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Four Seventh-day Adventist Sins That Prevent the Advent, Pt. 6 (of 6): The Patience of the Saints
Larry Kirkpatrick, Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, June 4, 2005
Document URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-4sdasinspt6.php
Review
These four paragraphs have informed us trhese past five sermons. Let us review them one last time:
God had committed to His people a work to be accomplished on earth. The third angel’s message was to be given, the minds of believers were to be directed to the heavenly sanctuary, where Christ had entered to make atonement of His people. The Sabbath reform was to be carried forward. The breach in the law of God must be made up. The message must be proclaimed with a loud voice, that all the inhabitants of earth might receive the warning. The people of God must purify their souls through obedience to the truth, and be prepared to stand without fault before Him at His coming.
Had Adventists, after the great disappointment in 1844, held fast their faith and followed on unitedly in the opening providence of God, receiving the message of the third angel and in the power of the Holy Spirit proclaiming it to the world, they would have seen the salvation of God, the Lord would have wrought mightily with their efforts, the work would have been completed, and Christ would have come ere this to receive His people to their reward. But in the period of doubt and uncertainty that followed the disappointment, many of the advent believers yielded their faith…. Thus the work was hindered, and the world was left in darkness. Had the whole Adventist body united upon the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, how widely different would have been our history!
It was not the will of God that the coming of Christ should be thus delayed. God did not design that His people, Israel, should wander forty years in the wilderness. He promised to lead them directly to the land of Canaan, and establish them there a holy, healthy, happy people. But those to whom it was first preached, went not in ‘because of unbelief.’ Their hearts were filled with murmuring, rebellion, and hatred, and He could not fulfill His covenant with them.
For forty years did unbelief, murmuring, and rebellion shut out ancient Israel from the land of Canaan. The same sins have delayed the entrance of modern Israel into the heavenly Canaan. In neither case were the promises of God at fault. It is the unbelief, the worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord’s professed people that have kept us in this world of sin and sorrow so many years (Ellen G. White, Evangelism, pp. 695, 696).
Those lines, written in 1883 remind us that the first great crisis in our church was not 1888. It was the initial years following the disappointment in 1844. All Advent believers should have united at that time and finished the work of God on this planet. But they broke away into stubborn factions. Not a one was translated without seeing death.
A Divine Attempt to Rouse Us
In the previous message in this series, we talked some Adventist history. We reviewed the Lord’s attempt to wake us in the 1973, 1974 revival. The General Conference Annual Council sent forth strong messages pointing out that God’s people had delayed the coming of Christ, and urging all to repent. But after a short period other persons came into leadership, other ideas become dominant, the revival was stalled. And, we are still here.
Some heard this call at that time. But some rejected it. And I believe that God did then just what He had said He would do. “God will arouse His people; if other means fail, heresies will come in among them, which will sift them, separating the chaff from the wheat. The Lord calls upon all who believe His word to awake out of sleep” (Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 5, p. 707).
Notice the agency: God. Notice the action: He “will arouse His people.” Notice His reluctance: “If other means fail…&rdquo Notice the means: “heresies will come in among them, which will sift them, separating the chaff from the wheat.”
In the light of our continued wilderness wandering, our continued indulgence in the four sins we have listed in each of these unusual sermons (unbelief, worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord’s professed people), God is not merely allowing worse and worse theological abberation to enter; He is making use of its presence to arouse His people. He is not blockading it, but rather giving it opportunity to flow in among us.
To our human wisdom this might seem counter-productive. But a higher wisdom is at work.
When the truth is shadowed by error, those whom the Lord has made His sentinels will make the truth sharper and clearer. They will search the Scriptures for evidence of their faith. The advancement of error is the call for God’s servants to arouse, and place the truth in bold relief” (Ellen G. White, Signs of the Times, January 6, 1898).
He wants to use you and I. And I believe F. D. Nichol was right about God’s promise when he wrote that ”When men place themselves on the side of truth, God accepts responsibility for their security and eternal triumph” (Francis D. Nichol, Seventh-Day Adventist Bible Commentary (SDA), (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1978), 2 Corinthians 13:8). Our task is to be faithful in living and giving His message. He will take care of the details.
The Sealing Taken More Seriously
I warned you in the first presentation of this series that you should wait until the end of it before you fully processed it. In some places, very hard things have been uttered. Now then, hear the last portion.
The “sealing time,” the time when God is making the last preparations in the characters of His people so they will be able to finish the Exodus from sin to holiness, from self to Jesus, from death to life, from unrest to Sabbath, is not something future. Actually, we have been in that last time since 1844. We are in it right now.
Thus it is Heaven’s purpose—right now—to complete our preparation to successfully pass through that time. Then let us remember. What is the sealing? “A settling into the truth, both intellectually and spiritually, so that&rdquo you cannot be moved (Ellen G. White, Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, vol. 4, p. 1161).
