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Death Valley
The Cloying Dust of Tradition? Or the Word of God?
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, California, USA
Delivery: 2006-03-26 03:44Z
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2006-03-26 03:44Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-dv.php
Occupy Till I come
In Luke 19, Jesus told a parable about a certain nobleman who went into a far country to receive a kingdom. His instructions to His servants were to occupy till he returned. They were to labor as his workers fulfilling the tasks he assigned them until his arrival home.
The nobleman, of course, represents Jesus who went to heaven to receive a kingdom. And these are His instructions for us. “Occupy till I come.” (Luke 19:13). Our dilemma is how to be faithful in occupying until His Second Coming.
As Seventh-day Adventist Christians, we have been called to our commission by our Lord. To His end-time people He laid out the picture.
Two approaches to running the universe stand face to face. Self first, versus self last. Satan offers his self first plan. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit offer the self last plan. God’s Ten Commandment law is the concrete demarcation point between the two approaches. But really, this law is only a means of saying that the character of Christ is the dividing line. Either we want that character reflected in us and by us, or we don’t. The character of Christ is the ultimate dividing line. Are we willing to be transformed to it, or are we still trying to convince ourselves that we can have a hybridized character, partially like Christ and partially partaking of our own preferences?
The Bible tells us that there was war in heaven. Jesus and His angels aligned against Satan and his angels. A battle for hearts and minds, for morality, for ideology, came to head. Satan was removed from heaven but not destroyed. It was better for the universe for his ideas to be permitted to run their course. The badness of the fruit of sin had to be seen, the skunk cabbage of evil smelt, the aroma of wickedness traced completely to its source in a different cosmic view. It was a war concerning what love really is. Is personal preference a higher value than morality? Than mercy and justice? Is God’s law in the final analysis more like plastic wrap, persistently shapable by fallen beings?
The Dragon Was Wroth With the Woman
Now God has a church. He guided a people down through the halls of ages. His ecclesia He gathered and blessed. The torch of truth was kept lit; the taper passed from generation to generation. In each setting the situation was a bit different. The development of truth required this here and that there. But God was revealing to us what we needed to know. Apace through time He preserved and extended His truth, set it before our faces, and called angels to watch the development of character.
But human nature was ever inclined to its Death Valley stasis, the seeking of an equilibrium with minimum resistance. Death Valley is the lowest point in America. All the water that drains into the basin settles at this lowest point, for there is no lower point on the water table for it to go. Look if you will at the present shape of all the great branches of monotheism and see. Tradition rules. Whether it is Judaism, or Islam, or Eastern Christianity or Western, tradition rules. Yes, there are small changes scattered in Judaism and in Western Christianity, but the ruling feature in every case is either the power of tradition or tradition ameliorated in some measure by convenience.
There is a trend evident in the west where tradition has less power and convenience more. A sheen of newness is continually applied but the ideas seldom change much. History offers analogs, repeats of ideas from centuries past. What we today view as the charismatic movement is seen again and again in religious history preceding us.
Satan makes war with the church, and it seems as though every group God has raised up Satan has eventually beaten down with error to where it lost its fervor, its love, its fealty to truth, and become inculturated with the blandness of its day. “Occupy till I come” became “be preoccupied until you die.” The search for a deeper understanding of truth dies out. Concordances are put on the shelf. Dust begins to collect. The cares of this life choke our spirituality. And our labor for His kingdom takes on a plastic edge. Satan wears down the church gradually. He understands the frailty of human nature. He knows that—eventually—we are extremely likely to relax our vigilance. All he has to do is wait.
Time is the friend of truth; time reveals much. But time is the enemy of the fallen nature, and a sustained seeking of God is uncommon. Our inclination is toward comfort, convenience, and an equilibrium with the tendencies and inclinations of our bentness. It is always easier to study less, agree with relatives, trust to experts, to pick our preferred Peters and Apollos and let them do the driving. “If _____ believes it, it must be true.” It is more convenient, always, to settle for the current party line than to risk exclusion from the community. Yesterday’s illegitimate innovation is tomorrow’s truth. And you will be able to line up nine PhD’s to tell you so if you just give it time.
Jesus came to a group of religious followers. Many of them were settled into Death Valley. Some were discontented but still unteachable. But a small clutch of fishermen and other villains were teachable. They became the 12 apostles.
Are you in Death Valley? Are you content with your experience? Have you ceased from praying, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”? (Psalm 51:10). Have you grown comfortable with an experience that says “my present spiritual failure is all that God expects”?
