I said to some of you last night that I was going to speak today about the experiences of God’s people just before the close of probation.  Before we get into that subject, I want to talk very briefly about the expression, “God’s people.”  Some people say, Are not all the people in the world God’s people?  Well, no, not really.  You can read in Genesis 3:15 God was speaking to the devil and He talked about the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.  The seed of the serpent are not God’s people.

People say to me, Pastor John, are not all Christians God’s people?  Well, I would never argue that point except when I am talking about God’s people just before the close of probation.  I am talking about a specific group of people whom the Bible calls “The Remnant.”  So, if you have your Bible, just for a quick review on who the remnant are, turn in your Bibles to Revelation 12:17.

It says, “And the dragon was enraged against the woman, and he went out to make war with the rest of her offspring [remnant of her seed; the ones] who keep the commandments of God and have [the ones having] the testimony of Jesus.”  These are the two characteristics of the remnant.  Notice the remnant people of God, the seed of the woman in the last days, the ones with whom the devil is enraged, have two characteristics, they keep the commandments of God and they also have the testimony of Jesus.

I was interested to hear Doctor Standish talking this morning about how his parents took him and his brother to evangelistic series.  My father believed in taking his family to evangelistic series.  We lived in Colorado and we went to evangelistic series all over, in Boulder, in the Broomfield area, in Denver, wherever there were evangelistic series our family went to them.

I remember when I was a boy, Seventh-day Adventist evangelists would read this text and they would tell the people, You only have to know two characteristics to find the true church in the last days.  That is what they all said when I was a boy and I went to the evangelistic meetings.  They read this text and they said, To find the remnant people of God in the last days, you only have to look for a group of people who have two characteristics.

One is they have to be a people who keep the commandments.  Now they could not be called commandment-keepers if they break one, because it says in James 2:10 that if you keep the whole law but you offend in one point, you are guilty of all.  So God’s people in the last days, the remnant, would have to be a people who do not practice idolatry and are not a Sunday-keeping people, because the fourth commandment forbids us to do that.

So God’s people in the last days would have to be a people who keep all ten of the commandments.  We will not review the Ten Commandments, but you know, the Ten Commandments.  I hope you are like the man in Psalm 1, who meditates on the law of God day and night.  This is something very critical for us to be studying, because there are many churches today that are not only allowing people, and teaching people, to break the fourth commandment and the second commandment, but also even allowing their clergy to break the seventh commandment.

A second characteristic is that they must have the testimony of Jesus, and the Bible spells out very clearly what the testimony of Jesus is.  It says in Revelation 19:10 that the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy.  It is the spiritual gift of prophecy.  Now there are churches that believe in all the commandments and keep all the commandments that do not have the gift of prophecy and we do not condemn those churches.

But those churches cannot fulfill the specifications of Revelation 12:17.  Does that sound reasonable?  We do not condemn other churches who are keeping the commandments.  We do not say that they are not Christian, but they cannot be the remnant people of God in the last days as described in Revelation 12:17.  Of course, we believe that we have the gift of prophecy and that we have it written down.

I do not know everybody here, but maybe there is somebody here who has never heard of this before.  If there is, I hope that you will contact me at the end of this service and if you have not heard of this subject before, I would love to send you a book called The Prophet of the End.  When we have prophecy seminars and we talk about this subject, we give this book to all of the people. 

That is too big of a subject to get into right now, but what we want to talk about is the experience of God’s remnant people, the people who keep the commandments and the people who have the gift of prophecy.

If there is somebody here who has not studied this before, Seventh-day Adventists believe that this gift of prophecy was manifested in the life and in the ministry of a woman called Ellen G. White.  That was her married name.  Her maiden name was Harmon.  There are very sincere Christian people, all over the world today, who are keeping the commandments and have this gift of prophecy and they are studying it and they are the ones, we believe, who are specified in Revelation 12:17 as the people who keep the commandments and have the testimony of Jesus.  The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy.

It is predicted in the Bible, and it is predicted in the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy, what is going to happen among these people as we approach the close of this earth’s history.  I have not made an absolute systematic study throughout the whole Bible about this subject, but in my Bible study I have been astounded at how much the Bible says about the experience of God’s people just before the end.

