I want to begin this afternoon by reading a statement from the Spirit of Prophecy, from The Messenger to the Remnant Church. If you have attended many meetings that have been held by self-supporting workers or the historic Adventist movement, the revival and reformation movement in Adventism, this statement will be very familiar to you. It has been read many times. It was first written in The Review and Herald, February 18, 1890, and was reprinted in Selected Messages, vol. 1, 406. This is what it says: "We want to understand the time in which we live. We do not half understand it. We do not half take it in. My heart trembles in me when I think of what a foe we have to meet and how poorly we are prepared to meet him. The trials of the children of Israel, and their attitude just before the first coming of Christ, have been presented before me again and again to illustrate the position of the people of God in their experience before the second coming of Christ--how the enemy sought every occasion to take control of the minds of the Jews, and today he is seeking to blind the minds of God's servants."

I want to ask you a question or two about that statement. She said that the devil was seeking to take control of the minds of the Jews. Did the devil have any success? Did most of the people know that the devil had any success?

The devil was so successful, my friends, that while speaking about the chosen people of God and their leaders, Ellen White says in the book, The Desire of Ages, 36, that they had become the representatives of Satan. You might have to read it three times to believe that it is there. But it is there. It says it. She says that their experience then has been presented before me again and again to illustrate the position of the people of God and their experience before the Second Coming of Christ. This is important enough that it was presented to Ellen White again and again.

I want to come back to that statement and analyze it a little bit more, but first I want to interject something else for you to think about. Just about any time that I am in California preaching, and this has happened to me many times now, somebody comes up to me and says, "In 1987, I went to hear your brother Marshall preach in Lodi, California, and I was surprised to hear that he was promoting the idea of starting home churches.

Now it has been eleven years since 1987. What has happened? Was that a mistake? Or is it even truer now than it was then? That is something you need to think about in the context of what we are going to study.

Let us go back now to the statement that we studied from The Review and Herald, republished in Selected Messages, vol. 1, 406. We want to understand the time in which we live, but we do not. She says we do not half understand it. Then she says "the trials of the Children of Israel, and their attitude just before the first coming of Christ, have been presented before me again and again to illustrate the position of the people of God and their experience before the Second Coming."

Now I want to ask you a question. Have you thought through what that statement has to mean? Have you thought that through? Few people have done some thinking on that statement. What happened to them is a type of what would happen again.

Then, I want to come back to the second point that I mentioned. That was that my brother was encouraging people to start home churches in 1987. Of course, any church, whether it is in a home or whether it is in a prison, needs to be organized, and it is organized for service. (See Education, 268.) You know, by the way, that Ellen White says in Upward Look, 315, that you can have a church in prison. There might be a lot of us having churches in prison before the end. There was an Adventist pastor in Cuba that I was reading about who was in prison for over twenty years and they had a church in prison. It is organized for service. The church is to be the light of the world. Read the chapter in Testimonies, vol. 5, where she talks about the church as the light of the world and she says that the warnings which worldly conformity has silenced will have to be given with the severest opposition from the enemies of our faith.

We will have to do the work that the Lord has committed to our hands. In regard to home churches, let me refer you also to the text in Proverbs 26:2 where it says that "the curse causeless shall not come." That is a text that I have thought about many, many times when I have seen terrible things develop, not just in the world, but among God's professed people.

I looked at these awful developments. One of the awful developments is that out of our educational system we are not receiving an army of workers to finish the Three Angels' Messages. We are not receiving an army of workers to finish God's work from our educational system. Now remember the text, "The curse causeless will not come." I can remember, that I myself was a faculty member of a Seventh-day Adventist College when I started to hear strange new philosophy.

When I grew up, I was taught in my home. I was taught in school that a true Christian education was a missionary training. That is what it was. Were you taught that? That is what I was taught, and that comes directly from the writings of Ellen White. A Christian education, true education, is a missionary training. That is the purpose of a Christian education. But I began to hear strange new philosophy that the purpose of education was so that you could make more money, so you could get along better in the world, and I thought, "Where does this come from?"

