Florida Camp Meeting : Mike Cauley's Sermon Transcript

June 2, 2007

I would like to share what I believe the Lord has laid upon my heart as I've done a lot of studying and praying over these past few weeks about the future of God's work here in Florida Conference. And so as we open the Word of God this evening, I want to invite you now to just pray:

Father, we thank you again for your presence. We've already asked you to be here, but now I ask that you would give me the gift of preaching and open the Word of God through me. Make me your mouth piece. In Jesus name, Amen.

Lindsay Lohan is a young lady that you may have seen on screen. Lindsay Lohan was the star of the remake of the movie "Parent Trap." Kind of a classic from the Walt Disney years that was remade in the 1990s. Lindsay Lohan plays the part of two identical twins, but in reality it's one person, of course. And she has this wonderful experience of cementing her parents, who have been estranged for a long time, back together.

Lindsay Lohan's life has not been as idyllic as the character that she played on screen. The young lady is only 20. She's featured on People Magazine this last week, and the subcaption was "Can anyone save her?" She's been in and out of rehab. She's been on drugs and off drugs and on drugs and off drugs. Her life is in shambles.

It kind of epitomizes our world this evening. We believe that Jesus is coming again soon. We believe that the time is going to be near when we'll see a cloud in the eastern sky about the size of a man's hand, and that cloud will get closer and closer to this earth until it fills the entire sky. It will be illuminated with angels. We believe that time is not far off. That is why we are Seventh-day Adventists. That is the core, outside of saved by grace, of what we believe.

But this world is in such trouble and turmoil, and it's going to continue to be that way as we get closer to the coming of Christ. And so how should God's church live in relationship to all the things that are going on around us? What should be our response to our world that is held hostage by the threat of terrorism? What should be the response of the people of God as they look out and they see that the world is morally imploding? What should be our response, our attitude, our way of reacting when we see weather patterns that are unpredictable and things out of control in our world?

I believe that God wants us to understand that we have a short time to get ready for the coming of Jesus, but most of all, to be attentive to sharing the gospel with the millions of people that need to know Him. There is a growing spiritual hunger in our world today. There is a growing spiritual hunger even more intensely it seems among younger people. Young people under the age of 25 have a different bent than we Baby Boomers, and also Gen Xers have.

I know you may get tired of all those classifications, but the kids called the Millennials, born around 1980 to about the early 2000s—those kids are different. They prefer rules over rebellion. They prefer family over fragmentation. They prefer standards and believing for something that counts in life over just letting life go to pot around them. There are 80 million of those people. There are more of them than there are of the baby boomers. They are the target of Madison Avenue. They are the people that everybody is going after, and they have a deeper sense of spiritual hunger than any generation in our lifetime.

You look out here this evening, and you see that there are a lot of folks that are my age and older. Now, you know, I like people in their 50s. I'm married to one. I'm married to a lady in her 50s. (I happen to be in my 50s as well.) Some of us are moving closer and closer to 60, and some of us are a little older than I am, but we've got to find a place in this Church for people that are in their 30s and 20s and in their teens. And they need to take the torch because someday, if Jesus doesn't come soon, some of us won't be as active.

We have to find a way to grab a hold of the opportunity to make good on God's promise from Ellen White, in the book, Education, "With such an army of youth, rightly trained might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon coming Savior might be carried to all the world." You know that quotation well don't you? Ellen White predicted that before Jesus comes, the Church will be brought to a point of finishing the work through young people.

It was the same age group that was passionate about the early Adventist movement. J.N. Andrews was 22 when he started on the publishing committee. 22! He was a kid. Ellen White was 17 when she had her first vision. She couldn't even have graduated from academy yet if she lived in our day. Uriah Smith was 21 when he joined the publishing work, and James White was 21 years old when he came upon the scene and began to preach the Advent doctrine.

So what is the message that these young people need to hear? And what is it that we need to do as a Church to get those people ready for the coming of Jesus? Friends, we are on the verge of a crisis in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I know that it's not good for church administrators not to do happy talk at events like this, because we like to be encouraged. And there are a lot of great things happening. All around the world this work is going forward with tremendous power. God is blessing the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but it is not going forward in North America.