It says a lot about it in both the Old and the New Testaments.  I want to study with you a few things about the experience of God’s remnant people just before the close of probation, and I want to begin by going to Luke 19:41. 

If you have your Bible, please open to Luke 19.  It says, “Now as He drew near (this is Jesus), He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!  But now they are hidden from your eyes.  For days will come upon you when your enemies will [surround you and] build [a siege, mount or] an embankment around you [that is against the wall of the city], [and they will] surround you and close you in on every side, and [they will] level you, [with the ground] and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another [a stone upon a stone, why?], because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

Now, what was the problem with the Jewish people not knowing the time of their visitation?  This has been a marvel to Christians, including myself, for a long time.  In the Christian Church it has been a marvel that the Jews did not recognize the coming of the Messiah.  They did not know the time of their visitation. 

In the children of Israel, there were some that the Lord sent as prophets.  They had priests and they had kings, but Jesus was a Prophet, a Priest, and a King, all three.  Jesus was the greatest of the prophets.  When Jesus wept over the city, was He just weeping over that city?  No, because Jesus was a prophet.  Let me read to you what He had in His mind.

This is from the pen of Ellen White.  If you have these books called Testimonies for the Church, this is in vol. 5, 72.  It says.  “The great sin of the Jews was that of neglecting and rejecting present opportunities.  As Jesus views the state of His professed followers today, He sees base ingratitude, hollow formalism, hypocritical insincerity, pharisaical pride and apostasy.  The tears which Christ shed on the crest of Olivet were for the impenitence and ingratitude of every individual to the close of time.  He sees His love despised.”

What does the Lord want from you?  It is not hard to answer that question.  He wants the very same thing that you want from another individual if you want to develop a secure permanent, long-term relationship with that person.  What do you want from somebody else?  If you are single and you are looking for a spouse, what are you looking for?  That is a dangerous question to ask today, because we live in such a society that you never know what somebody is going to answer when you ask that question.

If you have your senses about you and you are not totally demoralized by the society in which you live, what are you looking for?  Well, you want that person’s heart and you want all of it.  What would you think if you were courting somebody and they said, I just love you totally with the bottom half of my heart!  What would you think of that?  Would you marry them?  The Lord will not accept the top half!

This is what the Lord wants: “It is the whole heart that Jesus prizes.  The loyalty of the soul is alone of value in the site of God.”  Ibid. 73.  He wants your whole heart or none at all.  Well, the Jewish people did not know.  Now let me ask you another question.  This is a thought question.  Why did the Jewish people not know?  Was it because they did not have the information?  No, they had the information.

I had never studied this out, even when I went to Walla Walla College and was a freshman studying for the ministry.  I was in a class one day, and the teacher handed out a sheet of mimeographed paper.  We did not have Xerox machines and computers and all the kinds of things that we have today.  But he handed out a mimeographed sheet.

On this sheet it said, Here are the texts in the Old Testament that give predictions about the Messiah.  Do you know how many there were?  There were about sixty, and let me tell you, all kinds of details were predicted about His life.  Not just the time that He would be born; not just the place where He would be born; not just who His parents would be; or what His lineage would be.

It was predicted by Isaiah, the prophet, that the Messiah would exercise His ministry in a territory called Galilee.  Galilee, by the way, is a Hebrew word.  It is right in the Hebrew Old Testament and it says that Galilee was where the Messiah was going to exercise His ministry and it describes what He is going to do.  All kinds of details about the work of the Messiah were specified, and it is astounding, even to people who have not been Christians very long, when they start to study the evidence from the Old Testament about the Messiah, and they see all these details, and you see these details perfectly fulfilled in the life of Christ, they say, Why, why did they not know?  

Well, I suppose there is no one easy answer to that, but I will give you a few answers.

1.  There were a lot of them who were not reading and studying the prophecies.  That is one reason.

2.  There were a lot more of them who, whenever they studied about the prophecies,  were interpreting them in light of what the priests were telling them.  And the priests had developed a whole tradition about the Messiah, that Jesus did not fulfill all those traditions, and so they said, He cannot be the Messiah.  You can see that in the Gospels.

