HopeLives365

Pastor Mark Finley: We recognize that there's a distinct parallel. Prophecies misunderstood by the disciples led them to be disappointed when they thought Christ was going to establish an earthly kingdom rather than be crucified.

Show Announcer: This is HopeLives365 with Pastor Mark Finley. Today's message: "When the Earth is Filled with the Glory of God, Part Two." Enjoy and remember you can always catch up with past messages and stay up to date with HopeLives365 and Pastor Mark by going to HopeLives365.com. And now, Pastor Mark Finley.

Pastor Mark Finley: But out of that crucifixion, God raised up New Testament Christianity to preach to the world. We as Adventists believe that the parallel is exact—that again, early Advent believers misunderstood the prophecies. They were bitterly disappointed in 1844.

But what does it say in Revelation 10:11? Read it with me, please. He said to me—that's after the disappointment—"You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings." So out of the disappointment of 1844, God would raise a movement that would span the globe, a movement that would send its missionaries around the world.

Because Jesus said in Matthew 24:14, "This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, then the end shall come." Seventh-day Adventists are a dynamic mission movement. We send our sons and daughters around the world; some of them never return home. Why? Because we believe that there is a divine commission that must go to the ends of the earth and prepare people for the coming of Jesus.

We believe that God has raised up this movement to herald an end-time message of the three angels. Revelation 14:6 is the fulfillment of Revelation 10:11, where it says you must prophesy to many nations, tongues, and kings. "I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people."

So the Adventist message was to go to the ends of the earth. Now, these prophecies are being fulfilled in God's last-day church today. You will hear statements like, "Well, is the church going to fall apart? Is the church going to be divided? Is the church going to fail in its destiny?"

I want to take you around the world. I want to show you things that are happening, that the Holy Spirit is doing, that are absolute miracles today. And I want you to come with me on a journey. God's church is not going to flicker like a candle and go out. Jesus said, "I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." Is Christ going to build his church? Is he building his church? Will the gates of hell prevail against it? Not at all.

There in Washington, New Hampshire, Frederick Wheeler was conducting a communion service, and he spoke about the Ten Commandments. Rachel Oakes Preston was there in the audience, and she questioned him later about the Sabbath. Eventually, he accepted the Sabbath, and this became the first Sabbath-keeping Adventist church.

Now, how—unless it was in the destiny of God, unless it was motivated by the Holy Spirit—how can you take a little tiny church tucked in the woods of Washington, New Hampshire, and raise up from that a mighty worldwide movement that today is in over 200 countries around the world?

Seventh-day Adventists from their early days have believed in mission. It was in 1874 that J.N. Andrews, our first missionary from America, went out to Europe. Now, I want to show you some interesting population ratios. In 1863, there was one Seventh-day Adventist for every 373,143 people in the world. In 1900, there was one Adventist for every 21,487 people.

In 1940, there was one Adventist for every 4,549 people. In 1980, there was one Adventist for every 1,268 people. In 2000, there was one Adventist for every 519 people. In 2006, one Adventist for every 430 people. In 2014, one Adventist for every 392. And today it's about one Adventist in a little over 300 people in the world.

God is blessing this movement as it proclaims his love around the world. Here's another way to look at it. It took 107 years—from 1848 to 1955—for us to have our first million members. It took 14.7 years for the second million. It took 7.9 years for the third million.

It took 5.1 years for the fourth million. It took 3.3 years for the fifth million. Since 1986, we've added a million members every single year. Now, I am not suggesting merely because they're adding numbers that that is the finishing of God's work. But what I am suggesting is this: the hand of God is over this movement, and it is making an impact around the world.

Let me share with you a few stories from that. I want you to go to India with me. My wife and I began to work in India in the year 2000 in the city of Chennai with Brother Swamidass Johnson. The brethren asked us to travel throughout India to hold evangelistic meetings for a number of years, and we said no. We want to stay in one city, and we'll return to that city on numerous occasions.

We'll make a 10-year commitment to this city. And we did. We sponsored Bible workers in that city for 10 years. We built a Hope Channel center in that city. When we started in Chennai, there were 12 Seventh-day Adventist churches and 750 members. 12 churches, 750 members. Now, in 2019, we have 164 churches and 25,000 members.

But let me share with you some stories. When I first had my evangelistic meetings there early on—2000, 2003—this is a meeting in 2007 that I had there, and it became so dangerous for us to go that I had to have my meetings in the Pereira Center. Pereira was an atheist. And so we had to have our meetings in an atheist place because the Hindu militants would leave that place alone.