In many countries around the world the young people are leading out. They're in the forefront of evangelism—not here. The average age in America of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is 58 or 59. The average age in America is 36 in the public. That gap is widening by the year. The only reason the Church is at 58 or 59 rather than in its 60s is because of families who are immigrants who have come here, and their children are part of the mix.

Take a look in your church. If it's like a lot of the churches I visit on Sabbath morning, a lot of the young families are families who come here from other places. Now, I don't want to be misunderstood. Every one of those people are precious. We want them in the Church and many, many more—everyone! But we are anesthetizing ourselves to the reality that we aren't growing because we're blessed, we live in Florida. We live in a place where folks who come down from Chicago and other parts of Illinois and Indiana and New York and other places have come to Florida to retire. We're blessed because people have come from points south in our hemisphere and even Eastern Europe and have found this a good place to live. And some of our greatest contributors and leaders in this Church are people who happen to be born somewhere else in the world and have found their way to the United States. Praise God for them. I wouldn't change it for the world, but let's don't be blind to the fact that we are not doing so well at reaching kids. Do you realize that a young person who graduates from our academy, comes across the stage, gets their diploma has a 50% chance they'll never be back. They're out the door. We have to do better than that.

So what is the message that these young people need to hear? What is the message that God is calling us to give with a clarion call? I want to read a few texts with you this evening. First of all, I want you to take a look with me at the harvest. We live in a very good place here. We as Seventh-day Adventists don't have a lot of exposure to the world. We're sheltered somewhat, because of our lifestyle, from understanding how tough it is outside of the walls of our wonderful Church.

But look at I Corinthians 6:9-11. I believe if Paul were here this evening that he would say, "You know, you look a whole lot like the church of Corinth in your society at large today." Notice what it says: I Corinthians 6:9-11. "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God. Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God." That is a tough list of sins. But then He says: "And such were some of you, but you were washed." Hallelujah! "You were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God."

So the Church, I would suggest today, looks a whole like it did in the days of Paul. It isn't just a good evangelical family that goes to church on Sunday and needs to know the truth. Those are folks that we need to reach with this beautiful message. No question. There's a larger segment of society that are Buddhists, and single moms that are trying to figure it out by themselves, and a homosexual couple, and a transient, and a biker couple, and people that are atheist, and Hindus, and Jews that need to know Jesus.

And so what is the message that these people need to hear? Do you remember in John 3:17 where Jesus said, "He did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that through Him the world might be saved?" The message they need to hear is that God is a loving God. You know well the passages where we're told that before Jesus comes the entire world will be lit up with the glory of God. This world is going to be illuminated with a manifestation of the truth about who God is. Notice what Ellen White says, in Mount of Blessing, page 76: "By the revelation of the attractive loveliness of Christ, by the knowledge of His love expressed to us while we were yet sinners, the stubborn heart is melted and subdued and the sinner is transformed and becomes a child of God. And the last message of mercy to be given to this world is a revelation of His character of love."

So Jesus said, "I did not come into the world to condemn the world." That's what a lot of people think about Christians, but He said, "that the world through Him might be saved." That means that Jesus never lowered His standard about what He wanted people to become, but He raised the standard of how much God loves them. And according to Mount of Blessing, page 76, "that is the power to melt the heart and change the life."

Remember in John 14, Jesus is with his disciples in the Upper Room, and He says, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." And they could hardly believe it. Everything that the Father is is exactly what Jesus was when He was on earth here. So what message do we need to give? We need to give a message that these people are loved by God more than they can even comprehend. That is the message of Revelation 18:1 that will be illuminating the whole world before Jesus comes.

And so what do we need to do in order to jump start the Church, to create a momentum and a direction that will honor God as we see ourselves facing a lost and broken world that needs to hear the message that God loves them.

The first thing we need to do is to understand that this Church began in a way that is not like it is today. This Adventist Church was a movement when it began. It was a Church that was on fire for God. Listen to these characteristics of a movement written by a sociologist who has studied the Wesleyan movement in the 1700s. He also studied the early Advent movement in the 1830s, and notice these characteristics. And these are also the characteristics of the Christian church: a thirst for renewal, a holy discontent with what exists. Can't you see those early Adventists who heard the preaching of Miller, who wanted to have a thirst for something better, responding because they were hungry to make a difference for the Kingdom of God? It was something that ignited the hearts of young people, ignited the hearts of Ellen White, James White, J.N. Andrews, and those other young people like Uriah Smith.