There is one place that the apostle John records that Jesus was at the feast and the people said, When the Christ comes, nobody will know from where He comes, but we know where this One comes from, so He cannot be the Christ.  They were talking about that, and Jesus answered their questions right there.  Where did they get that idea?  Does the Old Testament say that when the Messiah comes, nobody will know from where He comes?

No, the Old Testament does not say that, but that was part of their traditions.  They had traditional interpretations of these prophecies.  Now, remember this scene we just read about in Luke 19:41–44 was not just about God’s people in ancient times.  This was about God’s people until the end of time.  And, my friend, I want to talk to you about something very frankly.  I am not here to get after anybody, but I want you to think about this.

If God has taken the pains to have thousands of pages of information written out for His people to direct them back to Bible truth, do you think that we should be reading and knowing what the instruction of the Lord says or not?  Or do you think that we will be held accountable for instruction that has been given to us and we do not even know what it is?  Are we going to be able to say, Well, I did not know?  Maybe you heard of the person who said about a certain book on the subject of health, I do not want to read that book, so I will not be held accountable.

Lord, I do not want anybody to give me a Bible study about the Sabbath, so I will not be held accountable.  Friend, please, I am not here to get after anybody, but I want you to think.  Are you reading the instruction that the Lord has given?  Somebody says to me, Pastor John, I am not a very good reader.  Let us talk about that for a moment.  The people who are not very good readers.

At Steps to Life, we have morning worship with our staff, five days a week.  Now, in your family, you can have worship in the morning and in the evening seven days a week and that would be fourteen.  But I am only going to tell you what happens when you have staff worship five days a week.

We have been doing this for several years now.  We read through the book, The Desire of Ages.  We read through the book, Christ’s Object Lessons.  Twice, we read through the book, Sketches from the Life of Paul.  We read Upward Look.  And then some of us got to thinking, well, why do we not read the Testimonies?  And so we started.  I do not remember exactly when it was.  I suppose it was a little over a year ago that we started reading the Testimonies.  We have read every single testimony in Volume One.  We have read all of Volume Two and we are in Volume Three right now.

We only read two pages a day and we only have staff worship five times a week.  If you have family worship morning and evening, twice a day, seven days a week, you would be reading almost three times as much as we have, if you read two pages at a time.  You see, you would read the whole Testimonies through in the neighborhood of three years.  It would be real easy.

Oh, friend, please, I am not here to get after anybody, but I want to read you something that Ellen White wrote is going to happen to Adventist people right at the end.  This is in Testimonies, vol. 5, 681.  She says, “Many are going directly contrary to the light which God has given to His people, because they do not read the books which contain the light and knowledge in cautions, reproofs, and warnings. . . . Skepticism and infidelity are increasing everywhere.  Light, so precious, coming from the throne of God, is hid under a bushel.  God will make His people responsible for this neglect.  An account must be rendered to Him for every ray of light He has let shine upon our pathway, whether it has been improved to our advancement in divine things or rejected because it was more agreeable to follow inclination.”

Oh, friend, will there be many Christians, will there be many professed Adventists who will not know the time of their visitation at the end?  Will there be?  Yes, we know that there will be.  There are many statements in the Spirit of Prophecy that help us to understand this.  One is in the book Early Writings, 71. I have read this statement.  The more times I read it, the more astounding it becomes.

She is talking to Adventists here, and she says that many—now we do not know how many, just many—they will not realize what is going on until the plagues begin to fall.  You read it.  I did not bring my Early Writings with me and I do not want to take five minutes to read it.  It is most of a page where she goes into a long description of these people.

Now, my friend, can you think how horrible it would be to not realize what is going on in the spiritual world until the plagues begin to fall, and then wake up?  You see, when the plagues begin to fall, probation has already closed, so either you are saved or you are unsaved and there is no more probation.  Either you are saved already or you are not going to be saved at all.

