Keep it Real
My homiletics professor encouraged us to “Keep it real!” When he first told me that a story came to my mind. A zealous elder was “teaching the Sanctuary Message” in Sabbath School. The church was discussing the Sanctuary becuause it was the study of the day in the Sabbath school lesson.
The elder wanted to make it simple so he created a drawing to supplement the lesson. The elder began talking about the geography of the wilderness tabernacle and from the beginning lost the people. He described the importance of the color of the curtains. He described the different pieces of furniture. He then asked the question, “Was the ark of the covenant God the Father’s throne or God the Son’s throne?” One sister in the audience had had enough. She yelled out “What does this have to do with my salvation?” The elder stumbled and then ignored the answer going right back to his discussion of the minutia of the geography of the Sanctuary.
The Sanctuary So-What!
I then fully realized why the Sanctuary is sat aside by many. It is the same reason why no one preaches on the liniage of Jesus Christ. (I have heard a very good sermon on this by Henry Wright, but it is the only one I have every heard that did not degenerate into a lecture.) Our teaching of the Sanctuary is limited by the fact that we either ignore it or we don’t answer the question of that Sister, What difference does this make? Am I better off for knowing this? Why even bring it up? No wonder it is only trotted out during Revlation Seminars when we are trying to prove that Adventism is true by resorting to a mathmatical calculation.
In the end like many of our doctrines, we have not passed the so-what test. Without passing the “so-what test”, a teaching is unprofitable and useless. When we preach Advnetism we must stop making it useless either by our disuse or by our faulty use of it.