September 2018 Signs of the Times Newsletter

[Stan]

September 2018 Signs of the Times Email Newsletter The Signs of the Times newsletter is a collection of stories and quotes from past issues ofSigns and These Times. ***************************      The night hours had slipped quietly away, and now dawn was breaking. Some 20 evangelists and pastors had spent a night of prayer in one of the annual believers’ meetings which layman Henry Bewley conducted in Dublin, Ireland.      Deep conviction had rested upon the group “that there were resources of power. . .  [they] had not received.” The night of fervent prayer and expectant faith had produced heart searching, confession, and an unusual sense of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.      In the early morning light Dwight L. Moody, a young Sunday School and YMCA worker from Chicago, and Henry Varley, the famous British evangelist, were recalling the night. Mutually they resolved “in dependence upon God to know henceforth a definite accession of spiritual strength to aid us in service.”      They parted that day in 1872, Varley returning to London and Moody to the United States. But the influence of those hours, and of a seemingly chance remark by Varley, would be felt far into the future.     On June 17, 1873, Moody returned to the British Isles, accompanied by Ira D. Sankey, both unknown. A bare handful attended their first meetings, yet they left England two years later world famous.      As soon as possible after arrival, Moody sought out Varley and recalling the night of prayer in Willow Park the previous year, asked, “Do you remember your words?”      “I well remember our interview, but I do not recall any special utterance,” Varley replied.      “Don’t you remember saying, “Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him’?”      “Not the actual sentence, no.”      “Ah,” declared Moody, “those were the words sent to my soul, through you, from the living God! As I crossed the wide Atlantic, the boards of the deck of the vessel were engraved with them; and when I reached Chicago, the very paving stones seemed marked with, ‘Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him.’      “Under the power of those words, I have come back to England, and I felt I must not let more time pass until I let you know how God had used your words to my inmost soul.”      Varley could only rejoice at how wonderfully his words—long since forgotten—had been used. His rejoicing deepened as the work of God under Moody and Sankey grew.      The London campaign, March 9 to July 11, 1875, drew 2,530,000, the largest attendance for a single city campaign until Billy Graham’s 1955 Glasgow crusade. In Manchester, ministers, a great army of other Christian workers, and all classes of the community “received a large blessing from the religious services conducted by the American brethren.”      Moody is estimated to have spent “almost 10,000 days and nights in meetings, which if put together would make a continuous revival more than 25 years long.” Stricken in the midst of his Kansas City campaign, he was taken home to East Northfield, Massachusetts, where he died December 22, 1899.      The great evangelist had been profoundly moved by Varley’s simple, challenging words: “The world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him.” For the rest of his life, he had, in effect, answered, “God helping me, I’ll be that man.”—By Bernard R. DeRemer, Signs of the Times, August 1986. Quote: “Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he’s only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.”—By Logan Pearsall Smith, These Times, July 1969. *************************** Don't miss the ­­­­­­­­October issue of Signs of the Times: To order Signs, call: 1-800-765-6955 or CLICK HERE to order online. ***************************      Robert Louis Stevenson contracted tuberculosis in his early years and from then on for the rest of his life he knew sickness and pain and life-sapping struggle with relentlessly advancing death. Here is a letter he wrote to George Meredith in 1893:      “For fourteen years I have not had one day of real health. I have awakened sick and gone to bed weary, and yet I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written my books in bed and out of bed, written them when I was torn by coughing, written them during hemorrhages, written them when my head swam from weakness. . . . But the battle still goes on—ill or well is a trifle so long as it goes.”      “The battle still goes on”—he hadn’t parked. And one can only begin to realize what those words meant when one reads words like these:      “When a temporary illness laid Stevenson on his back he wrote in bed one of his most thoughtful and careful essays—the one entitled ‘The Technical Elements in Style.’ When eye trouble forced him into a darkened room he still wrote on in the diminished light. When after a severe hemorrhage his right arm had to be bound in a sling, he scrawled with his left hand some of the poems now included in his book A Child’s Garden of Verses. And when the hemorrhages finally became so severe that the doctor forbade him to talk, he actually tried to dictate in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet a portion of the book on which he was then working. Everything against him, and yet he carried on.”      Stevenson never moved beyond the fact of his pain until death released him. But he was constantly, throughout his entire productive life, moving beyond its futility, its mastery, its stifling grip.      You’re not feeling well and so you can’t accomplish anything? Think again of Robert Louis Stevenson, and let him shame you or inspire you into moving on past your pain into the accomplishment of something fine and good and worthwhile.—Unknown, These Times, June 1983. Quote: “Conscience tells us that we ought to do right, but it does not tell us what right is—that we are taught by God’s Word.”—By H. C. Trumbull, These Times, January 1967. *************************** NEW from Pacific Press—Vision in the Storm—Looking for stories that inspire the WHOLE family? Youth pastors, Pathfinder leaders and parents can use Vision in the Storm for worships, and juniors themselves will love reading it. Teenagers played a significant role in the early days of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. James and Ellen White, Uriah Smith, John Harvey Kellogg, and J. N. Andrews were not always as old as they appear in the black and white pictures we have of them. God used them when they were young. Read their inspiring stories in Vision in the Storm by Rachel Whitaker Cabose (from Guidemagazine). Order ONLINE or call 1-800-765-6955. Also available as an eBook: iBook, Kindle, Nook. CLICK HERE to read the first chapter of this book online FREE. ***************************      A man was walking along a road one day, when he overtook a small girl carrying a very heavy baby.      “Oh you poor little girl!” said he. “I am sorry for you, carrying that big burden!”      To his surprise the little girl was not at all grateful for his sympathy. She looked at him indignantly, and replied:      “ ‘Taint no big burden! It’s my dear little brother!”      The man learned a lesson. He said to himself, “She loves the baby, and love turns burdens into a joy.”      May we not all learn a lesson from this? Do we count what we have given up for Christ and the burdens we bear in His service, a burden or a joy? If we do not count it all joy, even the greatest care of deepest sorrow, if it is for His sake, surely love is lacking.      “Tell me not of heavy crosses,           Nor of burdens hard to bear;      For I find this great salvation           Makes each burden light appear.”—From The Christian Life, Signs of the Times, April 9, 1902. Quote: Evangelist John E. Brown, speaking to a congregation of some five thousand people in Los Angeles in 1916, said: “Our amusements in America have taken a lower, and lower, and lower level, until today, in certain sets, certain amusements are accepted which twenty years ago would have landed their followers in jail. . . . This pleasure-loving twentieth century of ours is pleasure mad.”—Signs of the Times, January 2, 1917. *************************** Fake News! Society thinks it’s something new. Actually, the devil invented it thousands of years ago. NEW from Pacific Press—Fake News, a sharing book by Jim Gilley. Discover the fake news that the devil has been telling people since creation. For a FREE sample copy, CLICK HERE. (Offer available for residents of the US and Canada. Please respond before September 15, 2018.) ***************************      One fine summer evening, as the sun was going down, a man was seen trying to make his way through the lanes and crossroads that led to his village home. His unsteady, staggering way of walking showed that he had been drinking; and tho he had lived in that village more than thirty years, he was now so drunk that it was impossible for him to find his way home.      Quite unable to tell where he was, at last he uttered a dreadful oath, and said to a person going by, “I’ve lost my way. Where am I going?”      The man thus addressed was an earnest Christian. He knew the poor drunkard very well, and pitied him greatly. When he heard the inquiry, “Where am I going?” in a quiet, sad, solemn way, he answered—      “To ruin!”      The poor staggering man stared at him wildly for a moment, and then murmured, with a groan, “That’s so.”      “Come with me,” said the other kindly, “and I’ll take you home.”      The next day came. The effect of the drink had passed away, but those two little words, tenderly and lovingly spoken to him, did not pass away. “To ruin! To ruin!” he kept whispering to himself. “It’s true, I am going to ruin! O God, help me, and save me!”      Thus he was stopped on his way to ruin. By earnest prayer to God he sought the grace which made him a true Christian. His feet were established on the Rock. It was a Rock broad enough to reach that poor, miserable drunkard, and it lifted him up from his wretchedness, and made a useful, happy man of him.—Selected, Signs of the Times, August 20, 1902. Quote: “More men die of jealousy than cancer.”—By Joseph Kennedy, Signs of the Times, April 1994. *************************** Please include this in your church bulletin or newsletter: Why not share Signs of the Times® with a neighbor or relative? Sending a subscription is simple, inexpensive, and effective. Make a difference TODAY! Call: 1-800-765-6955 or go online at:http://www.adventistbookcenter.com/signs-of-the-times-magazine-yearly-us-subscription.html ***************************      “I wonder where the devil is?” pondered my preschool daughter, taking a break from coloring a hippopotamus.      “I don’t know,” replied her younger brother, shrugging his shoulders while creating a green giraffe.      “I sure would like to know where the devil is!” Shelly was giving every indication now that she was insisting on an answer from her little brother.      Shaun laid down his crayon in order to give the matter the full benefit of his four years of wisdom. Staring out the window with chin in hands, he deliberated for a moment and then concluded, “I don’t know. But I sure hope he’s a LOOOOOONG ways away!”—By Norman E. Lunt, Signs of the Times, February 1995. Quote: “Trust God, O child of God; and if He does not send thee help in the way thou art expecting, He will send it in a way thou art not.”—Unknown, Signs of the Times, January 24, 1911. *************************** Carry Pocket Signs wherever you go. Give a Pocket Signs to each person you meet. CLICK HERE to see a complete line-up of Pocket Signs! *************************** The Parents’ Prayer O Master, make me a better parent. Teach me to understand my children, to listen patiently to what they have to say, and to answer all the questions kindly. Keep me from interrupting them, talking back to them, and contradicting them. Make me as courteous to them as I would have them be to me. Give me the courage to confess my sins against my children and to ask them forgiveness, when I know that I have done them a wrong. May I not vainly hurt the feelings of my children. Forbid that I should laugh at their mistakes or resort to shame and ridicule as punishment. Let me not tempt my child to lie and to steal. So guide me hour by hour that I may demonstrate by all I say and do that honesty produces happiness. Reduce, I pray, the meanness in me. May I cease to nag; and when I am out of sorts, help me to hold my tongue. Blind me to the little errors of my children and help me see the good things that they do. Give me a ready word for honest praise. Help me to grow up with my children, to treat them as would those of their own age; but let me not exact of them the judgment and conventions of adults. Allow me not to rob them of the opportunity to wait upon themselves, to think, to choose, and to make decisions. Forbid that I should ever punish them for my selfish satisfaction. May I grant them all their wishes that are reasonable, and have the courage always to withhold a privilege which I know will do them harm. Make me so fair and just, so considerate and companionable to my children, that they will have a genuine esteem for me. Fit me to be loved and imitated. With all Thy gifts, O great Master, give me calm, poise, and self-control.—By Garry Cleveland Myers, These Times, August 1960. *************************** Compiled by Dale Galusha. Please pass this newsletter on to others.