As we had our meetings then, we saw the Spirit of God come down, and we noticed how the Holy Spirit was moving. We established also there a health center for the opportunity to hold health talks, built that center, built the Hope Channel center there, built churches. But we saw the miracles of God's grace.

Let me tell you how God is moving today in very unusual ways. 40 years ago, a Hindu woman was walking down the street. As she walked down the street, she saw a piece of paper blowing down the street. She picked it up. There in her native tongue were these words: "How to find peace after death, what happens when you die."

Her son had been killed in an automobile accident—in a tragic accident—and so she was looking to find some kind of peace and meaning in her life. As she saw this piece of paper, it was an advertisement for an Adventist evangelistic meeting. She attended, never telling her militant Hindu husband. She came every night to the meetings.

She accepted Christ in those meetings. She accepted the fact that Jesus was coming in those meetings. She accepted the Sabbath in those meetings. But she knew that if she told her husband, it could mean death for her. She knew that she could be put out of the home. So she never told him. When he went off to work on Sabbath, she kept the Sabbath by herself.

Now, you say she should have taken a stand. You can say that sitting in a church at Uchee Pines. But you have not walked in this woman's footsteps. She had three daughters. She raised them to know Christ. She would read the Bible to them when her husband was out. Those daughters grew up and they had children. 10 years went by, 20, 30, 40 years went by. She eventually died.

One day, one of these daughters walked into one of our Adventist churches. And as this daughter walked in, she came to the pastor. She eventually came to our evangelistic meetings. And here is one of the daughters here in the orange-ish sari. This, in fact, is the whole family. She came in and said to the pastor, "We have been secret Adventists since my mother came to those meetings 40 years ago."

She said, "Not only me but my two sisters and our whole families, but our husbands don't know that. But I can't hold back any longer; I have to be baptized." We baptized her. Her husband became furious. He was a very wealthy businessman working in Saudi Arabia. When he came back, the pastor began to study the Bible with him.

I began to work with him. And here's a picture of a secret baptism of me baptizing this Hindu man, this businessman. And when he was baptized, he gave three concrete churches that we built in Chennai. 40 years after she went to the evangelistic meetings, her whole family of over 20 now were baptized.

The seeds that you plant in your gospel medical missionary work may not sprout immediately, but God is going to use those powerfully for His name. Let's go to China. This is the largest Seventh-day Adventist church in the world. I used to say it has 6,000 members. It did when I was visiting there, but we just were back in China, and now it has 8,000 members. It has about 150 small groups—they're between 100 and 500. It has 150 of these groups that meet.

But let me tell you the story. Do you know that the largest Seventh-day Adventist church in the world was raised up by medical missionary work? Many years ago, there was a simple Chinese woman who became very, very sick. She had a daughter. This Chinese woman, who became so ill and so sick, had an Adventist neighbor.

The Adventist neighbor visited her and gave her hydrotherapy treatments. The woman began to get better. She and her daughter were so impressed that they listened when the Adventist lady gave them Bible studies. As they gave them Bible studies, they started a small group in their home. As they started that small group in their home, the group grew larger and larger and larger.

This woman is an amazing woman. She is a powerful, powerful preacher for God. And out of that small group, they began to start other small groups. They meet every day at 4:00 in the morning with their group, and they pray that the Spirit of God will come down in their city. Then they go out at 6:00 and witness as people are coming to work from 6:00 to 7:00.

When my wife and I were there, my wife Teenie said to her, "Why do you meet at 4:00 in the morning?" And she said, "Do you do that every day?" She said, "Oh yeah, every day. No, not every day, because on Sabbath we come at 6:00 in the morning because we're going to stay all day at the church." But Teenie said, "Why do you do it at 4:00?" She said, "Because our people are professionals. I mean, we have attorneys, we have physicians, we have university students. And so they come in the morning to seek God."

This is their choir as we are in that church. They're giving out literature; they're giving Bible studies. But at times it is very, very difficult, but the Spirit of God is being poured out in China today. We have 400,000 Adventists in China. I remember in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. I was in Hungary during the time, and 100,000 people marched in the street.

But the falling of the Berlin Wall opened up Moscow. To see what happened there then is nothing short of the outpouring of the Spirit of God. After we held meetings in Polshina University, we held meetings in the Kremlin Auditorium. Now, it's more difficult to hold meetings in the Kremlin Auditorium than it would be to hold them in the Congress of the United States here—far more difficult.