Elder Spear has reminded you, over and over again, that we are losing the majority of our young people. Why are we losing most of our young people? That is not my main subject this afternoon, and I do not propose to get into a long description of that, but I will give you three quick reasons and every one of these reasons is important:

1. The first reason that we are losing our young people is that they do not learn the principles of the Three Angels' Messages and the truth that has been committed to this people, at home. That is the first reason. That might be the most important reason of all.

2. The second reason that we are losing most of our young people is that they do not learn the principles of the Three Angels' Messages or the truth that God has committed to His people, in church.

3. The third reason that we are losing the majority of our young people is that they do not learn the Three Angels' Messages or the truth that God has given His people, in school.

Now you know that when you play baseball, you just get three strikes and then you are out. That is what happens to a lot of our young people. They have not learned it at home, they have not learned it at church, they have not learned it at school. Then their parents cannot figure out what has happened to the young people when they just go out into the world. "The curse causeless shall not come."

Now, friend of mine, if you have children, I hope that you, your wife or your husband will sit down and think through these three reasons very carefully. If you want your children to be in the kingdom of heaven and not burn in the fires of the last days, you need to look through all three of these reasons. You need to ask yourself, "Am I willing to take a chance on my child losing eternal life because he does not learn the truth at home, in church or in school?"

Friends, it is time to decide that we are going to give our children the best chance to learn about eternal life and how to have it on all three levels: in the home, in the church and in the school. Incidentally, they should learn it two ways. The least effective way is if they simply learn it by precept. That is the way to teach it to them and still have them reject it and not accept it. The more effective way is to have them learn it by example.

But the most effective way is to have them learn by both precept and example. That is what made the teaching of Jesus so powerful, because when people looked at Jesus, they saw that His life was in harmony with what He said. If you want to save your children, friend, you must not only teach them the truth, but also when they look at you, they have to see that your life is in harmony with what you are saying.

Let us go back to the first point we started with, where we read from Selected Messages, vol. 1, 406 about how "the trials of the Children of Israel, and their attitude just before the first coming of Christ, have been presented before me again and again to illustrate the position of the people of God and their experience before the second coming of Christ."

As we analyze this statement, it becomes apparent that we could learn a great deal by studying the experiences of the Jews at the time of the first advent. Do you believe that we could learn a great deal from that? We could learn a great deal because that is a type of what we are going to go through just before the Second Advent. The Lord presented that to Ellen White again and again.

I want to review a few things with you concerning the condition and the attitude of the Jewish people just before the first coming of Christ. Now let us just think this through for a little bit. What happened to them? They had a very powerful group of people, a very powerful group of leaders, among the Jewish people of that time, who were wealthy, who were highly educated, and whose counsel was accepted as the voice of God.

These people claimed to be the leaders, the "thought leaders" of the people of God and they had control of their church organization. Now they did not believe all of the inspired writings, but they claimed that they believed the most important parts. In other words, they did not have confidence in the Spirit of Prophecy. Ellen White said that they were skeptics, actually materialists, but they were in control of the chosen people, they were in control of the professed church in Jesus' day.

Remember that they were skeptics. They did not believe the historic message that God had given to the Children of Israel. Today, we call them the Sadducees. Now these people had been guilty of removing some of the primary landmarks that God had given to His people, some of the primary things that made them different from the world that they had removed.

These people were very highly educated and they had received their education in Greek schools. One of the leading places to get this education was in Alexandria, Egypt. These people had removed some of the main pillars and landmark doctrines that God had given to His people. But they were still in control. They were what we would call the liberal wing of the Adventist Church at that time. They were an Adventist Church. They were looking forward to the first advent of Christ. So they were Adventists. They were even Seventh-day Adventists, because they kept the Sabbath.

The people that were in charge and in control of their church organization were people who were liberal in their thinking, and I mean that in the modern sense, not in the old fashioned sense. They had gone away from the historic doctrines that God had given to His people. An interesting thing happened, though; the majority of the people did not go along with them. The majority of the people did not go along with them.

