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The "Why" Of Success

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Dec. 29 - The "Why" Of Success(8)

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This means God's holy people must be patient. They must obey God's commands and keep their faith in Jesus. Rev. 14:12, NCV.

When the Albany Adventist denominations and the spiritualizers stepped off Miller's prophetic platform, their understanding of end-time events began to deteriorate, and with that erosion came a lack of vision and mission. By way of contrast, the Seventh-day Adventist branch of Millerism took prophecy seriously.

We should note that merely holding the conviction that they had the "correct doctrine" does not fully explain the spread of Sabbatarian Adventism. After all, the Seventh Day Baptists preached the seventh-day Sabbath with conviction, but their 4,800 members in the United States in 2003 is less than what they had in 1840. As one nineteenth-century Seventh Day Baptist preacher told Bates, the Baptists had been able to "convince people of the legality of the seventh-day Sabbath, but they could not get them to move as the Sabbath Adventists did."

Likewise, many of the nonsabbatarian groups preached a premillennial Advent, but without the same results as Seventh-day Adventists. Clyde Hewitt notes that his "Advent Christian people have not been an evangelistic church and have not made much of an impact on the world." The result, he points out, has been smallness--not just in numbers, but most importantly "in dreams, in visions. Smallness breeds smallness." He also indicates that Advent Christians cannot attribute their lack of growth to unpopular doctrines, since the Seventh-day Adventist list of unpopular doctrines "includes all those of the Advent Christian faith and adds several more." Rather, he roots Seventh-day Adventist success in their conviction that they have a prophetic mission in the tradition of William Miller.

In short, the mainspring of success is much more than merely the fact that the Sabbatarians believed they had the "truth" on the Sabbath and the Second Advent. The driving force undergirding Seventh-day Adventism has been their conviction that they were a prophetic people with a unique message concerning Christ's soon coming to a troubled world. That prophetic understanding of their mission, integrated with their doctrines within the framework of the three angels' messages, provided Sabbatarians with the motive power to sacrifice in order to spread their message far and wide.

It is that very understanding that Adventism is in jeopardy of forgetting in the early twenty-first century.


 

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From India, from Africa, from China, from the islands of the sea, from the downtrodden millions of so-called Christian lands, the cry of human woe is ascending to God. That cry will not long be unanswered(COL 179).

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