The Kremlin Auditorium is where Khrushchev spoke, where Chernenko spoke, where Andropov spoke. You talk about the God of the impossible. You talk about the God who works miracles. This building on the left that you see was the center of communism. This is where the Communist Party met for years, for decades and decades.

When we first were going to have our meetings here, it was at a transitionary time. Communism had just fallen, and the Russian government wanted to give to the West the view of religious freedom. At that particular time, we made an appeal to the Russian government. We had some friends there; they allowed us to come into the Kremlin—the only Christian organization that's ever held in the Kremlin for any length of time at all.

When we first made those negotiations, they said, "You can bring nothing in with you. The security is so sensitive." I mean, that's an amazing building—beautiful crystal chandeliers, escalators. They said you can bring nothing in with you. We prayed. God does something amazing when we pray. As we prayed, we said, "Look, we want to bring 20,000 Bibles and give them away to the Russian people."

Finally they said, after we prayed, "Okay, you can. But Russian army trucks will pick up the Bibles, Russian soldiers will deliver them." So you see a miracle here. You see the army truck on the right-hand side of the Kremlin? That army truck is full of Russian Bibles, and the Russian soldiers are delivering them. And I thought to myself, Lord, if you want Russian soldiers to be our usher, praise God for that.

We preached night after night. We blended, of course, health and biblical values there in the Kremlin Auditorium. In the first baptism, we baptized over 1,000 people. And you know, it was interesting what the devil did all the time. We had rented an Olympic swimming pool in Moscow to have our baptisms. As we rented, there were always hellish forces, satanic forces against you.

We had rented the swimming pool, we had paid for it, we had the contract for it. And I said to them when we rented the pool, "Now look, the water is about six feet deep. That's too deep. We don't push them in from the side. We need water about three feet high—three and a half feet, up to the waist." And they said, "Okay, no problem, we'll drain the swimming pool. Let's sign the contract, you give us the money." We did.

We came back three days before, and they said, "Oh, we can't drain the pool," because they were getting pressure from the popular church not to let us have the baptism. They said, "We can't drain the pool, so you're not going to be able to have your baptism." I said, "Well, did we rent the pool?" "Yes, but it's too deep for you." I said, "Okay, that's our problem, not your problem."

They said, "Well, if you can figure out how to do it..." So you see what we did? We had our Russian carpenters come in and we built a platform three feet up, and we put our people on the platform. That's why we have these white ropes here—because if they go right or left, they're going to be in six feet of water. And we took 1,000 people down there. God always has a way.

One time we were baptizing in Moscow out in a lake. The lake was out of the city. We were going to baptize about 1,000 people. Our ladies made baptismal robes. We needed a tent for the ladies to change in. I had heard that there was one tent in some hospital in Moscow; I had no idea where that tent was—absolutely none. I knew it was some hospital, but there are 25 hospitals in Moscow.

We got on our knees and said, "Okay God, we need that tent." It was an army hospital, and the army was selling tents. And we said, "Okay God, we need that tent, help us." And so I said to two of my staff, "Look, get a Russian driver, go find that tent and come back with it in a couple of hours." They said, "What did you say?" I said, "We just prayed, you go find the tent."

They went out. As they were driving down—I mean, Moscow has 11, 12 million people—they were going down the street, and an ambulance went speeding past them. And the brother that I had sent out said, "Follow that ambulance." They followed the ambulance to the very precise hospital, and within two hours were back and they had our tent. In those years, God worked incredible, incredible miracles.

We saw God's Spirit poured out in unusual ways. This is the former Communist Party building in Ukraine, Kiev. Below this was a notorious KGB prison, but now it's a cultural center. When you have a totalitarian state, you have to control mass media. Therefore, the Russian government subsidized televisions because they controlled the content on the televisions to control the minds of the people.

God must have a sense of humor or a smile on His face because when communism fell, we satellited from this building across the 11 time zones of the former Soviet Union over the very network that was built by communists. We satellited the message of God. While I was preaching there in one of the most beautiful palaces in all of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Kulakov's son, Peter, was translating for me.

Mikhail had been in prison for his faith for five years, then sentenced to life exile. When he was in prison, he would go to the prison bars and he would look out into the night at the stars, and he would say, "God, please, please send the message of truth to this prison." When we were satelliting from that place, the signal came down on a dish in that prison where Pastor Kulakov was years before, and many of those prisoners were baptized.

