February 28  Bates Gets The Sabbath-1

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thous labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God. Ex. 20:8-10.

Seventh-day Adventists regard Joseph Bates as the apostle of the Sabbath. But, we need to ask, how did he come across the topic?

The answer to that question has more than one branch. For one thing, ever since he had become a Christian hd had kept Sunday as the Sabbath, even going so far as to enforce his position on his crew when he captianed a ship.

A second avenue undoubtedly involved his study of prophecy. After all, a student of the book of Revelation has no difficulty in seeing that the commandments of God would be kept at the end of time(see Rev. 12:17; 14:12).

But how did Bates become sensitized to the fact that the Sabbath of the New Testament is Saturday rather than Sunday?

That's where the Seventh Day Baptists come in. That group has never been an aggressive evangelistic people. The United States had only 6,000 of them in 1840. And by the year 2000 their numbers had shrunk to 4,800- a 20 percent loss in membership in 160 years. To put it bluntly, evangelism has never been their strong suit.

But during at least one time in their history they did become aggressive. Their 1841 General Conference session concluded that God "required" evangelism on publication society "began publishing a series of tracts with the objective of 'introducing the Sabbath' to the 'Christian public;" Again, at their 1843 General Conference session they once more resolved that it was their "solemn duty" to enlighten their fellow citizens on the topic of the seventh-day Sabbath.

Their efforts had some positive results. At their 1844 meeting the Seventh Day Baptists thanked God that " a deeper and wider-spread interest upon the subject has sprung up than has ever before been known in our country."

The story of these Baptist tells us that truth is a good thing. But it also indicates that even truth can do no good if people merely sit on it.

It wasn't until they made a conscious decision to let their light shine on the topic that things bean to happen. We still need those kinds of light-shining decisions today.

The prayer, "Bring us not into temptation," is itself a promise. If we commit ourselves to God we have the assurance, He "will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." 1 Corinthians 10:13(TFMB, 118).