This sermon was preached during the opening session of Annual Council 2025 on Wednesday, October 8. Elements of oral style have been retained.—Editors.
My time with you this evening will be spent talking about why we are here. I don’t mean why we’re here at Annual Council—I assume you know that. I mean in a broader sense: Why did God go through the trouble of bringing about an entirely new movement—the Advent movement?
I feel that one of the main reasons I was born was to understand and share, to the best of my knowledge, why it is that the Seventh-day Adventist Church exists. That’s what we’re going to be talking about.
But we won’t get into the heart of that question until Sunday morning. Over the years I’ve found that the Lord does more with my meager offerings when I first take a few moments to talk about some preliminary things.
Passion
I want to talk to you about passion.
If you ask the average person here in the United States what comes to mind when they hear that word, they’d probably say “energy” or “enthusiasm.”
People often think of sports teams. I remember one of the worst nights of sleep I ever got while traveling for the Lord. It was during the World Cup. I’ve played maybe 10 games of soccer in my life, but I was speaking in another country for pastors’ meetings with a couple hundred other pastors, and they were all watching the match. I didn’t get a wink of sleep until 4:30 in the morning because the pastors were going ballistic—cheering and shouting and groaning.
People might look at that and say, “That’s passion.” I suppose it is, but if we’re talking about Christian passion, it’s something more.
Sometimes you can get so busy doing things for God that the passion just kind of seeps away in a sea of committee meetings.
Usually when Christians use the word “passion,” they think of Jesus. Not so much within Adventism, but in other Christian traditions, the phrase “the Passion of Christ” refers to the week leading up to His crucifixion during which Jesus displayed His passion. Why do we call it that? Because biblical passion means you are willing to suffer for it.
As a Christian, if you’re not willing to suffer for it, you’re not passionate about it. You might be interested in it. It might bring you some pleasure. But from a biblical perspective, if you are passionate about something, you are willing to suffer for it.
Jesus left the glories of heaven to come to this world, the bad neighborhood of the universe. He suffered in many ways, the ultimate suffering being on the cross. And He did it because He is passionate for us. He loves us with a passion. It is not a tepid love. It is not a turn-by-turn love. It is a passionate love.
So let me ask you something. Don’t answer out loud; just answer between you and the Lord. How passionate are you to see the people of the world know Jesus Christ?
And remember the definition of passion: you are willing to suffer for it. How passionate are you for the mission that God has given His church? How passionate are you to know Jesus yourself and to help Him be known in the context of the unique message and mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church?
My guess is that many of you are feeling pretty good. The Lord has blessed. Perhaps there are great things happening in your area of ministry, and you are feeling strong. At least some measure of the passion of Jesus Christ belongs to you, right?
But my guess is that there are also many who would answer differently. Sometimes, working for the Lord can be brutal. Sometimes God’s people can be brutal. It can drain the life out of you. You can get so busy doing things for God that the passion just seeps away in a sea of committee meetings.
If you are sitting here right now and finding that your passion is running low, sit back and relax for just a moment. Let’s take a brief look at the life of a passionate man.
Nehemiah’s Passion
Would you turn in your Bibles, please, to Nehemiah 1:1-3.
“The words of Nehemiah the son of Hachaliah.
“It came to pass in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the citadel, that Hanani one of my brethren came with men from Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped, who had survived the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, ‘The survivors who are left from the captivity in the province are there in great distress and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem is also broken down, and its gates are burned with fire.’ ”
I’m in a room full of scholars, so I won’t give you an extended contextual picture of what’s happening here. Suffice it to say this: after 70 years of captivity in Babylon, there’s been a regime change. The Medes and Persians are now in power. There have been three decrees allowing the Jews to return and rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. This passage takes place during the time of that third decree. Artaxerxes is on the throne, and those who have returned are having a very difficult time. The situation is chaotic and dangerous. There are groups around Jerusalem that do not want the city rebuilt, and they are actively working against it. The fact that the wall has not been rebuilt is a source of disgrace.
That may be hard for us to grasp today, since we no longer live in walled cities. But back then a city without walls was a city without safety. It was also a sign that your God had failed, that you had failed.
Add to that the simple fact that it was unsafe. If there’s a wall between you and the bad guys, it’s easier to sleep through the night. Day after day, week after week, month after month, they tried to make progress but kept running into obstacles. This took a supreme toll on God’s people—including Nehemiah, as we’ll see in a moment. But Nehemiah was a passionate follower of God.
Notice what he does first. Look at Nehemiah 1:4-11:
“So it was, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned for many days; I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven.
“And I said: ‘I pray, Lord God of heaven, O great and awesome God, You who keep Your covenant and mercy with those who love You and observe Your commandments, please let Your ear be attentive and Your eyes open, that You may hear the prayer of Your servant which I pray before You now, day and night, for the children of Israel Your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against You. Both my father’s house and I have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against You, and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, nor the ordinances which You commanded Your servant Moses. Remember, I pray, the word that You commanded Your servant Moses, saying, “If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations; but if you return to Me, and keep My commandments and do them, though some of you were cast out to the farthest part of the heavens, yet I will gather them from there, and bring them to the place which I have chosen as a dwelling for My name.” Now these are Your servants and Your people, whom You have redeemed by Your great power, and by Your strong hand. O Lord, I pray, please let Your ear be attentive to the prayer of Your servant, and to the prayer of Your servants who desire to fear Your name; and let Your servant prosper this day, I pray, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.’
