Roman Holiday

Lisa and I boarded a plane for Rome last Tuesday. I'd sent the book manuscript in on Monday, and had what may prove to be the last NET 11 Planning Committee meeting. Exausted, we went on a badly needed vacation thanks to frequent miles.

Vacation is actually not the right word, since I'm still answering key e-mails, making NET decisions, and will have some work to do that cannot wait. But it is as much of one as we've had in a long time.

Over the years, I've been to over 50 countries and just about every major city in the world, except Rome, curiously enough. My several trips to and through Italy never included the Eternal City, but I wanted to check this out before the prophecy meetings got going.

It is very hot here at this time, and there are kazillion tourists from all over the world. The closest thing I remember is the number of tourists at the Grand Canyon.

One thing really strikes the well-informed visitor about this city: the total unity between the pagan and the religious. You see it in the architecture, the historical details, the landscape. So many times a pagan site from imperial Rome was converted into a house of worship by a pope years later. The tour guides say it with certainty: When imperial Rome collapsed, the city was ruled by the popes until the start of the republic. Do you know when that is? The 19th century. It all coincides with the biblical view of the conflict between good and evil.

St. Peter's Basilica is something to behold. Inside is that famous sculpture of Peter which is probably the god Jupiter, and many other items of interest. Peter himself called this city Babylon (2 Pet 3:15). So, I'm taking mental as well as real notes of what I'm seeing; plus as many suitable pictures as I can.

This morning, Lisa and I traveled from our hotel to worship in the largest Italian church in Rome. It is the one at the Union office, and for those coming from America, it is striking to see how small it is. Maybe 75 people were worshiping there today, and the church was full. We have yet so much work to do!

We look forward to traveling along the Waldensian Valleys next.

So, where are we in terms of prayer needs?

1.  Pray for More NET Churches. We believe this will be a very good series, and wish more churches would take advantage of this opportunity. There is a lot of supporting material to conduct a successful meeting, and churches can use as much or as little of it as they wish. Let's pray that even though it's only a month away, more churches would choose to use this as part of their evangelistic initiative.

2.  Pray for the Promotion.  This includes the social media approaches we're engaging in, the handbills a number of churches will use, and the various other forms of advertising. Of course, the key piece of advertising will always be the personal invitation by a caring church member.

3.  Pray for Church Revival.  Oh, how much we need the churches to fall in love with Jesus! A key to that objective is the commitment and heart of the pastor him/herself. If the leadership is focused on Christ and His mission to the world, it'll be easier for the congregation to follow. So, please pray for the pastors involved in the NET series, and for the congregations to develop an earnest desire to reach out to others as Jesus has reached out to us.

4.  Pray for the Archaeology Meetings. Dr. Hasel and I are looking forward to these meetings starting Sept 14. We hope and pray that many may come to them, and that many guests may choose to come to the prophecy meetings because of their experience with Astonishing Discoveries in the Land of the Bible. A new website about it should be up any time now. This is a great mini-series to invite friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers.

5.  Pray for the Equipment. My personal computer may be on its last dregs, and that makes me think of the various bad things that can happen when equipment you rely on suddenly stops working the way you expect. We have a lot riding on this.

6.  Pray for the Broadcast on HOPE. We weren't able to convince 3ABN to carry this NET series, which was a personal disappointment for me. However, there is a good chance now that Hope will carry the series on Hope TV, not just on Hope Church Channel. This means that for the first time ever evangelistic meetings may be before a potentially large secular audience across the country. We need the guidance of the Holy Spirit for every word we say, every song we sing, and every Bible explanation we give. God must be in control of everything, for His glory!

7.  Pray for the NET Music. Due to a limited music budget, it has been more challenging to get well-known Adventist artists to give their time to the NET meetings. They want to do it but they live off their music ministries, and that's understandable. We have a lot of excellent local talent (after all Nashville is Music City USA), but some are untested when it comes to performing for live television. Pray Jesus will guide our music coordinator, Gale Murphy, to bring on those who'd most clearly honor God and be a blessing to those coming to the meetings.

8.  Pray for the Local Fundraising. Fund-raising has depended on me, and we haven't had but one chance to do this work in the Nashville area. We need to raise at least $45,000 to cover our basic budget. Play pray the Holy Spirit may convict men and women of good will to invest financially in the work of the Lord.

