is risen.

And when he said that, everybody went crazy clapping.

The central pivotal message of scripture in terms of the miracle of the resurrection.

Yesterday in our little seminar on the heart, we recognized that you can have great eloquence, you can have very connected words, and you can be a good homiletician, but if you're not connected at heart with the Lord, it does not matter.

You're not gonna have much success at all, because God looks on the heart, and man looks on the outward appearance.

Okay, so having said that now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and do our best in preaching and I think there needs to be a real revival of preaching today and I want to in this seminar inspire you but also teach you some practical things.

Can I hear an amen from Dave in the back there?

Yes, Dave and the Army Group are really into not so much inspiration for you folks as perspiration.

Father in heaven, we're thankful for these few moments that you've granted us on earth.

And then the very few moments inside, those few moments here at Army.

It's really nothing in terms of eternity.

Yet you can make it everything in terms of eternity if we give you our hearts and our lives.

We could make a decision here that would cause us to live eternity.

We could learn things here that could cause others to live throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity.

1 of my favorite non-Adventist preachers, and I don't listen so much to that, but 1 of my favorites is Martin Lloyd Jones, the late Martin Lloyd Jones.

He was a physician first, and then he turned to being a preacher.

Not actually the crown, the thing right under the crown, which was the queen.

And he was just a wonderful physician turned homiletician.

And he went about ministry as he had medicine, in a comprehensive, logical fashion.

In fact, he still kept his script pad, and after church, people would come to his office and he would write out a script from the Holy Scriptures to them.

This is what I want you to do, this is your treatment.

And he wrote a timeless book called Spiritual Depression.

If you ever want to learn something about how the Psalms deal with depression, that's it.

And I wish I could talk about that the whole hour.

And I could, but it wouldn't match the title on the tape, so we better not.

So he had this book and I was reading his autobiography and this is what he said about preaching.

We're living in an age which is questioning or querying everything And among those things that it is questioning is the place and value and purpose of preaching.

In increasing numbers, people seem to be depreciating the value of preaching and they're turning more and more to singing of various kinds and types, and coming with various types of instruments.

So he said, look, this is what's happening.

They're going back, he continues, to dramatic representations of recitals or recitals of Scripture.

And some are even going back to dancing and various other forms of external manifestation of the act of worship.

All this is having the effect of depreciating the place and value of preaching.

So he's saying, now this was written back in the, during his lifetime, it would be sometime right after World War II, maybe the 60s was when he retired, so this would have been back then.

He goes on, we now know that the Reformation, now we know that the Reformation, even before you come to the particular Puritan emphasis, swept away all such things.

He said when the Reformation came, no dancing, none of this stuff, no dramatic presentation, swept it all away.

It swept away the medieval mystery plays.

You may wonder, why is it that some churches are getting into passion plays?

Why is it that they're getting into all these representations?

They weren't the first ones to get into it.

The first ones to get into that was the Catholic Church.

The Reformation got rid of all that and it's very sad to observe, he continues, that people who claim to have an unusual degree of spirituality should be trying to lead us back to that which the reformers saw so clearly had been concealing the gospel and truth from the people.

Now how many of you think this sounds up to date?

Even today there's more and more of that.

He continues, if you mime the scriptures or give a dramatic representation of them.

You are distracting the attention of the people from the truth as conveyed in the scriptures.

Whereas preaching is essentially concerned with bringing out the truth of the scriptures.

I don't know about you, but when I read that, first time I said, man this guy is like alive today.

He's saying we need to get back to preaching the Word, right?

And then he says he makes it plain as to where it all came from.

Under Roman Catholicism, preaching had been at such a discount, in other words, not done much, it was marked down, that there were very few preachers left in this country.

All the emphasis was put on the sacraments, and on the priests, and on various things which I have referred to, plays, etc.

Kind of like the emergent church movement today is going back to all these things that supposedly are the outer manifestations, right?

I don't think we need the emergent church because it's really the submergent church.

What we really need is the detergent church.

What we need is a Daniel 8, 14 movement where the cleansing of the sanctuary comes down to the cleansing of our hearts.

Issues of the Heart

We're gonna study about the heart, issues of the heart today.

And I want to just kind of tell you, that's actually the first time I've ever made this presentation, which means it probably will be better the second time, but you guys can have a heart-to-heart with me on it first here.

The reason that I wanted to study more about the heart was because I want a revival in my life, So I was asking, Lord, how is it that we can have a revival in heart?

And then I was reading another little book about the importance of preaching.

And in this book there were so many of these quotes that talked about the heart, which I'll show you some today, that it just totally convicted me.

So I started to then study all of the different passages in the scripture.

You might do that, you know, like when you're studying, you have a Bible program and you can see here that I searched out everything on heart and then I put it into like a document and, well, I'll just show you some of these documents.