Number two—there was a new emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit—the work of the Spirit is seen not only as important in the past but also an experience in the present. That's why God gave us the Spirit of Prophecy, because it was a manifestation that He was at work, and God wanted to reveal precious truth to His people.

Number three—tension within existing structures—old and new wineskins. Those people were so on fire for God, those young kids in the early Adventist Church, they were kicked out of their churches. They were kicked out of the synagogues in the early church. The Wesleyan people out of which Ellen White came, the Adventist movement is connected to Methodism in its revival roots, they were kicked out of their churches, the Anglican churches, and they started their own churches.

Number four—they were called to a more radical commitment for engaging a broken world. Early Adventists wanted to make a difference. Early Christians wanted to make a difference. They wanted God to change hearts and lives and see people restored out of their brokenness.

Number five—they were led by people with no recognized formal leadership status. Was Ellen White recognized as a leader? What about 21-year-old James White? They were just kids, weren't they?

Number six—involving people on the grass roots level, particularly the uneducated.

Number seven—energy and dynamism. Movements have the ability to incite and enlist others as leaders and participants. And this was the climate out of which the early Adventist Church was born, and this is what the Church will be when the work is finished. This Church will complete its work by rekindling its passion that came about from being a movement.

Now, as I said earlier, we need everybody. Remember when God raised up Ellen White and James White there were three key people in the early Adventist Church if you read the testimonies. Joseph Bates was in his 50s. They used to call him Father Bates, not because they were looking at him like a priest, but because he was like a dad. He was a mentor to them. The Church needs older folks to mentor and love those kids. We as older folks need the kids and their energy and their enthusiasm.

And so how in the world did the Church get to the place where it is today? How did we get away from that fervor, that dynamism of being a movement in the early Church of the Christian era and then move into darkness for so long? How did we get to the place where we are today?

It all pivots around a misunderstanding of the word Ekklesia, a word in the Greek New Testament. Now, the word Ekklesia is the word that is translated church. It started as a word to describe people who would gather together at town meetings, and it became known as a way to designate people in a certain area who said that they were loyal to Caesar, the emperor whom they worshiped as God.

When Christians began to worship Jesus as their Savior, they began to say, as their greeting, "Jesus is Lord," and it put them in direct conflict with society. Those early Christian believers were kicked out of the synagogues, were persecuted, were hunted down, but the word Ekklesia only meant a group of called out people who met in a certain part of a city or a village or an area. It meant a body of people.

The Church grew with tremendous rapidity during the early years. At the end of 100 A.D., there were about 25,000 Christians. At the end of 310 A. D., 200 years later, it is estimated there were 20 million Christians in the Roman Empire. God was blessing, and the devil became angry. He raised up a person by the name of Constantine. Constantine brought the Church, which was on the margin of society, into the center. In fact, the Church dominated the state for over a thousand years. We know that don't we?

That word, Church, was changed in the era of Constantine to become a building It meant a facility after he began his institutionalization of Christianity. He totally changed the New Testament church paradigm. Church was a building you went to. It was a basilica. The Church no longer referred to a group of believers. Instead of everybody doing ministry, it was done by paid professional clergy. People didn't go to church and fellowship and pray and study in homes which was what church was. They went to cathedrals, and they had preachers talk to them, and eventually they spoke in Latin and nobody understood. The corruption of this word Ekklesia sewed bad seeds in the soil of God's Church. And therefore, institutionalization took precedence in the Christian world.

So how do we get back to being a movement?

1. We have to go after young people. Tap into their zeal.
2. We have to raise the standard of what it means to be a Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

You know, being a disciple of Jesus is a school from which you never graduate. You never get done. It isn't like a Voice of Prophecy Discover Bible course, which is a good thing, but it is so much deeper than that, because you're always growing in grace according to the New Testament.

3. We have to simplify what it means to be Church. We have to raise the standard of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It doesn't mean you sit down and just watch every Sabbath. And we have to lower what it means to be Church in terms of the complexity. Church is the body of believers. It can be in a home. In fact, it primarily was until the days of Constantine.