So, I want to appeal to you, there is so much instruction that we all need, and I want to say this as kindly as I can, but I hope that you will get the point.  No matter what preachers you call in to preach at a campmeeting or at special convocations, the preachers actually cannot teach you everything you need to know.  You need to be doing some reading for yourself.

Do you know what happens when people do not study what the Lord has given to them?  Isaiah wrote about this.  I will just read you this short text.  It says, “Alas [or woe] to the ones calling evil good and good evil; who put darkness for light and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”  Isaiah 5:20.  Now how in the world do people get that mixed up?  Well, it is because they do not read the books.  And that is predicted over and over again to be a great problem among the professed people of God right at the end.

I have another reference, which says the very same thing in Testimonies, vol. 5, 211.  It is talking about the period just before the close of probation when God’s people are being sealed and about people who are not reading and studying and do not know what is going on.  That was the trouble with the Jews.

I want to go over several points very quickly.

We have already talked about the importance of reading and studying the books.  God’s people, just before the close of probation, are going to be in a very testing, trying time.  Everywhere I go I find that God’s people today are in various kinds of trouble.  There is a reason for that.  It is in trials and in troubles that we prepare for heaven.

Do you remember the apostle Paul said that we must, through much tribulation, enter into the kingdom of God?  And concerning our Lord and Master Himself in Hebrews 5:8, the apostle Paul writes, “though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.”  We are in this period right now, when God’s people are being tested.  They are going through conflict.  They are going through trials, because, as you can read in Hebrews 12 or in Titus 2, God has a purpose to purify a people and His people cannot be purified without testing, without trials, without some suffering. 

We are also living in a period of time, I do not fully understand what I am going to say to you now, but I know that it is so, because I can read it in the Spirit of Prophecy.  You can read it in your Bible in Isaiah 28:21 and in that text it talks about God doing a strange work.

When I was a boy growing up in the Adventist Church, I was always taught that God doing His strange work was when He was going to burn up the wicked.  And I am not contradicting that.  But I want you to read what Ellen White says about when God is going to do a strange work, because I believe that we are seeing this strange work right now.  This is one of the reasons why so many of God’s professed people are so perplexed and they come and they say, What is going on?  I cannot comprehend what is going on.

Oh, here is what is going on.  “The patience of God has an object, but you are defeating it.  He is allowing a state of things to come that you would fain see counteracted by and by, but it will be too late.  [I personally believe that we are already in the time when it is too late, but I am not a prophet. I am just reading to you what a prophet wrote.]  Who knows whether God will not give you up to the deceptions you love.  Who knows but that the preachers who are faithful, firm, and true may be the last who shall offer the gospel of peace to our unthankful churches.  It may be that the destroyers are already training under the hand of Satan and only wait the departure of a few more standard-bearers to take their places, and with the voice of the false prophet cry, ‘Peace, peace’ when the Lord hath not spoken peace.  [That is an allusion, by the way, to Jeremiah 6.]  I seldom weep, but now I find my eyes blinded with tears; they are falling upon my paper as I write.  It may be that erelong all prophesyings among us will be at an end.  [Has that happened?  That has happened!]  And the voice which has stirred the people may no longer disturb their carnal slumbers.  [In other words, they are allowed to sleep on.] When God shall work His strange work on the earth, when holy hands bear the ark no longer, woe will be upon the people.  Oh, that thou hadst known, even thou, in this thy day, the things that belong to thy peace.”  Testimonies, vol. 5, 77.

Friends, we are living in this time.  We are living in the times when prophesyings are not present.  There is no living prophet any more; just like in the days before Samuel.  We are living in the time that she predicted.  She said, When the time comes that “holy hands bear the ark no longer, woe will be upon the people.”  That is why we are in the trouble that we are in.

Now that is an allusion to the experience that the children of Israel had in the days of Eli.  Eli had two sons; you can read about it in the Bible.  They were very wicked sons, but they were of the priesthood and they thought that if they took the ark out to battle, that they would for sure win.  So they did it.  They took the ark to the battle.  Did they win the battle?  No, they did not.

I do not know if you have thought through the implications of that story or not, but I have people say to me, Well, the church is going through.  Well, just wait a minute.  The church did not go through that day, let me tell you.  About 30,000 men were killed and the ark was captured by the Philistines.  They did not even have the ark with the law of God in it any more, the Philistines had it.

