A Prophet among Us

Manuscript for Sermon at North Hill, August 28, 2010. Who knows how closely the actual "preached sermon" will be to this manuscript.


Sometimes a prophet's messages can make a real difference. Other times, the prophet must wonder why he or she bothered.

About 2000 years ago, a prophet named Agabus, visited the church in Antioch. While there he had a vision that there was going to be a severe recession and called on the church to get ready. The Christians in Antioch believed him and not only prepared themselves, they also took up a collection to help the believers in Jerusalem.

Agabus must have been pretty pleased with this response of the Antiochan, especially since Jerusalem was his home town. It appears that without the message of Agabus, there would have been no collection for Jerusalem. People there would have suffered severe hardship. Some may have actually starved to death. So Agabus' message was pretty important.

Several years later we meet Agabus again. He was still a citizen of Jerusalem, but this time he was visiting a town named Caesarea, about fifty miles northwest of Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul was also in Caesarea on his way to Jerusalem. Agabus gave Paul a message from God: “If you go to Jerusalem, you will be arrested and end up in the hands of the Romans.”

Paul decided to go to Jerusalem any way. Sure enough, while there, he was arrested. Paul spent the next couple of years in prison in Palestine. Then he was shipped off to Rome where he spent another couple of years under house arrest.

It is interesting to note that when the believers in Antioch responded to Agabus' first prediction and took up a collection for the Christians in Jerusalem, Paul was the head of the delegation that carried the money to Jerusalem. Paul had experience with the ministry of Agabus! He knew Agabus was a genuine prophet. But when Agabus gave Paul a personal message that contradicted Paul's own plans, Paul felt free to ignore Agabus' counsel.

In hindsight, we can say, “Oops!”

God did not abandon Paul because of his refusal to pay attention to Agabus' warning. Even in captivity, Paul was still able to share his faith and preach the gospel, though in a far more limited way than if he had not been a prisoner. Through the message of the prophet Agabus, God offered Paul an alternative to prison. Paul ignored Agabus to his own detriment.

Which reminds us of the words of 2 Chronicles 20:20. “Believe in the Lord your God, so shall you be established. Believe his prophets so shall you be established.”

The reason God sends message through prophets is he wants the best for us.

Today, I'm going to talk about the work of Ellen White, a woman Seventh-day Adventists believe was called by God to act as a prophet among us.

Over the course of her life time Mrs. White, as we often refer to her, had something like 2000 visions. She produced 100,000 pages of sermons, articles, letters and books. No other person has come anywhere close to having the impact on the Adventist Church she has.

The church did not start with Ellen White. She was not the founder of the church in the sense that Luther founded the Lutheran Church or Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science Church or Joseph Smith founded the Mormon Church. In those cases the formal doctrines of the church were first articulated by the founders. In the Adventist church, the formal doctrines were developed in small group sessions and conferences. Ellen White was part of these early gatherings, but she was not the leader, either in a social or theological sense.

But she remained active in the leadership of the church for 70 years. Long after all the other early leaders had died, she remained active and engaged. And the belief of the church that she had the gift of prophecy made her writings, her ideas more and more influential over time. She is now the most famous of all Adventists, having eclipsed all the other leaders she worked with during her life time.

What does it mean to be a prophet? What is the job of a prophet? Idoes a prophet do?

1. Call people to repentance
The first words of the Gospel of Mark are, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God: It is written in Isaiah the prophet, “I will send my messenger before you to prepare the way . . . And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Mark 1:1-3.

Repent! This was the central theme of John's prophetic message. Which is hardly surprising. It is the dominant theme of all prophets.

Repent! Alter the status quo. Change. Do something different. Quit doing the same thing.

A growing field of business is the professing of coaching. What is the essence of coaching? Helping people change. You want to write a book? There are people who specialize as writing coaches. The purpose of the coach is to help you change. Move from thinking about writing a book to actually writing a book. One of my sisters has signed up with a personal trainer. Why? To help her improve her physical condition. Business owner hire business coaches. Why? To help them improve—that is CHANGE—the way they engage in business.