Escape From the Valley
When Jesus taught His disciples to occupy till His return, He did not mean for us to rust until then, to be content, to stop searching, stop growing, to become cartoons of your faith until then. Neither did He mean for the entire church to become Marthafied, ever turning the cranks and pulling the pumps, teaching the same way it was always done before, doing the same stuff but just more and more of it. We want both parts, the Martha blended with the Mary.
From time to time we need to challenge our assumptions. “The Scriptures are constantly opening to the people of God. There always has been and always will be a truth specially applicable to each generation. The message given to Noah was present truth for that time; and if the people had accepted that message, they would have been saved from drinking the waters of the flood” (Ellen G. White, Review and Herald, June 29, 1886). Is there a truth specially applicable to our generation? The generation living in 2006?
Let us understand something. We are still here. We are a century behind. As Herbert Douglass says, “it has never been this late.”
Much has been given us and much will be required of us. Along with knowing truth we want to have that grace that accompanies truth, that tact, that careful caution toward others that treats them with patience and regards their sensibilities. We do not know through what trials others are passing or have passed. Some have passed life-changing trials in the quiet that only they know, not even able to share with their closest friends. But you and I don’t know who they are. So how many of you is this true of? Five percent? Or fifty? God knows. But we do not know, and we want to have the tact and caring that Christ had. And unless we soak our minds in God’s Word until they are saturated with God’s ways, our careless humanity will rise up and say and do that which is hurtful to others and antithetical to the gospel we claim to embrace.
Listen:
The Bible is the rule of life, teaching us of the character we must form for the future, immortal life. Our faith, our practice, may make us living epistles, known and read of all men. Men need not the dim light of tradition and custom to make the Scriptures comprehensible. It is just as sensible to suppose that the sun, shining in the heavens at noon-day, needs the glimmerings of the torchlight of earth to increase its glory. The fables or the utterances of priests or of ministers, are not needed to save the student from error. Consult the divine Oracle, and you have light. In the Bible every duty is made plain, every lesson is comprehensible, able to fit men with a preparation for eternal life. The gift of Christ and the illumination of the Holy Spirit reveal to us the Father and the Son. The word is exactly adapted to make men and women and youth wise unto salvation (Ellen G. White, Fundamentals of Christian Education, p. 390).
We ever need a refreshing of the message from God’s inspired sources. Not a change of the message. It is not time to remove the Sabbath truth or the Investigative Judgment or any other such component. But the world does not stand still. Just the change in the population we want to influence for truth alone is enough to enforce a diligence upon us. A century and a half ago, the pioneers of our church were surrounded mostly by Methodists and Baptists. But today here in Southern California, we are surrounded by a different mixture of thought and belief. Can we credibly communicate what we are experiencing to them?
How We Misrepresent Our Lord
The onlooker finds it difficult to understand us because he is an outsider. He has heard this and this and that about Christianity and he looks at us and we don’t know what is going through his head. Anything that appears cheap or inconsistent about us is liable to get amplified to him. Anything that looks like ingenious ways of making room for self will trouble the outsider. We compete with many differing expressions of spirituality. People are moving so rapidly. We may have only a very small window of opportunity to “get it right.”
The danger of Death Valley is that we begin doing things for the wrong reason. All traditions are not old ones. Between now and the Second Coming we need to be aggressive students of God’s Word. Our ideas about what constitutes present truth need to be very well wrought.
We have a “tradition” of spreading the gospel in this way: we spread the seed before we examine the seed. We could be planting rows and rows of carrots where we thought we were planting corn. Just what message are we giving? Living? Is it a Christian message or an Adventist message? Having studied the history and doctrinal core of Western Christendom, I would rather be identified more specifically, as a Seventh-day Adventist than as a Christian. By definition we believe in Christ as Redeemer and Lord, as personal God who made infinite sacrifice for us, who died and rose again, who will soon, literally, return for His people. But when we say we are Christian, others often think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning at the stake of martyrs, and the often absurd radio proclamations of the backwoods revival preacher. They think of the Pope and of Billy Graham and of Benny Hinn. There is a lot of baggage here, a truckload of false impressions to confuse. But in a wrong-places quest seeking for legitimacy, Adventists have aided and abetted, deemphasizing our distinctive beliefs. “We’re just like they are” is the call.