We need to reject the system of Constantine which has sown bad seeds into God's soil, His will for His church. And we have to move back to the Wesleyan model out of which Adventism grew. Ellen White called them social meetings. Do you realize that Wesley had no churches when he began, and at the end of his ministry one in thirty people in England were Methodists. These are people following a bibilical model.

In 1776, less than 2% of people in America were Methodists. In 1850, 34% of Americans, a third, considered themselves Methodists, because they had adopted a model of small group ministry in homes and empowering people and planting new churches.

The work in China is a case study in what happens when God's people are forced back to their biblical roots. When the communists took over, it was one of the most destructive persecutions in the history of the Christian church. They killed all of the top leaders of the Christian churches. They expelled all the missionaries, of course. They took over all the properties. They had no seminaries, no schools. They imprisoned all the second and third tier type leaders, and they forbade people to meet and pray and study or told them they would be tortured or killed. There were two million Christians when the communists took over.

In the early 80s, Christian believers, not us, but Christian believers came to China to assess what had happened. Things had begun to improve a little. They thought the Church would hardly be in existence. They estimated that there were 60 million Chinese Christians. One of the people said, "Will you pray for three things for us? Pray that we'll be able to build churches and have more than 15 people meeting together, because we can't have more than 15 people meeting together. Pray that we'll be able to start schools, because we have to train our people how to be leaders in the homes, in their little house churches, and pray that we'll have paid pastors to do the work for us.

And the missionary said, "I can't pray that for you, because that is the secret of the New Testament Church. The way you've been doing it is the biblical model." They estimate there are well over 80 million Christians in China today, because they have followed this model. These people somehow have taken to heart that the Word of God is sufficient to empower and enable God's people. They had no mass meetings for all those years. They had no central organization. The work has continued to explode.

We need to move away from an attractional form of evangelism. You know, the idea of sending out the brochures and everybody comes. It doesn't work well anymore. So, we must take church to where the people are. In the New Testament, they met in public places. They met in homes—that was church. We need to redesign what it means to be a church.

A young lady had come to a bar in New York City. She was wanting to make a telephone call and needed change. Unfortunately, she was from Puerto Rico and did not speak English. The people at the bar were intoxicated, except for the bartender who is the only one she could finally talk to, and they had nobody in the bar that could speak Spanish. She got upset, because she kept trying to say what she was wanting them to hear and she thought if she said it more clearly they would understand. They didn't understand her, and they weren't really very patient, and they called the cops.

Police came. They said, "Man, this lady is out of control. We don't know what is wrong with her. She's upset. She keeps talking." Nobody spoke Spanish. This is the early 80s. They said, "We don't know what to do with this woman. She's getting more and more animated. Let's call the ambulance." They called the paramedics. They came. They didn't know what to do. Nobody spoke Spanish. They took her to the hospital. She was really upset. I mean, you can imagine. She just had a little message for the bartender and the whole thing fell apart, and she is just livid, "Why are they taking me here?"

They took her to the psychiatric ward. They medicated her. They strap her down for three days. A social worker who speaks Spanish comes in three days later. The social worker hears her story and rushes to the woman's apartment. The lady had kids that were sick. She was trying to get change to make a phone call, and she couldn't make the bartender understand. She was trying to call her doctor. The children were dead. They died of thirst.

Those people didn't care enough to learn her language. They didn't care enough to find somebody who could speak Spanish. It's not too hard to find somebody. They didn't care enough to learn the language so this lady could understand them. You understand where I'm going with this, right?

Do we care enough to learn the language of kids? I'm as serious as a heart attack. We have a broken world. We have a society of Millennials who are hungry for the gospel, and we aren't cutting it. Now, I haven't talked to the Conference Executive Committee about this, so don't tell anybody. But I'm going to be asking them to begin to plant churches to reach kids under 25. I'm going to be asking them to help us figure out how to become churches in the biblical, New Testament sense in the way that the Methodists were out of which Ellen White came and the early Adventists, because they were biblical churches. For years, they didn't have many churches in the Adventist movement. They didn't have paid pastors, they didn't have settled pastors over churches until the 1920s. Pastors were itinerant evangelists.