These are all the preparations that, you know, different things, different documents where I went through different quotes and different things.

And then it all, I kind of then categorized them into different texts, you know, like what is the heart.

And then I put it into another document that even looked more closely at different aspects of the heart, then I started studying through all of the quotes on Ellen White on the heart, which will take me a couple years, and so I didn't get that done, but they're so rich that, you know, it was powerful.

So then came to a document about ways to prepare the heart.

So you know, when you're preparing for like a sermon or a talk, you can literally spend weeks or months, right?

And you have to discipline yourself not to do that sometimes.

So like for instance, tomorrow I'm going to give a talk on how to study the Bible, but I'm just going to narrow it down.

I don't like to give talks that are like all over the Bible, because I find that Bible students can't follow those.

I don't find that that's profitable with people, because they don't really know what you're doing.

When you go from Genesis to Revelation to Exodus, they have to take your word that all those contexts make sense.

So I would rather study just verse by verse with them through something and that way they start to get confident.

If I go to the Bible study and I have blown so many Bible studies that I know what to tell you what not to do.

If you go to a Bible study, they can like the Bible study because of their cleverness and because they like you, but when you leave, they don't know what to do.

But if you study with them how to just go verse by verse, then they have a clue.

Or if you show them, okay, we just looked up all the texts in the Bible about something, and that's called a topical study, and you show them how you did that, then it helps them.

They can never reproduce that study, and then when they say something to their friend or their pastor or their relative, they just look at them and go, you don't know what you're talking about.

And it's an embarrassing moment for them.

So I don't like to put people in that situation if I can help it.

So anyway, that was this little preamble before this.

Father in heaven, we're thankful today we can study issues of the heart.

We ask that your spirit would be with us and Lord that you would speak to our hearts.

We're told in scripture that your heart, that your heart and Your soul is in the sanctuary.

Your mind, you're in that heavenly sanctuary and you want to communicate with us.

So we ask that we could, from what we learned today, that you could and we thank you we come in Christ's name.

Okay, so I wanna look now at the actual presentation that came out of all that little preliminary work I showed you, which I'm just calling issues of the heart.

And the reason I wanted to do this is because when I got the invitation to come to RME, they sent me a little email, and This is 1 of the things they said.

Prayer and heart preparation when opening the scriptures and the word is what they wanted us to talk about.

We may specifically request a particular speaker to address this topic.

However, every speaker may want to include some aspect.

And heart preparation, they said, is important.

It maximizes the ability of the Holy Spirit to work and bring understanding.

I think this is so key, I mean, that sounds like a simple sentence.

And then as I began studying it, I realized how key it was.

Okay, here are some of these quotes that I came across in Spirit of Prophecy and we'll look at some Scripture too.

Third volume of the Testimonies, 237-238.

By the way, I'm going to post all these on my website at amazingfacts.org, go under the AFCO tab, Amazing Facts Center of Evangelism, and you'll find director's notes, and that's me, the director, and you can find notes from many different presentations across the country.

And then I will ask them to link to that on their army page.

I also put the notes from this morning's study of the chiastic structure of Psalm 85.

You guys can make that your own sermon freely.

I have received freely I give so you then can give to others.

Ministers should first feel the sanctified influence of the truth upon their own hearts and in their own lives, and then their pulpit efforts will be enforced by their example out of the desk.

Ministers need to be softened and sanctified themselves before God can in a special manner work with their efforts.

I read that quote and I go, whoa, I mean, basically what it's saying is what?

You need to be ministered to before you can minister to others.

You need to be connected before you can help the other get connected.

So it doesn't matter how artful your Bible study is.

If you're not connected, and you can have fairly clever and artful Bible studies, but if you're not connected, you're not gonna connect.

This text really convicted me out of many of the texts.

This 1 convicted me the most that I read.

Amaziah was 25 years old when he became king.

And he reigned 29 days, I mean 29 years, rather.

His mother's name was Jehodah Dan of Jerusalem.

And he did what was right in the sight of God, but not with a loyal heart.

So in other words, you can be doing everything right, but your heart can be wrong.

And in other words, Not with a perfect or blameless heart, the Amplified Version says, or not with a whole heart.

So, you can put on a show and then it looks like you're doing the right things.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

A Revival In Preaching

56m

How To Study the Bible

46m

Issues of the Heart

45m

Our Greatest Need

42m

Standing Before God

1h

The Synagogue of Satan

51m

The Seven Thunders and The Third Woe

50m

Following The Star At Night, Session 1 (Part 1)

59m

Sleepless Weeping, Session 1 (Part 2)

43m

Shaken But Not Stirred, Session 2

57m

The Mob, The Trial, and the Death Decree, Session 3 (Part 1)

57m

The Cross and the Triumph, Session 3 (Part 2)

53m

Sound Doctrine