I suppose if you had been a self-supporting worker such as John the Baptist, you might have thought that one of the most dangerous developments among God's people was that this group had the controlling power. They had the controlling political power; and connections, not only with the leadership, the priesthood in Jerusalem, but they had connections with the Romans. Many people think that today.

Many people think that those who have removed the doctrines concerning the sanctuary, the investigative judgment, the necessity of overcoming sin, and other landmark doctrines that have made Adventists what they are, including the divine authority of the Spirit of Prophecy and all of those things that have happened in the liberal wing of Adventism, many people believe that is the greatest danger that there is and that is what we need to spend our time attacking and trying to overcome.

Now it is true that when Jesus came, He did oppose the teachings of the Sadducees. But as dangerous as all of that was, the removing of the doctrines, this unbelief, this lack of confidence in the Spirit of Prophecy, changing the landmark doctrines, and all of those things, as dangerous as all of that was, that was not the most dangerous thing around.

There was something in those days that was even more dangerous than that, and that is what I want to spend my time studying with you this afternoon.

Ellen White says that our greatest danger is self-deception and worldly conformity so that sin will not appear sinful. In those days there was a danger that was insidious among the people of God, and almost none of God's professed, chosen people recognized this danger. Yet it was more dangerous than the Sadducees; it was the Pharisees.

Even Christ's disciples did not figure out this danger until after the crucifixion. That is how insidious this thing was. Now what was so dangerous about the Pharisees? If you will read the story of Jesus, you will find that He spends much more time attacking Pharisaism than He does Sadduceeism, although He does attack the Sadducees on occasion. But He spent much more time dealing with the problems of the Pharisees.

What is Pharisaism anyway? Well, I have done a little study on this. I found out that Ellen White says that in the Christian world today, Pharisaism is not extinct! Well, that is interesting. So it is still here. She says that the disciples were not wholly free from Pharisaism and she makes even more blanket statements than this. She says that Pharisaism is the spirit of human nature and it is manifested in all ages among the human family.

In Jesus' day this was far more dangerous, far more insidious, and deceived far more people than did the problem with the Sadducees. When I see among us, as so often happens, that we try to focus and concentrate our energies on attacking the errors of Sadduceeism, that is the liberalism, I say to myself, "Are we missing the point?" Sadduceeism is dangerous and we should be opposed to it, but that is not the biggest danger.

Now, concerning the Pharisaism of the Pharisees, Im Matthew 23, 2, 3, Jesus said, "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works; for they say, and do not." Notice, their theology was not that bad because they were teaching the law of Moses. They were reading the Scriptures.

Jesus said, "What they tell you to do, go ahead and do it, because they are sitting in Moses' seat. They are teaching the law of Moses, they are teaching the Scriptures. But do not do what they do." For lack of time I am going to read just a few descriptions from the pen of Ellen White of what Pharisaism is like.

1. It is a form of Godliness without the power. She makes that statement multiple times.

2. It results in making men gods. She says that it results in a course of precision that is much church machinery.

3. And, in the 1901 Library Speech, she said, God's work "is to advance without asking permission or support from those who have taken to themselves a kingly power."

Pharisaism results in kingly power in the church and that kingly power is manifested in an attempt to control all the money coming in from church members. That is the way it was manifested then, and that is the way it is manifested now according to Ellen White. She makes that distinct statement in the Spalding and McGann Collection, 174.

She says, "For years, a degree of Pharisaism has been springing up amongst us…a Spirit which desires to rule…but very little of the Spirit which leads men to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn of Him…Human inventions and human plans are eclipsing sacred things and excluding divine instruction..…They rule without a vestige of the authority of God… and others are becoming leavened by this wrong influence." The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, 1558, 1559.

Remember what Jesus said to His disciples in Matthew 16. He said, "Beware, [that is watch out,] for the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees." We hear much today about properly constituted church authority, but I want to tell you, I just read to you from an inspired statement that Pharisees do not have any divine authority for what they are doing.