People say, "Well, Mike, now that means that you're going to do all these things for our church. You're going to turn everything upside down. What are we going to do?" I'm going to try not to upset you. I don't like to make people mad, but we need to band together to make a difference for the kingdom, folks. We've got to enfranchise those kids. It is so dumb to have the kids over at Forest Lake Church, the young adults, the 20 somethings, and everybody here is gray haired, but you may not like the music. I'll try to keep it down. I'll pray about it all year long. But, somehow we have got to bring those kids, not to a place of entertainment, but to be fully committed disciples.

We need to give them the Church. Go preach, go share Jesus with somebody. Go start a Bible study. We're praying for you, and we're going to help you love the lost, because we don't know how to do it, and we're looking to you to help us figure that out.

Friends, we need a revival today. We need to be biblical in our approach. Jesus is coming. We're sitting here as if nothing is going on around us. Let's not be numb to the moving of God's Holy Spirit.

Do you remember when you were a young person? Or maybe you came into the church as an adult, but you heard stories about the mission field. You heard a story about somebody giving their heart to Jesus in New Guinea, some person far away, and how God blessed that person even though they were persecuted and before long there was a whole village of people that seemed to love Jesus and were worshiping him. Remember how in your heart you felt "Man, I wish I could go be a missionary? I wish I could go to Venezuela, somewhere in the jungle, and I could go preach the gospel to those native people. Man, wouldn't it be great to go Africa and see the Spirit of God moving like some of those great stories we used to hear from Josephine Cunnington Edwards when we were kids? Wouldn't it be tremendous to be able to see the Spirit of God moving like we hear once in awhile about stories in China and Viet Nam and other places around the globe, breaking open for the gospel?

The great mission field in the world today is the Moslem world, the Hindu, the Eastern religion world, and North America and Europe and Australia. This world is becoming more pagan than the pagans. This culture is going down the tube morally, and people don't know anything about the Bible. And God is calling you to be a missionary to this society that we find ourselves in. He is calling us to empower our kids to be missionaries to these broken people, to people who have holes stuck in all kinds of places in their face, and we wonder how in the world did you ever get to that place. They don't add up to you and me. It doesn't make a lot of sense to us how those guys think. But those kids need Jesus, friends, and they're looking for something.

There is a deep spiritual hunger in the world today, and God is calling us to move away from the Christendom, institutionalization of the Church to being about the gospel of Jesus and primitive godliness, utter simplicity. Preach the word of God wherever you go. Church is not a building. Church is a home.

I'm tired about talking about buildings. I'm ready to talk about sharing the gospel with somebody in a restaurant. Why not have a Bible study at the Waffle House if that's the place to go? I want you to stand up this evening for Jesus. If you want to be a missionary, if you want to empower our youth, if you want to say "I am tired of this dead, lackadaisical Christianity that we bought into from the Roman Empire. We rejected Roman theology. It's time to reject the Roman system that church is just a place to sit and be entertained by the best show in town."

I want you to stand this evening. Will you stand with me and say, "I want to stand for Jesus and become a missionary to the culture that God has put me in? I'm going to start praying for the people that I work with. I don't understand. I can't stand it when they start telling those coarse, terrible jokes at work, but I'm going to love those people in spite of the fact that they're just not very lovable. I'm going to do my best to love those kids in my church even though they turn me off. I wish I could get their hair cut. I am going to do whatever it takes to be patient. We have got to see our kids grow to spiritual maturity, and we've got to give them a chance to fail. They're not going to make it unless they goof up a little bit. They're going to make some mistakes if we give the Church back to them, but look what happened when God gave the Church to a 17 year old. Look what happened when God gave the Church to a 21 year old named James White. He preached a thousand sermons by the time he was 22 years old. What happened when God gave the Church to Uriah Smith, this young kid 20 something years old and J.N. Andrews, and the list goes on. They didn't know what they were doing.

Oh, God, this evening we want the Spirit of God to fill us. Help us, we pray, oh God to be willing for God to move in our lives in extraordinary ways, and we'll sing praise and honor to You in the worthy name of Jesus. Amen.

God bless you.