Why?  Because the people bearing the ark were not holy people.  You see, inside that ark there was a law and the people carrying the ark were not obedient to that law.  They were disobedient to it, yet they thought that the Lord was going to work a miracle for them because they had it.  It is actually a form of idolatry, or like heathenism.  I am not saying anything against any organization, any church or any person.

We need to think things through.  Let me state it in very plain language in a different way.  The Adventist message will not take you through to the end if you are not sanctified by it.  That does not mean that there was anything wrong with the ark.  That does not mean that there was anything wrong with the Ten Commandments.  The problem was that the people who were bearing the ark were not in harmony with the law that was inside the ark, so what could the ark do for them?

Oh, friend, what can the Adventist message do for you if you are not sanctified by it?  Well, it is just like it was in the days of Eli.  One of their big problems then was sensuality.  Ellen White, in writing in Testimonies, vol. 5, 78, about the church just before the end, says it is going to be a time of terrible sensual sins.  I do not want to dwell on this.  I hate to even talk about it.

Did you know that Ellen White wrote, that even in those days that the sins of the Sodomites were among us.  Did you know that she said that?  And the message—nothing is wrong with the message—but the message will not take you through to the end and protect you if your hands are not pure and holy.  You have to have clean hands and a pure heart.

And, friend, no matter what is going on in your heart, or no matter how dirty your hands are, Jesus has the ability to clean you up if you are willing.  But there is not going to be anybody who is not an overcomer who goes through the pearly gates.  That includes all the preachers.  But it does not just include preachers, it includes everybody else.  Do you know that God is going to have a people who are pure and true?  He is!  He has already decided it.  It is in the Bible!  Read Titus 2:11–14.  He says He is going to purify to Himself a people.  God has already decided.  He is going to have a people who are pure and true. 

Well, somebody says, Pastor John, does it not say that the wheat and the tares are going to grow together?  Yes, but it says that they are going to be separated at the end.  Is that not what the parable says?  And we believe that we are living in the time of the end.

How is it all going to separate out?  How is the church going to be purified?  God has decided that He is going to have a people who are pure and true.  Do you know that there is coming a time—now I am not the one to do it, God and the angels are going to do it, not me!  But there is coming a time when every single tare will be taken out of the church.  Are you aware of that?

There is coming a time!   We should never rest and be complacent and say, Well, the wheat and the tares are going to grow together.  Listen, friend, if you and I are tares, the Lord is going to see to it that we are taken out.  How is this going to happen?  Well, here is how it is going to happen.  See if you recognize that we are going through any of this right now.

She says, “But the days of purification of the church are hastening on apace.  God will have a people pure and true.  In the mighty sifting soon to take place we shall be better able to measure the strength of Israel.  The signs reveal that the time is near when the Lord will manifest that His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor.”  Ibid. 80.  That is an allusion to the preaching of John the Baptist in Matthew 3:12.  The days are fast approaching….”

Now we are going to go over about six points quickly as we close.  “The days are fast approaching when there will be great perplexity and confusion.”  Ibid. 80.  Do you see any perplexity or confusion in Adventism today?  I told you last night that I considered myself to be one of the most privileged of mankind, because I had the privilege of being born into a Seventh-day Adventist family.  Both my father and my mother were Seventh-day Adventists before I was born.  So I have gone to a Seventh-day Adventist Church ever since I can remember.

And I can tell you that when I was growing up, we did not have the perplexity and confusion in Adventism that we have today.  Now there were some problems.  I remember one time, when I was a boy, we were attending a church dinner.  The men of the church were standing around, talking.  Since I was a boy, I was just standing eavesdropping to what the men were saying, like boys do.  They were talking about a terrible thing that had happened.

This was in the Pacific Northwest.  A terrible thing had happened in that Conference, not in our local church.  All the time that I was growing up this never happened once in our local church.  But they were talking about a terrible thing that happened in the Conference; some other local church.  Do you know what that terrible thing that happened in this conference was?  There was a man in the conference who had divorced his wife.  He was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and so they were talking about how the Church had to deal with this. 