The only reason to hire a coach is because you want to change because the job of a coach is helping people change.

This is primary job of a prophet.

When Elijah summoned the nation of Israel to Mt. Carmel he wanted them to change. Quit messing around with Baal the god of the Philistines and give yourselves unreservedly to the worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel.

When God sent Jonah to Nineveh, he wanted the residents there to give up their evil habits and devote themselves to goodness. (As you will remember, Jonah wasn't all that in synch with God's purposes. Still through Jonah's prophetic work, God got the people of Nineveh to change.)

The prophet Jeremiah is famous for his stern messages of warning. Repent! Change! Quit doing what you're doing! Do something different. If you don't, disaster looms over you.

The central work of a prophet is to call people to change. To repent. To do differently. To do better.

When Agabus gave Paul a prophecy, it was not “Great job you're doing there.” Agabus did not say, “You're on your way to Jerusalem. Way to go. Keep up your courage.” No, Agabus cautioned about impending calamity. The prophet was urging the apostle to change his plans. Repent. Change direction. Do something different. This is the central work of a prophet.

When you read the writings of Ellen White, this is one of the most obvious characteristics of her content. She is constantly urging her readers to repent. To move their lives in greater harmony with the will of God and the teachings of the Bible. She paints a vivid picture of a dauntingly high ideal:

Like our Savior, we are in this world to do service for God. In order to be co-workers with God, we must know Him as He reveals Himself. This is the knowledge needed by all who are working for the uplifting of their fellow men. Transformation of character, purity of life, efficiency in service, adherence to correct principles, all depend upon a right knowledge of God. This knowledge is the essential preparation both for this life and for the life to come.
Ministry of Healing, p. 409 (with ellipses).

We are to act like God, to be like God. Our habits are to flow out of a deep, genuine knowledge of God. (I'll come back to this later.) But for those who like to “do theology” in the sense of playing with ideas about God's activity and character, Ellen White offers a very direct challenge: make sure all that “knowledge” is actually shaping our lives. Just as Jesus came to serve, so we, if we are going to call ourselves Christians, are also here to serve, to be co-workers with God. Not merely co-thinkers or co-theologians with God. Ellen White was constantly prodding people to actually live their Christianity. She pushed so hard for obedience that people with sensitive consciences who relied on her as their primary spiritual guide could become overcome with the weight of duty.

2. Organize God's People

The prophet Elisha helped the people of Israel in all sorts of ways. He helped the city of Jericho fix their water supply. He set up schools for young men. He traveled from place to place advising, preaching and healing. Near the end of Elisha's life, the king, who was not a very devout man, came to visit him. When he saw the old prophet lying sick in bed, he exclaimed, “My father! My Father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”

That's how influential Elisha was. That's how indispensable he had become in the nation. Elisha was like an entire army all by himself. His action, however, was not defeating enemies, it was organizing the domestic affairs of Israel. His primary foreign policy work was the reduction of military conflict.

In the years after the Jewish people returned from captivity in Babylon, the prophet Haggai called for a new, vigorous movement to finish reconstruction of the temple which had been demolished by the Babylonians. He told them their own current economic difficulties were the result of neglecting the temple. If they would make the reconstruction of God's house top priority, God would bless them in their own personal lives.

(It is important to note that in the Bible, the prophets did not possess political or religious authority. They gave advice to kings and high priests. They thundered warnings and urged courses of action. But the final decision did not lie in the hands of the prophets. The authority for making decisions remained in the hands of the properly constituted authority of the monarchy and priesthood. To the extent we Christians think of ourselves as a “prophetic voice,” it is proper for us to speak up and voice our opinions about how the nation ought to be run. We must also respect the proper authority of government and we can confidently leave the decision making in the hands of secular authorities.)

Ellen White gave the Adventist Church pointed counsel regarding colleges, a medical school, publishing houses and missions. She supported a massive restructuring of the entire administrative structure of the denomination in 1902. Most observers agree that it was largely her counsel that set in motion the trends that led to the incredible world-wide growth of the church.