The essence of Pharisaism is described in Hosea 10. Ellen White says so. It is the professed service to God when a person is really working for himself. It results in a critical, unforgiving spirit, devoid of love. It results in resistance of the truth and in evil surmising. Ellen White says "This evil surmising is a repast from the enemy, a banquet of the devil's own preparing."

She says there is far more Pharisaism among our people than they suppose. "It is a spirit of wanting to be first,…A spirit of criticism toward others,…envy, jealousy, suspicion, faultfinding, and false witnessing.…A spirit of retaliation,…disaffection and disunion.… among those who claim to be firm believers in the truth. Such do not practice the spirit of the truth. The leaven of their evil surmisings permeates the company where it exists." Review and Herald, December 18, 1888.

If you try to summarize it, it results in a person who makes a profession of that which is true, yet their life is not in harmony with their profession. So when Jesus came, there came to be a life and death fight. War, between Jesus and the spirit of Pharisaism which was the predominate spirit in the church among the professed people of God at that time.

Now, I want to read to you what Jesus said to them about their problem in Matthew 9. Here Jesus is talking about the Pharisees specifically, as you can see in verse 14. And Jesus says (in verses 16, 17) "No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wine skins, and both are preserved."

Notice, you cannot put the new wine into the old wineskins. It will not work. You cannot unite the teachings of Christ with Pharisaism. It will not work. A lot of people have tried it. Ellen White wrote concerning this in The Desire of Ages, 278. She says, "Nor could the principles of Christ's teaching be united with the forms of Pharisaism. Christ was not to close up the breach that had been made by the teachings of John. He would make more distinct the separation between the old and the new.…The effort to unite the teachings of Jesus with the established religion would be vain. The vital truth of God, like fermenting wine, would burst the old, decaying bottles of the Pharisaical tradition."

Now, are we going through an experience similar to what they went through, or not? Did Ellen White prophesy correctly when she said that their experience then would be typical of the experience that we would go through just before the end? And when Jesus came, we just read that what He taught could not be united with the forms of Pharisaism. And let me remind you, friends, Pharisaism is more dangerous than Sadduceeism. It is more dangerous than the liberal wing of the church. It is more insidious. It is more deceptive. It is closer to the truth, outwardly it has the truth. They profess the truth. But you see, Pharisaism is the desire to rule and manifest kingly power and to control things. They had made a god out of their church organization. And so the words of Christ, Ellen White says, were an arraignment of the whole system of Pharisaism. He declared that by placing their requirements about the divine principles; the rabbis were setting themselves above God.

Are we living just before the Second Coming of Christ? In the 1888 Materials, 332, Ellen White wrote, "Only in Christ Jesus will the church near the period of Christ's coming be able to stand. She is required of her Redeemer to advance in piety, and to have increased zeal, understanding better as she nears the end that her own high calling is of God in Christ Jesus."

Some people think that as we approach the end, we can say, "Oh, well, it is all right. Just let the tares grow. The tares and the wheat have to just grow together until the harvest. Just let it go. It is going to happen until Jesus comes back." Now that is not in harmony with what I just read. Mrs. White said that as we approach the end, that we are required by our Redeemer (she is talking to the church; she mentions it by name), to advance in piety and to have increased zeal, understanding better as she nears the end, that her own high calling is of God in Christ Jesus.

But the devil's plan is to leaven the camp with so many tares and so much Pharisaism that it will choke out the wheat. And the success that he is having is almost unbelievable. We have parents coming to us from all over the country telling us the saddest stories about what has happened to their children.

They ask, "What has happened to my children? My children are all out in the world. They grew up in an Adventist home, they went to Adventist church, they went to an Adventist school, and now they are gone." Remember, friend, "the curse causeless does not come." Ellen White wrote in the 1888 Materials, starting on page 356, I will read to you a few sentences. "Pharisaism (is)…leavening the camp.…Seventh-day Adventist Churches were affected;…but the Lord had given me a message, and with pen and voice I would work until the leaven was expelled."