We saw the moving of the Spirit of God. As I travel the world and I see what God is doing, I know that God is working miracles around this world. I am affirmed by the text that the gates of hell will not prevail against God's church as I see men and women and boys and girls coming to Christ.

Come with me to Cuba. The first time I ever went to Cuba—and you know, there are things that I can say now that I would be very cautious to say many years ago—because I had worked in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, I was sent to Cuba to work cautiously and quietly. In those years, you didn't get a visa into Cuba.

The first time I ever went into Cuba, I went in to do some negotiations for the church because the General Conference president at that time, who was Robert Folkenberg, wanted to hold a major evangelistic meeting in Cuba. He wondered if we could do it. And so he said, "Mark, would you go in and work with the government?" So I did.

And we negotiated all day, seven hours, and I came up with nothing. At the end of the time, I said, "What do you need most?" This was under the days of Fidel Castro. They said, "What we need most is a more positive image in America. Voice of America is booming in all this negative stuff." And I said, "I can help you with that."

I said, "We have a national television program; one in every 200 Americans watch it. It's called 'It Is Written.' How would you like me to produce favorable programs about Cuba and put them on my network?" They said, "We would love that." I said, "No problem, I'm happy to do it. But you've got to let me come with a film crew to Cuba, and you've got to let me take pictures of your beaches and so forth."

I said, "I want to talk about religious freedom in Cuba, too. I'd like to bring 12 or 13 colleagues and we'll put them in all the major cities of Cuba, and they can hold Bible meetings, and you as a government allow people freedom to come, and I'll take pictures of it and I'll show that in America." Somebody said, "Well, they're just using you."

We baptized 3,000 in those 13 evangelistic meetings. Pastor Folkenberg came at the end. One day I was sitting on the platform and they always gave me a minder who would always be with me, and the head of religion, who happened to be an atheist. His cell phone rang and he left the platform, and he came back and he said, "That was just Fidel Castro. He wanted to know how you were doing and to be sure everything was going okay with your filming and the meetings."

God did some amazing things. We went back to Cuba. Cuba's an amazing place, and we love the people there. They're so resourceful. They have cars that we used to have in the 50s. They have no parts for them, and so they're so resourceful; a fender falls off a car and they'll glue it back on, and they'll use anything to keep those things going.

But we wanted to have a public evangelistic meeting. They allowed us the first time to have meetings in our churches, but they wouldn't allow any public auditoriums. So we went back and had a meeting just after the 50th anniversary of the revolution. Here we are on the sixth floor of the government buildings—the seventh floor was Castro's office. Here are Teenie and I and these two women who are Communist government officials, and then our president of our work there.

We were negotiating with them about having a public auditorium. When I went in, they said to me, "Well, tell us a little bit about what you think about the embargo that America has on Cuba." I've dealt with those questions before; I've met with government officials all through Eastern Europe, so I knew how to respond to them.

I said, "I'm not a government official, and you might be interested to know that more Adventists speak Spanish than do English. And you might be interested to know that Adventists are a worldwide work, so I don't come representing America; I come representing the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Jesus Christ. And we're here to help and bless your people. We'll have health meetings and biblical meetings."

And so we talked about a public auditorium, and they said, "Look, we will give you a baptismal pool that you can have public, but you cannot have your public auditorium; it's too sensitive." So we had good relationships with them. Teenie made great contact with these ladies and bonded together. We prayed with them and we left.

We went back to the church and told our pastors that the government had just told us we couldn't have public meetings. This is a live picture; this is not staged. They got on their knees and they prayed and earnestly sought God and said, "God, please send down Your Spirit. God, please move powerfully."

The cell phone of the union president rang as they were on their knees. As we got up off our knees, he said, "I just got a phone call from the top government office. They're going to give us a public auditorium." We don't have to pay for it; they're going to give that to us. We were just singing the doxology here, just praising God for the graciousness of the Cuban government. We did not have to pay one penny, and hundreds were baptized during that series.

Show Announcer: You've been listening to HopeLives365 with Pastor Mark Finley. We hope you've enjoyed today's message and remind you that you can find more in our many ministry resources at HopeLives365.com. And you can support this ministry by going to HopeLives365.com/donate. And now, a final thought from Pastor Mark.

Pastor Mark Finley: One day, Jesus will come. But before He returns, He will pour out His Spirit in mighty, mighty power on a church that is seeking Him. And Jesus will accomplish His mission in the world.