So there were a few problems when I was growing up, but not one hundredth part, I do not think, of what we have today.  Great perplexity and confusion.

Why is the perplexity and confusion?  This is being allowed for a reason.  Listen, “Satan clothed in angel robes, will deceive, if possible, the very elect.”  Ibid.  Now what does it mean when it says, Satan clothed in angel robes?  That means that Adventists are going to be told that they are receiving a message from heaven.  It is going to look like we are receiving marvelous new light from heaven.  But if you check the writings out, you will find out that it is not the right thing.  Now I will leave you to try to figure out whether there is any of that going on and how much.

But look at the next one.  It says, “There will be gods many and lords many.”  Ibid.  Now what does that mean?  Well, first of all, what is a god?  Well, the Ten Commandments say, “You shall not have any other Gods before me.”  A god is somebody who has ultimate authority.  In fact, a god is even above the law.  That is why only somebody who was God could pay the price for the breaking of the law.

Everyone else is underneath it, but God is not underneath it.  Jesus is not underneath it.  There has been no yoke laid upon Him, He is above law.  God could tell Abraham to go and sacrifice his son.  None of us could tell Abraham that.  Even an angel would not have the authority to tell Abraham that, except at God’s command.  A God is somebody with ultimate authority.  And it says here that there are going to be many gods and many lords.

And then this very interesting sentence; just a short one.  “Every wind of doctrine will be blowing.”  Ibid. 

I am not a prophet, but I think it is all right if a preacher recognizes something when he sees it and hears it, and I believe we are living in the days when every doctrine is blowing right now.  I do not think that is future any more, I think it is happening right now.  It is happening all over.  It is happening in home churches; happening in Conference churches and it is happening all over the world.

When I was in Europe recently, I came back and I told my staff,  “Every problem that we are facing here in the United States, I saw every single one when I was over there.”  Every problem that we are facing, all kinds of problems with doctrines, I saw every one that we are facing when I was in Europe, they are facing the same ones.  “Every wind of doctrine is blowing.”

Well, what is all this building up to?  All this perplexity, this confusion, this gods many and lords many and Satan coming into the church clothed in angel robes to deceive the very elect, to what is all this leading?

Well, here is the answer.  “The time is not far distant when the test will come to every soul.”  Ibid. 81.  My friend, when it says that the test comes to every soul, it is coming to every soul in the world, but it is coming to Seventh-day Adventists, I believe, first.  And what is the test?  Well, you know what the test is.  You have read Revelation 14, the test is that  “The mark of the beast will be urged upon us.”  Friend, it is coming.  It is coming.  That will be a surprise, because we will be surprised that it came so soon.  She says that the test is coming and what is the test?  The test is that the mark of the beast will be urged upon us.  Read Revelation 14:9-12.  It talks about this mark.

That is the Third Angel’s Message, talking about the mark of the beast.  Read Revelation 13:14–17.  It talks about the two-horned beast enforcing the mark of the beast on pain of death, and that you will not be able to buy or sell and eventually there will be a death decree if you do not accept it.  The test is coming.

Do you know that the God we serve knows how to do thorough work?  And by the time this test is over, every tare will be out of the church.  The church will be a lot different then, because, you see, there will be multitudes of people coming in and there will be multitudes of people going out.  Here is the way she describes it.

“Those who have step by step yielded to worldly demands and conformed to worldly customs will not find it a hard matter to yield to the powers that be, rather than subject themselves to derision, insult, threatened imprisonment, and death.  The contest is between the Commandments of God and the commandments of men.”  Ibid.  That is what the contest is over. 

I have said many times, there are only two kinds of religion in the world.  There are not hundreds of kinds of religion in the world; there are only two.  All religion is based on one of two things.  All religion is based either on the Word of God and the commandments of God, or it is based on the word of man and the commandments of men.  That is what the contest is over. 

Why is God allowing you to go through the tests and trials you are going through?  I find that everywhere I go, God’s children are getting tested and tried like never before.  Why is God allowing you to go through this?  So that you are going to be ready for a big test coming up.  The big test is coming, and it will not be a test that you can fail a few times and then take over.  It will not be like that.