You notice what Ellen White said? She said, "I am not going to quit talking, I am not going to quit writing, I am going to keep working until this pharisaic leaven is expelled." Now let me ask you a question just to stimulate your thinking a little bit. How are you going to expel the leaven if the leaven is in control of a church, and they can control the vote? Have you ever thought that one through?

If you have not, you had better start. Notice: "The Lord had given me a message and with pen and voice I would work until this leaven was expelled and a new leaven was introduced, which was the grace of Christ. I was confirmed in all I had stated in Minneapolis, that a reformation must go through the churches."

Friends, we cannot go to heaven the way we are. Something has to change. There has to be a reformation in our lives and in our churches, if we are going to heaven. She says, "Reforms must be made, for spiritual weakness and blindness were upon the people who had been blessed with great light.…As reformers they had come out of the denominational churches, but they now act a part similar to that which the churches acted. We hoped that there would not be the necessity of another coming out."

Have you ever thought through the implication of that sentence? It has direct bearing on the home church movement that is springing up all over the world. And some of us that should be leaders in Adventism are so blind. The Lord is taking the work into His own hands and I see people without education, training or knowledge, starting churches all over the world. I am excited to see it. I know that God is at work.

And, friend, if you and I do not do something to save our children and save the people around us, the Lord will use somebody else; but we might lose our soul. She says, "We hoped there would not be the necessity of another coming out. While we will endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit (that is a quotation from Ephesians 4 about unity) in the bounds of peace, we will not with pen or voice cease to protest against bigotry."

Now what is this bigotry? It is Pharisaical control, human control over the church. Human beings are never to control the church of God. Read that in The Desire of Ages, 414, 415. She says the same thing in The Acts of the Apostles. She says that "many will close their ears to the message God sends them and open their ears to deception and delusion.…Our brethren separate themselves from God, by reason of the homage they give to human beings." "There was much talk, but very little of the mind of Christ. . . . The enemy often employed them in his service.…Under the influence of the great deceiver they would take a position to oppose the most sacred things of God." Manuscript Releases, vol. 16, 219. "There must be no rings of men to unite together in unholy fellowship to strengthen each other in ways and ideas that are opposed to the spirit of God.…Unless they were changed in spirit and confessed their mistakes, they would go into greater deceptions." Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, 359, 360. "As long as you maintain this spirit of Pharisaism, God's Spirit will not, cannot work with you." Ibid, 410.

Now this is of great interest to me, friends, because one of the things that I understand is that preaching and teaching and all religious service is utterly vain, useless, worthless, hopeless, and helpless, unless the Spirit of God is working.

I want to be ready for the latter rain, do you? But Mrs. White says to the leaders of God's work, as long as you maintain the spirit of Pharisaism, God's Spirit will not, cannot work with you because you do not feel your utter dependence upon Him. She says that when you humble your hearts before God, you will see that there is danger of Pharisaism in every church.

That includes home churches. There is danger of Pharisaism, she says, in every church. So, as the disciples lived and worked with Jesus, as they listened to His teaching, they began to understand, although it took them a long time, that the thing that really counted in religion was to have a faith, a love that works in your heart and purifies your mind and your soul. They began to understand that was what it was all about.

The more they understood that principle, the more they found out that the soul that lives this way, that has a faith that works by love and purifies the soul; this person could find no place for union with the old religion of the Pharisees. The disciples found out--by the way, it took them many years after Pentecost before they fully learned this lesson, probably decades--but they found out that an effort to unite the teachings of Jesus with the established religion would have shown the utter mistake of such a course.

As Ellen White says, "The new doctrines, like fermenting wine, would have burst the old decaying bottles of the Pharisaical tradition. To the Pharisees the teaching of Jesus was new in almost every respect. It was unrecognized, unacknowledged as truth. They professed to have great respect for the religion of Able, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Moses. But [get this sentence] although Christ taught the original truths that had been committed to the fathers, His teaching was new to the Pharisees."

And that is the exact condition we are in today. Historic Adventists are not teaching something new. We are accused of it all the time, but we are not teaching something new. We are teaching the old, original doctrines that were committed to God's people. The reason the people think it is new and it is new wine, is because their doctrines have been perverted.

