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God Still Leads-1
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Dec. 5 - God Still Leads-1

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Like an eagle teaching its young to fly, catching them safely on its spreading wings, the Lord kept Israel from falling. The Lord alone led his people. Deut. 32:11, 12, TEV.

God's guidance. Sometimes we think that's ancient history. Not so. One of the interesting stories of divine leading in early twentieth-century Adventism relates to the reestablishment of the medical branch of the denomination after the loss of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the American Medical Missionary College to Kellogg.

Even before that loss, as early as the summer of 1902, Ellen White was urging the need
of a medical outreach in California. On September 5 she wrote to the General Conference president that "constantly the Lord is keeping southern California before me
as a place where we must establish medical institutions. Every year this region is visited by many thousands of tourists. Sanitariums must be established in this sector of the state" (Lt 138, 1902).

Three weeks later she penned that "for months the Lord has given me instruction that He is preparing the way for our people to obtain possession, at little cost, of properties on which there are buildings that can be utilized in our work" (Lt 153, 1902).

Mrs. White had no doubt that Adventism needed "smaller sanitariums in many places" "to reach the invalids flocking to the health resorts of Southern California." After all, "our sanitariums are to be established for one object--the advancement of present truth" (7T
98, 97).

Those were good ideas. But where would the money for them come from? The denomination, partly because of rapid worldwide expansion in the previous decade, trembled on the verge of bankruptcy. It had ended 1900 with only $32.93 in the General Conference treasury. Beyond that, even the $32.93 represented borrowed money. For several years the General Conference had existed on a hand-to-mouth program of deficit spending. And that was before the fires that burned the Battle Creek institutions to
the ground.

So just where was the money to come from in this era of near bankruptcy and rebuilding?

Now here is a first class question to which there wasn't even a fourth class answer.

Without God's leading there would not be that new generation of sanitariums that enthused Ellen White.


 

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But He can do the humanly impossible.
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