A Message from President Ted Wilson

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain:

for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

 Deuteronomy 5:11

Hmmm...what's in a name?

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Names of IndividualsGod has made it clear that His own name is not to be taken lightly as one of the Ten Commandments is a decree to reverence the name of the Lord. Sacred history also reveals God’s interest in the names of certain other individuals. For example …

• Abraham, the father of the faithful, and his wife, Sarah, were once merely Abram and Sarai before God renamed them.
• After his night of physical and spiritual wrestling, the Lord changed “Jacob” to “Israel,” a name clearly associated with the name of God.
• At his conversion on the road to Damascus, “Saul,” the enemy of Christ, becomes “Paul,” the emissary for Christ.
• Daniel, though given the name Belteshazzar by his Babylonian captors, refused to refer to himself by that name because his Hebrew name, meaning “God is my judge,” was a standing rebuke to the heathenism in which he was immersed.
• Then, of course, there was the naming of John the Baptist … this powerful forerunner of Christ.

CreationRemember your name, Seventh-day Adventist! It is so distinctive. The “seventh-day” refers to God’s power in creating this earth in six literal, consecutive, contiguous, 24-hour days and capping it with a memorial of that creation, the seventh-day Sabbath. This reminds us that we are a direct creation of God and not some chance anomaly of some impersonal evolutionary process.
SabbathAs Seventh-day Adventists living on the very brink of eternity we are not to minimize our “seventh-day” distinctiveness, we are to accentuate it, giving the trumpet a certain sound. We are told in the same book [Selected Messages, vol. 2] page 370, that, “The Lord has permitted the enemy of truth to make a determined effort against the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. He designs by this means to awaken a decided interest in that question which is a test for the last days. This will open the way for the third angel’s message to be proclaimed with power.”
Second ComingIn the same way that “Seventh-day” reminds us of where we came from, as Artur [Stele] explained to us this morning, “Adventist” tells us where we are going. We are waiting for the imminent return of our Lord Jesus Christ, and look forward to it as the culmination of all of earth’s history. The literal return of Christ,
Remember Your Name!Let us search our hearts today and remember our name … I make a special appeal to those who are discouraged, frustrated, despondent, or perhaps distant from the church or the Lord. Remember Your Name!

Written by Pastor Ted Wilson, President of the General Conference of the SDA Church