We are teaching the original truths that were given to Adventism. Just like Jesus was teaching the original truths that were given to the fathers, and yet to the Jews of His time and the Pharisees of His time, they said, "I never heard anything like this." She says that the Pharisees thought that almost everything that Jesus was teaching was new. Well, it was new to them, but it was actually the old original theories.

So, when you are in a situation like this, the devil comes to you with a very skillful, sly temptation and the leaders in Adventism bought this in Minneapolis in 1888. And people say, "If we just hold to the good old theories, then we will be in a good safe position." Do you realize that is what they said in 1888? They said, "We will hold on to the good old theories." The result of that was that they had no part in the message that God was sending to His people right then. Then they said, "We will be safe."

In closing, I want to read to you this statement. It has to do with both of the points we have been looking at. It has to do both with the question of what is the purpose of the home church movement, why is it? And it also has to do with what we have been studying about the Jews in the time of Christ and how their experience then is a type of our experience now. And do not ever forget it. If you forget everything else we have studied, do not ever forget this: Pharisaism is much more dangerous than Sadduceeism. Do not forget that, because it is much more deceptive and much more insidious and it does not have all the heresies around it. It looks good. Do not ever forget that.

Do not think that we do not have Pharisaism. I have read you statement after statement where Ellen White says we do have it among us, more than we know. Pharisaism was what led the Jews to reject Christ, even more than Sadduceeism. It was because of that that Jesus said, "I cannot pour the wine into these bottles. I have to find some new bottles."

This is something for you to think through very carefully. It has directly to do with what we have been studying. It has to do with the home church movement worldwide. Here is what it says: "Now, those who have had years in this same experience, know not God nor Jesus Christ Whom He has sent, and should such go forth as representatives of Jesus Christ? These men will never give the right mold to other minds; they have not grown up to the full stature of men and women in Christ. They simply have the name of Christians but are not fitted for the work of God, and never will be until they are born again, and learn the A.B.C. in true religion of Jesus Christ. There is a little hope in one direction.…"

Now parents, listen carefully. If you want to save your children, listen to the last part of this paragraph. "There is a little hope in one direction. Take the young men and women, and place them where they will come as little in contact with our churches as possible." I did not say that, I read that. Ellen White said that! She said "There is a little hope in one direction. Take the young men and women and place them where they will come as little in contact with our churches as possible, that the low grade of piety which is current in this day shall not leaven (Notice that word leaven? That was the Pharisees problem. Jesus said, 'Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees') shall not leaven their ideas of what it means to be a Christian." Manuscript Releases, vol.12, 333.

Oh, friend, are you going to save your children? Are you going to be saved yourself? You had better watch out because the devil is on your track. He wants to introduce some leaven into your experience and you will not even know what has happened. Remember, the person who is deceived does not know he is deceived.

When Jesus came, He had to find some new bottles. And I want to tell you that God is finding some new bottles today! I am amazed as I travel and I visit. I find that God is taking people who have been drug addicts, who have been involved in all kinds of crime, and He is showing them the gospel and they are accepting it. The Bible says, "Watch out that nobody takes your crown."

By the way, Ellen White gives us the promise that if we were willing to become new bottles, the Lord would put the new wine in. Do you want to be a new bottle? Do you want to say, Lord, I want to be really converted? I do not want to have a Pharisaical heart anymore, trying to control Your work, trying to dictate and trying to serve myself and having kingly power and trying to control the church, I am willing to do whatever You say. I am just willing to be one of the brethren.

Do you want that experience? Friend, we are going to have to have it if we are going to receive the latter rain, because the latter rain is not going to fall on people who still are afflicted with Pharisaism. Do not forget, it is far more dangerous than Sadduceeism. It is far more dangerous than the liberal element we have in the church today. It is so much more insidious. We have to get rid of it if we are going to receive the latter rain.

Do you want to save your children? Be sure that they hear the truth at home, where they go to church, and where they go to school. Let us kneel and pray before we go.