An Appeal to our Adventist Friends

As further evidence, consider this illustration from H.M.S. Richards in his 1958 book “Feed My Sheep.”

“Some time ago it was my privilege to bring to Christ, as revealed in the gospel and taught by the true Advent message, a very fine woman and her daughter. They were both wonderful Christian women and knew Christ as their Saviour in the church to which they had formerly belonged. They saw and accepted all the great doctrines of this truth which we call “the message.” They kept the Sabbath and joined the church. The daughter became the wife of one of our workers; she is now. For twenty years the mother was a member of our church, and faithful in attendance. But unfortunately in that particular church there was a series of pastors who preached less and less of gospel truth, less and less of Bible truth. Sometimes they did not take one text from Scripture, but composed their whole sermon from quotations from the spirit of prophecy. Good as that is, it is still not the Scripture. One man preached there for over six months without using one Bible text, according to the testimony of some of his congregation.

After nearly twenty years in the truth, this woman shocked the pastor by saying, ‘I am leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church and going back to the [blank] Church,’ which happened to be the church of her girlhood.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why are you doing this terrible thing?’

‘I’m doing it because I want to hear about Jesus. I’m hungry to hear the gospel, I’m hungry to hear the Bible preached.’

‘Oh, but don’t you know those people don’t have the Sabbath, the Spirit of prophecy, and all these other wonderful truths?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. I’m not giving up the Sabbath. I’m not giving up these wonderful truths. But they have something you don’t have. They have the gospel, and they preach from the Bible. I’m so hungry to hear it, I’m going back.’

‘Oh,’ the pastor said, ‘I’ll give you some Bible studies.’

‘No, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what the Bible is. You have been here now for three or four years and I’ve never yet heard you give one Bible sermon. All you know is an old-covenant religion of do, do; don’t, don’t; touch not, taste not, handle not; you shall perish with the using. All you know is what these red books say. You read them to us all the time, but you haven’t given us a Bible text for at least six months. You don’t understand the Bible. You don’t know what the Bible is about. Don’t talk to me about the Bible.’

‘Don’t you know that this is the truth?’

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I know. I’m going to keep the Sabbath, but I’ve got to hear the gospel. Good-bye!’ (1958 edition, pg. 177-178).”

Clifford Goldstein, editor of the Sabbath School Quarterly, recently wrote an editorial for the Adventist Review that acknowledged the lack of gospel clarity within Adventism. In the process, he also refuted the idea that nobody leaves the Adventist church over doctrine. “Keep dreaming, folks. People leave us, all the time, over doctrine. We fool ourselves, consoling ourselves into believing otherwise.”

More importantly, Goldstein identifies the heart of the problem: “We have to place the gospel, salvation by faith in Christ alone, as the absolute center of all our beliefs. Though great progress has been made here, we still have a way to go. Christ our substitute, whose righteousness is credited to us by faith alone as our only hope of salvation, must permeate every doctrine. There’s a power in the gospel not found in the health message or in teaching about the scapegoat” (Adventist Review, 2006).

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