Thank you so much for your prayers on behalf of the prophecy book. The title of it is Decoding Bible Prophecy and will be published by Pacific Press. It will be made available to the churches at a very low price. Our plan is to give the book to everyone coming to the prophecy meetings at least six nights. It'll be our incentive for first-week attendance. We now plan to give the Andrews Study Bible to them after attending twelve nights.

Let us not grow weary in doing good. The Lord will sustain us. Thanks for much for your prayers!

"Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy,

and keep those things which are written in it;

for the time is near."

Revelation 1:3

Lord, I Give You My Heart

I'm listening to that song, "Lord, I give you my heart, I give you my soul..." It's Sabbath morning, and that is what I've done. That's all I really want to do. My sense is that this will soon come to an end, and I want all to be in the hands of Jesus.

The NET journey has been long and challenging. On Monday, we will likely have one of our last planning committee meetings. On Tuesday I leave for Rome. Once back, I'll be in the Northwest, after which the archaeology meetings begin (Sept 14). A week later is the Consecration Weekend with the Nashville churches and Prophecies Decoded starts.

We have done our best. We produced the extensive evangelistic/empowering DVD, wrote the detailed manual, offered training for Bible studies, small groups, youth evangelism. We developed ways to use the social media, and selected many resources for churches to use during the meetings. We edited archaeology and creation mini-series and created guidelines for home use. We have done fundraising. We have done all the accounting and distributing necessary. We encouraged revival and reformation in the churches, and wrote a book on the Holy Spirit to complement such focus. All this while teaching full loads and traveling 120,000 miles so far this year.

The book on prophetic interpretation (the actual title hasn't been decided yet) is almost finished. I wrote what I think will be the last chapter earlier this week, and have been doing some re-write and editing since. With the help of God, that will be finished tomorrow. Thanks for the many of you who have been praying.

What now? It's all in God's hands. Sometimes I think other institutions or organizations, and other speakers, are much better equipped to do what we are doing and will yet be doing for these NET meetings. But God has entrusted us that awesome responsibility this year. And all we can do is our best unto the Lord. He will do His part, which will make forget our best and forgive our worst.

1. Pray for the Prompt Publishing of the Book. Pacific Press will have to do an extraordinary effort to get this out in time for the churches to use. We've decided to make a change in our live site. Instead of giving the book on opening night, we will give it after they've attended six nights. Pray that the book will be a great blessing to people reading it, so they can get a better handle on how to study God's word, and why some of the things they've believed so far are not from the Lord. 
2. Pray for the Efficient Use of Social Media. We've had a couple of young adults working on this, and have put adds on Facebook, links to the website, the promo DVD on YouTube, etc. Oh, how I wish this, somehow, went viral. That it would stir the interest of many young people, especially, to call the 800 number, or go to the website and seek to register to attend a nearby church.
3. Pray for More Churches to Join. We have about 640 churches signed up (we thought we had more, but after an audit, we realized a number of duplications). While a very respectable number, how I wish we had 1,000 of them! It is still possible, but it would call for a miracle at this point. It is so much better for people to go to a church than even to someone else's home to watch Prophecies Decoded. We realize there will be perhaps thousands who will be watching this at home, by themselves. But the best opportunities to respond to the Spirit of God will be while people attend church.
4. Pray for the Churches Involved. At this point, pastors are getting anxious to be ready, to find all the volunteers needed to do this work well. Churches are sometimes stretched financially and lack people resources. Pray that they may have enough laborers to do the work, and enough financial resources to advertise and promote and resource guests well. Pray that the Spirit of God may be fully in control of their setting and bless each church abundantly. That they may find great joy and a bountiful harvest of souls.

Thank you for your faithfulness. It's been a great source of encouragement to know a number of you have been lifting me and the NET meetings before the Lord.

Lord, I give you my heart.

"Give me your heart, my son, and let your eyes delight in my ways."

Prov. 23:26

Four Critical Issues

The reason it's been so long since my last blog is that I have yet to come up for air. Yet the issues are so pressing right now I cannot afford not to communicate this with you. Please pass on this need for prayer far and wide to people of faith who believe in our mission.