Too often it is exactly the case that we are just as other groups. That is no badge of honor, but of shame. Consider what more careful church leaders said in 1974: “We feel deeply that ‘the image of Jesus’ must be reflected clearly not only in the personal lives of church members but in Adventist sermons, Adventist literature, and Adventist institutions—schools, hospitals, and publishing houses. The answer to the query What is different about the Adventist way? should be obvious to all who come into contact with any aspect of the remnant church. The Adventist goal is primarily quality rather than quantity. Such a goal is reached not by merely doing what other organizations can do equally well, whether such effort be in health care, education, welfare, or even sermons in evangelistic meetings or on Sabbath mornings. Whatever an Adventist does should be distinctively different: ‘God has ordained that His work shall be presented to the world in distinct, holy lines. He desires His people to show by their lives the advantage of Christianity over worldliness. By His grace every provision has been made for us in all our transaction of business to demonstrate the superiority of heaven’s principles over the principles of the world. We are to show that we are working upon a higher plane than that of worldlings’ (Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 7, p. 142). (1973 - 1974 Annual Council Appeals, p. 28).
Yes indeed. Whatever an Adventist does should be distinctively different.
Back to the Book!
So what must we do? Drill down deeply, study, explore, keep growing, never relent from following the Lamb (Revelation 14:4). We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous (1 John 2:1). If we fail we must turn up again, run back to Him again, seek His forgiveness again. He will empower, transform, and put complete overcoming in our experience.
When Jesus called us to occupy until His return, He was calling us to continued study and heart preparation. Nothing can replace a personal experience with God’s Word. Nothing can stand in for personal study. When we go to a restaurant, we do not go there to sit down and pay money to have the chef come to our table to describe the food he prepared. We want to taste for ourselves the food he has prepared. It must be the same with Bible study. Are you personally studying?
There are three parts to good Bible study. The first part is Bible reading. You just keep reading through again and again and again. I hope that most of us here have read through the Bible several times. Reading through again and again gives you the background. There are people today who can repeat back for you episode by episode or movie by movie all the dialogue of those productions. They watch them over and over. They are forming their character against the backdrop of fiction. You and I need to read the Bible over and over and thus form our characters against the backdrop of reality.
The second part of good Bible study, you may have guessed, is prayer. We need to have a personal experience with God. We need to talk to Him. We need to listen to Him. We need to give Him space to communicate with us. Prayer brings our hearts and minds into a state of receptivity, of interest, of reaching-outness toward God. We need to feel after Him and find Him and prayer prepares us to receive from Him. It focuses our mind, it warms up our faculties of intellect and conscience and discernment and faith so that we are prepared to engage with Him in the study and wrestling as learner. A welder makes preparation before he welds. He gets the right gloves and goggles, he gets his knee pads. He comes alert to the task because he is going to be working with hard substances and soft flesh, and he is flesh. One wrong move could seriously injure or kill him.
When we come to the Word we are coming to a hard substance. God’s truth is immovable, and we are but flesh. Misunderstanding could be fatal. We need to make our preparations and then come. Prayer is the central preparation. We must surrender or we will not be able to receive. We must pray or we are not fitted for Bible study.
The third part is our actual interaction with the Word itself. Turn off your cell phones, turn off your television. Find your quiet place. Wade into the Word. Even here we must not fall into well intentioned but misguided ruts. Don’t turn too quickly to that cross reference; labor with the text right where it is for awhile. You can turn to the cross references after you have pushed harder on the text where it lay. And don’t turn too quickly to Ellen White. There’s time for that; it is a good move. But first, be quiet, be still, first work on the text right as it stands on the page. Taste the text right there. Talk to God about the text right there. No one said to stop praying when you turn to the pages!
Friends, no generation has ever had the resources ours does for studying out God’s will. We have the Bible itself all indexed and cross-referenced, we have CDROMs and software giving instant search capability. And scholarly resources, careful though we must be with them, are all there for the using. Then there is the internet. Where did an idea originate, how was it transmitted through time, what faith group is it associated with and why? The internet offers us other windows, windows into Islam, Judaism, Eastern and Western Christian idea sets, the varied groupings of Protestantism, and more. Our privileges and our options for study are unparalleled.
But should that surprise us, when God told us that He wanted to develop a group who would rightly represent Him, particularly at the last days?
Occupy includes the doing of evangelistic outreaches. But it also includes feeding our own experience in other ways. Some of you (you know who you are) go to the gas station more frequently than you engage in serious Bible study.
Our duty is to fill up with God’s truth, keep on growing, watch for heaven-sent opportunities to share, and then share. And then go back again to the Word and receive even more. Present truth is ready to change us. Are we making ourselves available to it in order that we might be changed? May God challenge our assumptions and may we let Him. The rough edges must come off. I must be changed. I must better represent Christ. The time is now. GCO
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