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June 2021 Signs of the Times Email Newsletter FREE Book Offer at End of Newsletter The Signs of the Times newsletter is a collection of stories and quotes from past issues of Signs and These Times. *************************** A teacher gave an arithmetic class this problem: "If there were twenty sheep in a field, and one of them jumped over the fence, how many would be left?" Immediately little Jimmie's hand went up, waving in the air, as he replied, "None." "Wrong," said the teacher. "You do not know arithmetic." "Well," drawled Jimmy, "I may not know arithmetic, but I do know sheep. Where the leader of the flock stays, all stay, and where he goes, all go."—By Charles G. Bellah, Signs of the Times, November 11, 1941. Quote: “Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they may see twice as much as they say.”—Unknown, Signs of the Times, September 4, 1917. *************************** Don't miss the July 2021 issue of Signs of the Times: To order Signs, call: 1-800-765-6955 or ONLINE! *************************** Most of us are like the doubting lads that D. L. Moody once told about: A Sunday school teacher wished to show his class how free the gift of God is. He took a silver watch from his pocket and offered it to the eldest boy in the class. "It's yours if you will take it." The little fellow sat and grinned at the teacher. He thought he was joking. The teacher offered it to the next boy and said, "Take that watch; it is yours." The little fellow thought he would be laughed at if he held out his hand, and therefore he sat still. In the same way the teacher went nearly round the class; but not one of them would accept the proffered gift. At length he came to the smallest boy. When the watch was offered to the little lad, he took it and put it into his pocket. All the class laughed at him. "I am thankful, my boy," said the teacher, "that you believe my word. The watch is yours. Take good care of it. Wind it up every night." The rest of the class looked on in amazement; and one of them said, "Teacher, you don't mean that the watch is his? You don't mean that he hasn't to give it back to you?" "No," said the teacher, "he hasn't to give it back to me. It is his own now." "Oh—h—h! if I had only known that, wouldn't I have taken it!" The greatest joy the Christian church can know—the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the latter rain—can be ours if we simply follow God's directions. He says: "Ask ye of the Lord rain in the time of the latter rain." This great blessing, as well as hundreds of others mentioned in the Bible, is ours for the asking.—By Kenneth J. Holland, These Times, August 1951. Quote: “When Jesus Christ utters a word, He opens His mouth so wide that it embraces all heaven and earth, even though that word be but in a whisper.”—By Martin Luther, These Times, August, 1970. *************************** NEW from Pacific Press—Rediscovering the Glory of the Sabbath, by Jo Ann Davidson. Throughout Scripture, the Sabbath is shown to be a delight. The final chapter is “The Heart of the Matter”—a powerful reminder of the “why of the Sabbath”. CLICK HERE to order online or from your local Adventist Book Center--1-800-765-6955. eBooks Available: Kindle Nook *************************** Forgiveness in a Hayloft When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished:” and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.—John 19:30. Hudson Taylor was a sickly child, unable to attend school except for a brief time. He received most of his education at home. Family Bible reading with prayer was an important practice in the Taylor home. Hudson’s father was a pharmacist and Methodist lay preacher. When he was fifteen, Hudson went to work as a bank clerk in a reputable local firm. An older clerk laughed at what he considered Hudson’s outdated spiritual views. A free thinker himself, he tried to convince Hudson to share his skeptical attitude toward the authority of the Bible and his doubts about the Christian faith. Hudson was attracted to these views and began to harbor doubts himself. Concerned, his parents began to pray for him. After only nine months at the bank, an inflammation in his eyes forced him to resign. He returned home to become an apprentice in his father’s drugstore. In June of 1849, seventeen-year-old Hudson was home alone. His father was working, and his mother was out of town on an extensive visit to a friend about eighty miles distant. He was bored and looked around the house for something to read to pass the time. While looking through his father’s library, he discovered some tracts. Hudson smiled as he chose one of them. The stories in these tracts are usually interesting, he