My trip to Australia took 32 hrs each way, from door to door. Quite a trip, huh! For two years the Queensland Conference president had been trying to arrange for this, and the time to go was not working out. Finally, about eight months ago, we agreed on the early August dates because I knew I had to have been long finished with the book on prophecy. Boy, was I wrong.

Talking with one of my readers for this project, a writer and scholar of some note, I realized I should have asked him to ghost-write it or co-write it with me. Too late for that. This process has been a crucible for me. For months I've studied and read, but nothing was coming to the surface about the writing. Finally, two weeks ago, I began writing. I've been working on this 18 hrs a day, and am now, I believe, two chapters away from finishing it. The reason I cannot let up is we need this for the NET meetings, and Pacific Press needs it yesterday!

The meetings overseas were greatly blessed, as all of them seem to be when I speak on the Holy Spirit. But I returned home Thursday night, and hours later I was headed to Sacramento, for the ASI meeting. The Sabbath afternoon interview went well, except for the fact I wasn't aware 3ABN needed the promo DVD and graphics hours ahead of time. I pray the NET announcement may get some of those hard working lay people to sign on for the meetings.

In an hour, Lisa and I will drive to Nashville to begin tonight Decoding Revelation an in-depth study of Revelation's seals, trumpets, and plagues I'll be largely skipping for the big meeting. Our plan was to leave two days ago, but that had to change because of the book. Two chapters were written in the meantime.

Due to all this work, I've not been able to revise the presentations for this weekend. I'll be doing some of that today when Lisa is driving. The bad news is that we've only got two AIM registrations for this series. Normally, we should have gotten 50. Something is definitely not working, and only prayer will turn the tide. These meetings are meant for the church-going evangelical interested in prophecy. Most of them would come over to the main series once they attended this one.

In addition, this poor response problem will be worsened by the fact a miscalculation was made allocating the number of handbills to send for the Nashville site, so that only nearly half of them will be sent over the original number I had planned. This is a real problem because the conference, stretched as they are already financially, couldn't come up with the money for more.

So, I beg you to trouble the Lord on the following issues:

1.  DECODING REVELATION MEETINGS. That begins tonight in Nashville, and ends, after five presentations, on Saturday night. Pray God's Spirit will do extraordinary things to bring people to this meeting, because the handbills, apparently, have failed. We don't want to just use these meetings for various ministry teams to practice for the big one, we want to attract people to meet Jesus in the Revelation. Pray also for me, for I am exhausted, and will need to spend time revising the presentations as we go. Our plan is to tape these and make them available later as a set from NADEI.

2.  LOCAL FUNDRAISING. The NET 11 budget is split into the national and the local one. Both budgets require I raise a total of over $200,000. We've not been able to make any progress on the local fundraising yet, but we have lined up four critical visits for Thursday and Friday. Please pray that the Lord may bring conviction to these folk to contribute generously to the cause. If we had had more money available, we could have covered all of Nashville with the handbills. We need help in this regard.

3.  BOOK ON PROPHECY. This goes without saying. I've been sending various chapters to top-notched readers--scholars, writers, evangelists--quality people who've been giving me excellent feedback. But that's just it, it'll mean more time to make the needed revisions. I wasn't kidding when I said PPPA needed this yesterday. The pressure to finish this NOW is tremendous. I know God is near and He is blessing. More miracles are needed for this. The books needs to be simple to read, yet we're dealing with complex prophetic material. It needs to have enough of a "bite" to draw guests' interest and yet I cannot say too much before first winning their confidence with the live meetings. It is a needed book, but one difficult to pull off.

4.  HANDBILL ADVERTISING. The results so far, have been very disappointing. Much lower than anyone expected. We don't know if demonic push back is strong on this issue or if there is something unusual going on that we have yet to figure out. We simply cannot have this low a response for the upcoming archaeology and the main prophecy meetings. That will be a disaster. We have other advertising planned in addition to handbills--a blimp, highway billboards--but response to the handbills will need to drastically improve. Pray the Lord leads us to understand what we should do differently, if anything.

Thanks for your faithful praying. To the outside, this must sound like a crazy life. But we're doing, frankly, the best we know how, while trusting the Lord and counting on Him all the way. For that we need major prayer support. Yours. Thanks for that.

"I love the Lord because He has heard my voice and my supplications.

Because He has inclined His ear to me,

Therefore I will call upon Him as long as I live."

Psalm 116:1, 2