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God Still Leads-3
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Dec. 7 - God Still Leads-3

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He leadeth me. Ps. 23:2.

Soon after the purchase of the Paradise Valley Sanitarium God revealed to Ellen White that an Adventist sanitarium needed to be established near Los Angeles. Finding the property was the easy part. Pastor John A. Burden soon discovered the castlelike 75-room Glendale Hotel. Built at a cost of $60,000 in 1886, it now had a price of $26,000.

Burden believed that acceptance of his offer of $15,000 would be a sign of God's approval. All doubts vanished when the owners told him that he could have it for $12,000.

But the Adventists faced the same old question: Where to get the money? The small conference was all but bankrupt. It had recently bought the San Fernando and Paradise Valley properties. And the $20 that Burden had taken out of his own pocket for an initial payment certainly didn't go very far. The conference couldn't even pay the $1,000 down payment, and the conference constituency had rejected the purchase.

Under those discouraging circumstances, Burden and the conference president personally advanced the down payment out of their own savings. At that point a letter arrived from Ellen White asking why the work was being delayed. The conference president read it to his constituency. That broke the wall of resistance. They pledged enough to purchase the Glendale property.

Obtaining the Paradise and Glendale properties had occurred through a combination of
vision and sacrifice. But the real test was yet to come.

The church had acquired both properties in 1904. But Mrs. White asserted that God had
still another one for the church. Back in October 1901 she had claimed that God had distinctly shown her in a vision a sanitarium property in southern California consisting of
"an occupied building" with "fruit trees on the sanitarium grounds." So real was the vision that she seemed to be living there herself (MS 152, 1901).

Yet she didn't know the property's exact location.

God is a person of timing. He knows when the occasion is right for certain moves that will rapidly forward His cause on earth. But He wants us to be in tune with His timing so that He might use us in unexpected ways.


 

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To human beings striving for conformity to the divine image there is imparted an outlay of heaven's treasure, an excellency of power, that will place them higher than even the angels who have never fallen(COL 163).
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