Pentecost 10/3/33/120

Dear Friends,

Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, is finally here. At 9 a.m. on the First Day of the week, exactly 50 days from the time and day that we kept the Wave Sheaf Offering, we commence the service for Pentecost.

This message was the substance of the message for the last Pentecost of 2009. It is useful that we go over this to see what has happened and to deal with the developments that have continued at an ever increasing and an accelerating rate. There are now incredibly more churches and groups and people than were here last Pentecost and the Coordinators are asked to make sure that the papers listed herein are available to the brethren, at least in sermon form.  In the last fifteen months God has wrought a miracle in the Church of God the like of which we have never seen previously. We have added to the substance of the message and now updated it to more adequately reflect our growing circumstances. God is now consolidating all the Sabbath-keeping Churches of God in the Last Days under one banner within CCG. He is taking the brethren and putting them together for the Last Days and the great trial that lies before us.  We are all being judged as sheep against sheep and sheep against goats in accordance with Ezekiel chapter 34.

This Feast represents the Wheat harvest, which is symbolic of the harvest of the elect of the First Resurrection. This is our feast and it is representative of our calling. It is also an offering Feast and one of the three times each year where offerings are to be made. There are a number of papers surrounding this feast and coordinators are to appraise their members of the details.

Ruth (No. 27)
The Leaven of Pentecost (No. 65)
The Ascents of Moses (No. 70)
The Old and the New Leaven (No. 106a)
Pentecost at Sinai (No. 115)
The Holy Spirit (No. 117)
The Omer Count to Pentecost (No. 173)
The Golden Calf (No. 222)
God's Feasts as they relate to the Creation (No. 227)

This year at this Pentecost we are all even more aware of the extraordinary activities of the Holy Spirit. Over the fifteen months since Abib 32/120 or 2009, our Father, Eloah, the One True God has added perhaps hundreds of thousands to our body. They are still being interviewed and inducted and we still have no real idea of the sheer magnitude of what God has done and is doing or how long it will continue. We are now in over 40 nations and growing daily.

It will be many months before the secretaries are able to sort it all out and there appears to be no sign of the growth slowing down. In fact, it seems to be increasing exponentially. It seemed to be doing that last Pentecost as we said. We did not realise that it would continue to grow exponentially and it is getting bigger and faster and our people have not stopped for fifteen months.

Our web access continues to grow and consolidate in paper downloads per week. The web site measurement at Quantcast.com records only html, as we have explained, which is the lesser of the forms: ftp, audio and html. It always peaks in May and has done so since the web started in January 1996. We have approximately doubled each year from peak to peak. That has never been the practice with our people, however. That sequence has now changed dramatically.
As you are all aware we do not number Israel and we regard it as a sin. David lost 70,000 for committing that sin and so did the WCG at its demise in 1995. They lost 70,000 of their baptized membership over a very short period. They actually had lost two thirds of their baptized membership or some 200,000 over an extended period since 1965 or so; however, the 70,000 went in a very short time. They simply went home. A number of those are now being restored to us.

By 1995 the WCG had split into multiple fragments all squabbling over the tithe-paying sheep and not taking the opportunity to correct one iota of their erroneous doctrine. They were theologically incoherent and remained so, attacking one another over administration. We have watched the libel and defamation go on now unabated for years. The Church of God (Seventh day) did the same in 1995 and by 1999 they were declared Protestants. The Seventh Day Baptists in the US also declared Trinitarianism and the SDAs did the same in 1978. They lost people overseas in droves and they are now coming to CCG.

The One True God deals with all things and brings matters to fruition in His own time through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Not one sheep given by God to Christ will be lost. Christ said so. He lost no one when he was on earth and he will lose none, ever. We have waited patiently for years for God to act. Sometimes we thought it appeared that He was about to act but they were merely attempts by the adversary to disrupt us. Always the attacks worked to consolidate and protect us.

God decided to act as He always does, not by might nor by power, but by His Spirit.

Over the last few years He made us aware of what had been done in the Churches of God around the world. From Pentecost 2008 God started to put His sheep back together but in areas that were poor and scattered. The brethren had been scattered by stupidity and sin in all of the offshoots. Those errors were particularly evident in Africa – in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and in Zambia and Malawi and Zimbabwe and Mozambique and many other nations. The damage was done by false doctrine, usually Trinitarianism and the doing away with the Sabbaths. The SDAs kept the Sabbath but corrupted themselves with Ellen G. White’s false prophecy and doctrines. All that is now being swept away.