thought. I’ll read the stories and skip the spiritual lesson that always comes at the end. He didn’t realize he was about to be hit with the lesson this time right in the middle of the story! Hudson took the tract out to the barn, climbed up into the hayloft, made himself comfortable, and began to read. The story was of a sick coal man who was in anguish because he thought his sins prevented him from reaching Christ. Some friends visited and encouraged him that Christ had already borne his sins with Him to Calvary. Suddenly the worried coal man shouted, “Then it’s done! My sins are gone!” Those words hit Taylor with unexpected force. Suddenly, the statement of Jesus on the cross rushed powerfully into his mind, “It is finished.” Light flashed into Hudson’s soul as he realized, Christ’s finished work on the cross is for me, Hudson Taylor. There is nothing for me to do to make myself better. I should simply trust the work of Christ on my behalf. My sins are already forgiven. All I need to do is to repent and believe. Right there and then, Hudson fell to his knees and accepted Jesus as his Saviour. What he did not know until later was that for the past month his sister had prayed daily for his conversion. Nor did he know that his mother that very day had gone to her room determined to pray for her son until she had the assurance that he had found Christ. She remained on her knees for several hours, until the Holy Spirit gave her peace in her heart that all was well with Hudson. When Mrs. Taylor arrived home two weeks later, Hudson met her at the door. “I’ve some glad news for you, Mother,” he said, smiling broadly. “I know, my boy; I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me,” she replied. Then she told him of her all-day prayer vigil. She had been on her knees while he read the tract in the hayloft. Epilogue Soon after his conversion in the hayloft, Hudson Taylor came under the conviction that God was calling him to China, to the vast inland empire where no missionary had ever gone. At that time, missionaries were allowed only in the five treaty ports but were excluded from the inland provinces. Interestingly, before Hudson’s birth, his father had prayed that if he should be given a son, that he would be called to be a missionary in China. Taylor studied medicine and the Chinese language and sailed for China in 1853 at the age of twenty-one. He was forced to return home because of poor health. While walking along the beach at Brighton, England, in June of 1865, he prayed for twenty-four missionaries; two for each unentered province in China. Within a year, he had them and returned to China, beginning the China Inland Mission. He taught his missionaries to take local occupations and to rely on no mission board for their financial needs but to rely on God alone through prayer. Later, Taylor prayed for seventy and then one hundred missionaries. He accepted missionaries from the working classes, not waiting for the educated or for ordained ministers. Many of the recruits were single women that no other missionary organization would accept. Their mission was nondenominational, and volunteers came from several denominations in Britain and North America. The China Inland Mission became the largest single Protestant body in China by the end of the 19th century. During the Boxer Uprising in 1900, ninety-one of his missionaries were brutally murdered in Shansi Province alone. Taylor’s health never recovered that tragedy. He died in 1905, leaving 205 stations in China with 849 missionaries and 125,000 Chinese believers. China watchers in Hong Kong estimate that there were between twenty-five and sixty-six million Christians in China in 1995. Much of the vitality of Christian faith in China today can be traced to the pioneering work of J. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission.—By Ron and Dorothy Watts, Powerful Passages. *************************** Place this in your church bulletin or newsletter: Now is a great time to offer hope to your friends and neighbors. Signs of the Times® takes on a broken world and directs people to Jesus for relevant answers. The result is changed lives! Send a subscription today. Order from your Adventist Book Center. To order call: 1-800-765-6955 or online at: https://adventistbookcenter.com/signs-of-the-times-magazine.html *************************** The world has ever been slow to accept new ideas, and not many who have had a great vision or done a great work have been patted on the shoulder, and told, “Go ahead, friend; we believe in you, and we are with you.” The gloom peddler, the scoffer, we have always with us; and he seems to have come early in the world’s history. We look back through the centuries, and we