So God is allowing you to go through some tests and trials, some trouble and some perplexity and be involved in things that involve confusion.  You will be saying, Lord, I cannot believe what I am seeing.  I cannot believe what I am hearing.  God is getting you ready for a test.  He has told us what the test is.  It is an amazing thing.  God can tell you in advance what the test is, what the questions are and what the answers are.

This test is a one-question test and you can answer it with yes or no.  You know what the question is, you know what the test is in advance.  You know everything, and all you have to do is say yes or no and that will determine, friend, your eternal destiny. 

Are you ready for the test?  That is what we are going through now.  God is preparing a people for this test.

Here is what is going to happen in this time.  “The gold will be separated from the dross in the church.”  Ibid.  She goes on to describe this.  Now, friends, you and I, we need to do everything that we are supposed to do.  I want us to make an introductory statement on this so that nobody gets the wrong idea. 

We do have an obligation.  You read Christ’s Object Lessons, the chapter on the tares.  We have an obligation, as church members, to not allow open sin in the church.  We have that obligation.  People who are living in open sin are to be disfellowshipped.  But, friend, even when we do that, you and I cannot purify the church.  Purifying the church has to do with what is going on in the heart, things that we cannot even read.

But God knows it and He said, I am going to purify the church and when I get done, it is going to be just the pure and the true.  I want to ask you this question in closing.  When the only people left among God’s professed people are the pure and the true, will you still be part of it?  Will I be part of it?  I have dealt with this question on my knees, and I have said, Lord, I need a miracle in my life.  I want perfect purity.  I want perfect holiness.  I want perfect victory over any temptation that the devil can send my way.  That is what I want, but, Lord, only You can make it happen.  I am determined to cooperate, but Lord, I want you to work a miracle in my life.  Because friend, read Psalm 24, the only people going through the gates, are people who have clean hands and a pure heart.  That is all.  Nobody else is going in.  Nobody! 

It does not matter what you have done, even if you have been an evangelist, even if you have baptized thousands of people.  I have worked with evangelists who have baptized thousands of people, but you still are not going in.  The apostle Paul said, I keep my body under subjection lest what?  Lest I be reprobate or cast away.

Do you know what that word reprobate means?  It means somebody who has been rejected.  And, friend, I do not want to be rejected at the end, and you do not either!  That is the reason you are here.  Before we dismiss our worship service this morning, while we are thinking about something that is very important and very, very serious, I think we ought to pray.  I think we ought to pray that the Lord will give us clean hands and a pure heart that will involve the application of the blood and also involve the application of the Holy Spirit to our hearts.

It is the Spirit, Ellen White says, that makes the heart pure.  We have to be forgiven.  We have to be washed.  We also have to be purified by the Spirit.  We have to be changed, otherwise, one of these days we are going to have a test come and we are not going to make it.  People who do not have clean hands and a pure heart will not pass the test.  It is guaranteed!  Because, Ellen White says, you will not be able to pass the test unless you are standing in the power of God.

That is the only way you will be able to stand.  That means that I will never be able to make it—except as the power of God is revealed in my life.  Remember Hophni and Phinehas.  The ark will not give you the victory if you are not sanctified by the truth.  Just knowing the truth will not take you to the end, oh no!

Do you want to have clean hands?  You know what that means?  That means that what you do is in harmony with the law of God.  Do you want to have a pure heart?  You know what that means.  That means that your thoughts and your feelings are in harmony with the law of God.  As I have studied this subject, I have recognized that I have to have a miracle in my life, because the law of God means that I must love God with all my heart, all my soul, and all my mind, and my neighbor as myself.

The more I have studied that, the more I have recognized that is not the way I am.  So I have gone to the Lord and said, Lord, I need a miracle in my life.  I need a new heart.  I need a new spirit.  Do you want to have a new heart and a new spirit?  A purified heart and clean hands?  If you do, before we dismiss, I want to invite you to pray with me.  I believe that prayer can bring an answer that will give us a new heart and completely change our lives.