Some of the churches had been scattered by the baptism and appointment of polygamist ministers. These practices occurred in three of the major offshoots. Another church came to be called the “Church of Prostitutes” by the brethren because they gave women to men and men to women as they joined the church. That church does not even allow divorce and remarriage in its doctrines in the US. The church became a standing joke, as did they all. God would not leave them in that way and nor would He allow the brethren to be destroyed. He chose to act in His own good time and restored the brethren and used them as a nucleus to call untold thousands into the Church of God, and He used weakness and poverty to do it. We are aware of the details and we are satisfied that most of the called brethren in those areas are now in CCG and are being added to daily.

God turned the inherent racism of the Church of God in the 20th century on its head and used the weak to confound the mighty.

From this Pentecost, the Churches of God will continue to expand and be developed. CCG is now the largest church of all the Churches of God in the twenty-first century already. It appears to be the largest of the Churches of God in their history and is now the second largest and most important Sabbath-keeping church in the world and growing daily.  We neither know nor care what our numbers are but we know that we are in the hundreds of thousands and we are reaching areas of this planet that have not heard the Gospel of the Kingdom of God for a thousand years or more. We have little strength and we have few funds, but God is using us mightily.

The reason we were kept within very strict financial limitations is so that not one minister of the Churches of God could say that they could not have done what we have done, given their financial resources and people. They were given fourteen years or two Sabbath cycles to do that. They did not do that, nor did they give their talent to assist those who were doing so.

The time is now complete. God has now started to act and He is now calling people in Africa and Asia and throughout the world.

The tide is turning and God is shattering the Churches of God and combining them in CCG in vast numbers. Some national churches that had been corrupted with the Trinitarian doctrines of the US WCG have repented and are joining CCG in their entirety. So also the Seventh Day Baptist Unions are repenting and joining CCG. So too the Churches of God (Seventh Day) are identifying our doctrines all over Africa and in Asia and joining CCG as are the WCG offshoots. Cameroon as another National WCG church has also asked to join us in addition to COG from Myanmar.

God is using CCG to consolidate the Church of God as per Ezekiel 34. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again: but God did. 

We have now organised churches in Asia in NE India in Tripura, Assam, Mizoram and Meghalaya extending into Manipur and down into Bangladesh and into Myanmar down to Yangon. We have a significant presence in Asia now from Pakistan to the Philippines. We are in the Middle East and North Africa and our presence in Africa is now massive. Our presence is being felt everywhere and each nation is inducting churches in droves. This week we received a report of another 41 churches inducted in the Congo DR in Ituri Province alone and there are still hundreds to go in other areas.

Three conferences were organised last week in Uganda for the officers and families to discuss development. They were 350, 800 and 400 persons respectively. In the conference at Ssembabule where the 800 were assembled two Ugandan parliamentarians asked to be invited to the seminar.

In Kenya we were asked by the Council of Churches to provide several thousand signatures to the minister of the government department to revise a proposed referendum to the Kenyan Constitution.

We are now organising churches from South Africa through Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana all the way through Africa.

God has given us just as much as we need and no more. The Developed nations have played a massive role in helping get things organised, but now the Developing nations are getting so well organised they are helping each other both inter-tribally and internationally. It is a new spirit of cooperation among brethren all over the world. There is neither Jew nor Greek. All are working together.

The Sabbath Church of Ethiopia asked to join us on the New Moon. They were associated with the SDAs but could not continue with the erroneous doctrines and asked to be admitted to CCG. They said CCG doctrines were perfect and the Sabbath-keepers of Ethiopia are eager to distribute the doctrines all over Ethiopia. They are well spread throughout Ethiopia.  They have kept the Sabbath and food laws all their lives and they confirmed that Ethiopia has kept the food laws and the Sabbath for three thousand years and the church there for two thousand years. They are eager to do the work of God. That was the centre of the Abyssinian church that spread the faith to China under bishop Mueses of the fifth century. We are now restoring the Abyssinian Church of God to what it was 1500 years ago. See the paper General Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122).

We are all sinners and I the most miserable of all, perhaps. However, we are not to remain that way and we are to overcome. Let none think of themselves as better than another and let them boast in Christ and pray for one another.

Work diligently in the faith. Hopefully we are able to complete the written work now underway. Also we have much to do in all forms of the media. There is so much to do and so much to teach to so many people. Please pray that we are given the resources to do the job properly.

Have a great Feast and use these two days to develop your bonds with each other and to assist each other to learn. Do not go to the Feast empty handed, as God will hold anyone who does accountable. The new ones are to pay attention to what they are taught and learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. Some are brand new to the faith and are just coming to grips with the Sabbath issue.

Now you brethren will understand why we have been given such grounding and preparation time. Rejoice in all that you have been given to do. Our meat is to do the will of Him who sent us and to finish His work. Our task is to prepare for the Witnesses and the Messiah and the First Resurrection. Do not fail. The Second Resurrection is a poor second to those that have been called to the glory of God.