One who is sealed is settled into the truth, both intellectually and spiritually and cannot be moved away from that truth. He is spiritually prepared. He is intellectually prepared. He has a personal experience with Christ. He has an intelligent doctrinal understanding. This is not to say that He has a perfect and complete doctrinal understanding, but he has an intelligent doctrinal understanding. He has studied what the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy say and he has a reasonably good understanding of how these things all relate to each other. He is not a novice. He has the basics down, and more than the basics. He knows by experience what the inspired sources say, as opposed to what the popular soft-serve in the church says.
The placement of spiritual and intellectual preparation in parallel with each other suggests the necessity of each of the two aspects. It is not enough to have a mere head knowledge of the doctrinal system of Adventism. Would you agree? Of course you do. But let’s be honest with the statement. It placed intellectual prepration in direct parallel with spiritual. Would you agree that it is not enough to have a strong spirituality? That is where some of us would be inclined to argue and disagree. They would say that if you have the spiritual preparation, then all the doctrinal components are either unnecessary or will automatically fall into place.
But just as we must be settled into the truth in the spiritual sense, so must we also be settled into the truth in the doctrinal. If we are not, we are at risk of adopting false teaching that will prevent us from successful passage through the end-time. That is, that will lead to our being lost. And without the intellectual component in place, we could not victoriously finish the great controversy war and vindicate the character of God. The church will be unable to finish her mission.We need today to help our people have an informed faith, to understand the things of the last days. We need to manifest the voice of Caleb and Joshua. But too many of us think that those who believe as we do in the church are only tolerated because we are insignificant. We are grasshoppers in our own sight. We do not realize that even those who disagree with us understand that we are necessary partners in the church. It is what we give in means and in personal participatory energy that keeps the church viable. But it is on the spiritual level that we are and must continue to be the salt in the church. Without her mission, the church becomes an alien entity. We must continue in her midst and help her fill her mission.
The Apparently Grim Outlook
But we live in a difficult hour for the church. It seems as if great changes are not only taking place in the world but in God’s church. We were warned that the final movements would be rapid ones. We were warned that the church would look as if its fall was imminent, but that it would not fall. To some of us it seems as if that time has already come. But listen.
The church is more than a group of people who believe, uphold, and have faith in a specific set of teachings. The Bible says that the church is the ekklesia, the called out, the pillar and ground of the truth, the source and boundary-line of truth. In the world but not of the world, the church needs to maintain her boundaries.
The church structure is meant to facilitate the internal and external work of God, preparing the saints for heaven and preparing the world for the return of Christ; inreach and outreach, edification and evangelism. We look at the church structure and almost cannot help but say, “Now that is a mess that can never be untangled.” But we are warned that if we attempt to tear it down, we are deceived and at risk of bringing in a condition of things immeasurably worse than what presently stands. We are, instead, to advance, in spite of the difficulties apparently impossible to surmount looming before us.
The church structure has been ordained of God for our prosperity and success in advancing His cause. It is not merely an optional department of the broader church. It may or may not in every way function today according to the divine purpose, but it is still crucial to God’s plan. In spite of the ways the denomination appears to be failing, the truth is going forward in many of our churches.
Here, at the border of the promised land, I hear too many voices raised proposing that God is no longer using the church. But if we should develop an attitude of bitterness and grief toward the church for all her failings, it may be we who sentence ourselves to another lap in the wilderness. God will take to Himself a people in whom the character of Christ has been perfectly reproduced, and not a whiney gaggle of complainers crying on each other’s shoulders. We had better become lucid about just where we are. Jesus is ready to come and we are milling about, unclear about how to direct our energies and unready.
Like Moses, Like Ellen White
Church membership does not guarantee salvation or even a vital connection with Christ. But God has revealed, plainly, in the writings of contemporary prophecy, that it is His will for us to be members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. How can we refuse?
When God proposed to Moses that He destroy the Hebrews and make of Moses’ loins a new nation, (Numbers 14:11, 12), did Moses err when he urged his argument, “then the nations which have heard the fame of Thee will speak, saying, Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which He sware unto them, therefore He hath slain them in the wilderness” (Numbers 14:15, 16)?
Earlier yet, did Moses err when at a previous manifestation of wickedness he identified himself with those rebellious former slaves and urged God to forgive them and “if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written” (Exodus 32:32)?
We may sometimes be tempted to respond to the departures we see around us as was manifest in the hopeless reaction of the servant of Elisha (2 Kings 6:14-17). It looked like the city was utterly surrounded and there was no hope. But Elisha saw with the eye of faith. God showed that He was still in control.
Is there a risk that because of our extreme desire to see the work completed we might prematurely surrender to the testimony of our imperfect sight, and ourselves succumb to feelings of bitterness (as warned in Testimonies to Ministers, p. 111), ourselves manifest unbelief, ourselves fail on the very border of eternity? Shall we, since the church looks defective, leave her to her doom?