Today there are somewhere between 15 and 20 million Adventists world-wide. There are over a hundred colleges and universities, including three medical schools. More than 170 hospitals. All of this is largely the consequence of the advice and counsel of Mrs. White.

So Ellen White demonstrated the work of a prophet in her constant calls for repentance, her constant urging for us to do better, do differently. She acted in harmony with the Bible prophets in giving guidance to the church regarding how our life together should be organized.

Then there is theology.

3. Prophets Teach Theology.

The Gospel of Mark describes the work of John the Baptist as a message of repentance. Mark also uses another phrase. The work of John the Baptist was to prepare the way for the Messiah, to smooth the road for Jesus. In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus came to make his Father known. Jesus reveals God more clearly than any other prophet or priest. He is the supreme teacher and model of God. All prophets participate in this work to a lesser degree. The job of prophet is to make God known.

Ellen White has been dead for almost a hundred years. The passage of time has made some of the details of her messages less and less relevant. A favorite illustration of this is her counsel regarding education of girls. She wrote that every girl should learn to harness a horse. The context of the statement is equipping girls for practical living. In her day, transportation was by horse. If a girl did not learn to harness a horse, it made her less independent, less capable of functioning apart from a man in her life.

Harnessing a horse is obviously not an important skill in today's world. The equivalent in our world would be that every girl should know how to change a tire or use jumper cables.

However, the spiritual theological heart of Ellen White's writings is as relevant as ever.

Of the scores of books that have her name on them, by far the most famous are the five volumes of a narrative commentary on the Bible called "The Conflict of the Ages Series" --Patriarchs and Prophets, Prophets and Kings, The Desire of Ages, Acts of the Apostles, and the Great Controversy. In these books Ellen White reviews the entire history of God as we know it in the Bible and church history. She works to explain how every action God has ever taken is an expression of amazing love. Even the bad news stories—Noah's Flood, the destruction of the Philistines, the terrors of the last days—all of these calamities and disasters are actually the outgrowth of God's commitment to love, to freedom and the eternal blessedness of not only human beings but every living creature in the universe.

The first sentence of the first book, Patriarchs and Prophets, is God is love.
“God is love.” 1 John 4:16. His nature, his law, is love. Every manifestation of creative power is an expression of infinite love. The history of the great conflict between good and evil, from the time it first began in heaven to the final overthrow of rebellion and the total eradication of sin, is also a demonstration of God’s unchanging love.

Patriarchs and Prophets, Chapter One, page one. (with ellipses)

Mrs. White's phrase “the history of the great conflict” is really a reference to the Bible. Patriarchs and Prophets is the first book in a five-volume narrative commentary on the Bible. The over-arching organizing theme of this series is her attempt to show that every action of God, from his miracles of creation, healing and deliverance to his sternest judgments and curses, can be best explained as expressions of deep, genuine love for humanity.

Ellen White grew up believing in eternal hellfire. She was driven away from that belief by its incompatibility with the truth of God's love.

The conviction that God is love is one of the few things all Adventist theologians agree on—conservative and liberal. All agree that ultimately whatever theories they advance must be squared with this bedrock conviction.

The last sentence of the last book in Mrs. White's commentary series, repeats the opening sentence of the first book: God is love.

And the years of eternity, as they roll, will bring richer and still more glorious revelations of God and of Christ. As knowledge is progressive, so will love, reverence, and happiness increase. The more men learn of God, the greater will be their admiration of His character.

The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love.
Great Controversy, Last Paragraph. (p. 678) (with ellipses)

Persuading us of this truth and helping us understand and apply its implications in our lives is the central task of all prophecy and all prophets. Because Ellen White has given us so much help, we are confident that her visions did indeed come from God.

It remains for us, now, to carry forward in our world the work she did so admirably in hers. We are called to know God ever more fully and to make him known.

To repent and to call the world to repentance. (Remember, repentance is not some mysterious, complicated theological process. To repent means to make positive change. One step in the right direction.)

To organize ourselves for carrying forward Jesus' ministry of hope, help and healing.

If we do these things we will have properly honored the legacy of the prophet among us.