find him always on hand, blocking the wheels of human progress. When Noah took his tools down onto the plains and began to put up the framework of the ark, some of these scoffers were then on the stage of actions. They said, “Noah, you are crazy! It has never rained here, and never will. You are misled. This world will never be destroyed by a flood.” But Noah toiled on in this gloom-laden atmosphere for one hundred twenty years, until one night it began to rain, and then they all wanted to crowd into the ark; but the door had been shut. When Columbus tried to equip a fleet to sail around a spherical world and reach the East by sailing west, he wasn’t very enthusiastically received. Folks jeered and they scoffed, and they told him he was beside himself. “The world is flat, man! And when you get out a few miles, you will drop off into oblivion.” If Columbus had waited for the world’s approval, someone else would doubtless have discovered America. These blockers of the wheels of progress were present when Luther came before the world with a new doctrine. He wasn’t received with open arms by the masses. His teaching was unpopular, though true. He had a message for the world, and it conquered through God’s help and the assistance of loyal supporters. A whole crowd of these pessimists gathered on the shores of the Hudson one day, to see Fulton fizzle out with his steamboat. But Fulton had a vision and confidence and courage, and he persevered and succeeded in spite of prophecies of failure. In a little town down in Ohio, two young men were called “the crazy Wright brothers,” because they dared to experiment with flying machines. But the Wright boys had some backbone, and were not hunting for public approval. If Mr. Howe had been influenced by the ridicule of men, our mothers might still be sewing by hand. But when the Lord gives a man a message or an idea, He usually gives him a backbone to go with it. Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome, in 1620, for daring to teach that there are other worlds than ours, and that instead of there being but one solar system there were many such systems throughout infinite space. Congress told Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, that they might just as well appropriate money to attempt to build a railroad to the moon as to invest it in the telegraph. Our first railroads had a hard time to get a right of way through the country; now we all ride on the trains. We all enjoy our modern bathrooms; but the first bathtubs were taxed by municipalities. Ministers who today sound a real message from the pulpit may not be popular. Some of them have been asked to resign from the fashionable churches. Don’t decide against some message or some truth because it is unpopular. Truth has not always been popular; in fact, it seldom has been. The Saviour Himself told us that the multitudes would travel the broad way, while few would be found on the straight and narrow path. – Charles L. Paddock, Signs of the Times, August 14, 1923. Quote: "Whom God appoints, He anoints."—Unknown, The Youth’s Instructor, December 6, 1927. *************************** Share a tract with a friend. The largest selection of tracts available can be found by CLICKING HERE! *************************** Take Time TO THINK: It is the source of power. TO WORK: It is the price of success. TO PLAY: It is the secret of perpetual youth. TO READ: It is the fountain of wisdom. TO LOVE AND BE LOVED: It is a God-given privilege. TO BE FRIENDLY: It is the road to happiness. TO LAUGH: It is the music of the soul. TO GIVE: It is too short a day to be selfish. TO PRAY: It is the greatest power on earth. TO WORSHIP: It is the soul’s great need.—From Dateline, Vol. 9, No. 6, These Times, November 1965. *************************** FREE BOOK OFFER! Evangelist Mark Finley has written Hope for Troubled Times—a booked to share with friends, neighbors and co-workers during these challenging times. The book shares hope and encouragement. For a FREE sample copy, CLICK HERE and send your name and mailing address. (Offer valid in the North American Division. Please respond by June 15, 2021.) *************************** Compiled by Dale Galusha. Please pass this newsletter on to others.

? Ye are in Christ ? 1 Corinthians 1:30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:

I am in week two of my current run at breaking my caffeine addiction. So far I am holding on. I feel much better. I had seem postum in a local supermarket back before I chose to ditch caffeinated drinks. I bought a jar of possum. It cost close to $10.00. I drank a cup the other day and enjoyed it. I am drinking a 2nd cup right now. I have heard Kraft ditched postum. Someone else must have picked them up.