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The Call For Gospel Order-3
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May 19  The Call For Gospel Order-3

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If any one aspires to the office of bishop, he desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher. 1Tim. 3:1, 2, RSV.

Late in December 1853 Ellen White publicly joined her husband in his plea for gospel order. Basing her sentiments on a vision received during her and Jaems's eastern tour in the fall of 1852, she wrote that "the Lord has shown that gospel order has been tto much feared and neglected. Formality should be shunned; but in so doing, oredr should not be neglected.

"There is order in heaven. There was order in the church when Christ was upo the earth, and after His departure order was strictly observed among His apostles. And now in these last days, while God is bringing His children into the unity of the faith, there is more real need of order than ever before; for, as God unites His children, Satan and his evil angels are very busy to prevent this unity and to destroy it"(EW 97).

She was especially concerned with the appointment of ministers. "Men," she wrote, "whose leves are not holy and who are unqualified to teach the present truth enter the filed without being acknowledged by the church or the brethren generally, and confusion and disunion are the result. Some have a theory of the truth, and can present the argument, but lack spirituality, judgment, and experience"(ibid, 97, 98).

Such "self-sent messengers," she expostulated, "are a curse to the cause," especially to those "honest souls [who] put confidence in them," thinking that they are in harmony with the church. Because of problematic self-appointed clergy, "it is much more wearing to the spirits of God's messengers to go into places where those have been who have exerted this wrong influence than to enter new fields"(ibid., 99).

Becuase of the problems, she urged that "the church should feel their responsibility and should look carefully and attentively at the lives, qualifications, and general course of those who profess to be teachers." The solution, she added, included going to God's Word to discover the biblical principles of gospel order and to "lay hands upon" only "those who have given full proof that they have received their commission of God"(ibid., 100, 101).

Chruch leadership is a fearful responsibility. We need to take it seriously in both its qualifications and in its practice.

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May God help His church as it seeks its way in a broken world.
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