Our loyalty must be to Jesus and His truth. And that means we have no time or energy to spend creating unnecessarily a new church structure. Inspiration warns,
It has cost us much study and many prayers for wisdom, that we know God has answered, to erect this structure. It has been built up by His direction, through much sacrifice and conflict. Let none of our brethren be so deceived as to attempt to tear it down, for you will thus bring in a condition of things that you do not dream of. In the name of the Lord I declare to you that it is to stand, strengthened, established, and settled. At God’s command, ‘Go forward,’ we advanced when the difficulties to be surmounted made the advance seem impossible. We know how much it has cost to work out God’s plans in the past, which have made us as a people what we are. Then let everyone be exceedingly careful not to unsettle minds in regard to those things that God has ordained for our prosperity and success in advancing His cause’ (Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers, p. 27).
We have not the endorsement of heaven to cast aside the structure erected at so great cost and rebuild. We are, instead, to manifest faith in the God who sees more than the servant of Elisha, more than the blinded children sprawled naked and drunken on the foot of Sinai, more than the band of rebels standing oblivious at the border of Canaan. And this very Moses who said that if God would be dishonored he would prefer to be blotted out, that rather than making a nation from his own loins, he would ask of the merciful God yet another mercy for these all-too-oblivious people—this very Moses was granted the privilege of speaking to Jesus of His upcoming death in the days just before Calvary. No. I have to believe the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy instead of what my feelings tell me.
When I see the inexcusable stupidity and insubordination round about I am tempted like James and John to urge God to send down fire from heaven and consume. But I learn of Christ that to make such request, to allow such a feeling to be subtly owned inside of me, by me, would call forth His rebuke, “You know not what spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:55). I believe such a response from Moses’ heart, John’s, or mine, breaks the heart of Christ.
We are not endorsing error here. We are fighting the battle for truth. We risk much. And we fight on. There are negative forces within the church which would be absolutely relieved, that would hold a great party, if we folded our tents and left the battlefield. Now is not the time to say, “Yes, go ahead and make of us a different nation. Let these purchased by Thy blood perish in the wilderness because You were not able to bring them in.” God forbid! Remember, it was unbelief—unbelief at the very border of the promised land—that bought Israel a death march back into the wilderness.
Let us, standing at the border of Canaan, be not faithless, but believing (John 20:27). In this light, strife among the Lord’s professed people is what you have when you spend energy on matters that God has already decided. He had decided that He would take His people into the promised land. But they decided that He wasn’t serious. Thus they could not enter. Thus they engaged in debate over that which was a given.
We need to have proper confidence in God. Challenging though the situation sometimes seems, we should do the harder thing, stay engaged, exercise our influence for Christ, help others find their way, and take an active part in the fulfillment of the mission of the church. We have as a people been too little committed to filling the roles, larger and smaller, that it takes to make a church successful in its operation. The church is going through; that is a given. But whether she reaches home in this generation, is your decision.
We must defend the faith, contend for it, stand for it and present it. But we lengthen our wilderness wandering if we spend time and energy in strife over questions that cannot help us. We have been unwise in marshalling our energies. We have sometimes been mindlessly independent when we should have sought wise guidance and insisted on finding the way forward in spite of the apparent giants in the land. If we would step out in faith more we would find that the giants aren’t always so tall as they look. Indeed, sometimes they are imaginary!
Conclusion and Series Conclusion
Conclusion
We must beware strife rising in us from our own unconversion or our own lack of faith. We have no time or energy to spend on chimeras and errors. We need to realize we live in the time of sealing, we live in the time of completion, we live just at the brink of the most intense things earth will ever see. We have not time to argue over questrions that will not profit us.
Some in our denomination are anxious to label issues surrounding righteousness by faith, the sanctuary, the atonement, the incarnation, what real overcoming means, as unhelpful for us at this time. They are mistaken. These are the very questions it is most necessary this generation resolve. The reason why is simple: How we answer these questions determines whether we are fulfilling our mission as a people or not. It determines whether we are debating over things that God has already decided, or not. It determines how many wilderness laps add up on the odometer. It determines, most of all, whether your eyes, your rods and cones, lenses and retinas see Jesus in this life, or whether you must wait in the grave the trumpet call of Jesus at the Second Coming while your grandchildren finish the work.
Series Conclusion
For forty years did unbelief, murmuring, and rebellion shut out ancient Israel from the land of Canaan. The same sins have delayed the entrance of modern Israel into the heavenly Canaan. In neither case were the promises of God at fault. It is the unbelief, the worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord’s professed people that have kept us in this world of sin and sorrow so many years (Evangelism, pp. 695, 696).
Therefore God urges us at this time, to look to these four Seventh-day Adventist sins that prevent the advent, and do differently. Let each take inventory personally of how my unbelief is at present hindering God’s work, how my worldliness is at present hindering God’s work, how my unconsecration is at present hindering God’s work, and of how my strife and misuse of energy is at present hindering the work of God. Then He will rise with healing in His wings and we will at last cross over Jordan. The Second Coming will soon occur.
Then these eyes can see Jesus at last. GCO
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