“For I was the king’s cupbearer.”
What if we began to pray prayers like that?
What if we were to start praying these deeply transparent prayers of contrition—for ourselves and, to the best of our ability, for those we shepherd, for those we care for who have fallen short as we have? Prayers of such an audacious quality that only God would have the power to answer them with a yes.
You see, it turns out there are two truths about prayer and passion.
Passionate Prayer
Truth number one: Our level of passion for Christ is often most clearly revealed when we pray. Let that sink in. Our level of passion for Christ is often most clearly revealed when we pray. This doesn’t necessarily mean raising our voices or shouting. Most of the time it probably won’t. What it does mean is an unrelenting honesty.
That’s what passionate prayer looks like—an unrelenting honesty, an unrelenting look into the mirror of how we really are, an unrelenting desire for Christ to prevail, even and especially in the midst of our frailty.
In fact, let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine if your prayers for the past six months—public or private—were played end to end over the loudspeaker system in heaven for the angels to hear.
What would the angels do when they heard your six months’ worth of prayers? Would they rejoice at the passionate love for Christ that you convey? Would they fall asleep because of the suffocating predictability of your prayers? Would their stomachs turn because of the tepid Laodicean flavor radiating from your requests? Or would they rejoice that such a man, such a woman, has answered God’s call into ministry?
Because, you see, our passion for Jesus is often most honestly revealed when we pray.
And truth number two about passion and prayer: Honest prayer is often where passion is reborn and strengthened.
Surely this is part of why Nehemiah prays. It’s easy to look at people like Nehemiah and say, “Well, he was always a hero, right? Never a low point.” But if you read what it says, that’s clearly not true. He weeps and cries for days, and then he comes to this prayer that we have written down here.
He engages in this honest prayer so that, yes, he can plead his cause and the cause of Israel before his Creator God—but also to find more passion, more power, more strength. This is why he comes. Nehemiah comes looking to God to grant him success for the glory of God.
Ladies and gentlemen, if your passion for the unique message and mission of the church is running low, if your passion for Jesus is running low, then pray. When you least want to do so, pray.
Prayer without God-sized plans being put into action as a result is a miscarriage of righteousness.
This is the key to unlocking the frost that can so often hold our hearts. Find the time and the place, and pray honest prayers. You and I both know all too well that you can be efficient at doing God’s work and yet become so dry spiritually that, as Ellen White so eloquently put it, you are “a day’s journey” from Christ.
And that’s walking, friends. That’s walking.
I just want to encourage you. If that is you, if you find yourself sitting here and you’re a day’s journey from Jesus and your passion is low, take the time and pray. Pray honestly, asking for that passionate revival in your heart.
And again, what if we did this? What if we, as leaders in the church, did this regularly, making the time daily to be with Christ in prayer? What if we refused to attend a committee meeting until we had first attended a prayer meeting with Jesus? What if we spent less time pushing papers and more time pushing our petitions for revival and reformation before God? What if we worried less about what others might think of us and concerned ourselves far more with learning to think the thoughts of God in prayer? What if?
Well, I suspect that if we did that and made it a way of life, soon enough people—both inside and outside the Seventh-day Adventist Church—would take note. They would whisper to one another and say, “These men, these women, have been with Jesus.” And they would listen with new ears to whatever Jesus might say through us to them.
If your passion is lacking, then pray. Pray with passion. God will answer with passion, and change can begin.
Passionate Planning
And now notice, secondly, Nehemiah comes first and he prays passionately, receives more passion in return, and then he does something quite specific.
Nehemiah 2:1-9:
“And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, that I took the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had never been sad in his presence before. Therefore the king said to me, ‘Why is your face sad, since you are not sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart.’
“So I became dreadfully afraid, and said to the king, ‘May the king live forever! Why should my face not be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire?’
“Then the king said to me, ‘What do you request?’
“So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, ‘If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may rebuild it.’
“Then the king said to me (the queen also sitting beside him), ‘How long will your journey be? And when will you return?’ So it pleased the king to send me; and I set him a time.
“Furthermore I said to the king, ‘If it pleases the king, let letters be given to me for the governors of the region beyond the River, that they must permit me to pass through till I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he must give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel which pertains to the temple, for the city wall, and for the house that I will occupy.’ And the king granted them to me according to the good hand of my God upon me.
“Then I went to the governors in the region beyond the River, and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me.”
So says the cupbearer of the king. Ladies and gentlemen, what does a passionate follower of God do after passionately praying? Well, it’s easy. He or she passionately puts God-sized plans into action.
Now, please listen carefully here, because at first that sounds almost cliché or mundane. It is not. Passionate prayer is absolutely indispensable. We must have it. But prayer without God-sized plans being put into action as a result is a miscarriage of righteousness. It is empty spiritual calories. They slide down smooth, but they leave us slumped on the couch while the world perishes around us.
To me, one of the greatest tragedies that I’ve experienced in my 30 years of ministry so far is that when I meet with a pastor or a church leader somewhere in the world and they are celebrating something legitimate—maybe a baptism has taken place, maybe they’ve opened a soup kitchen, maybe they did a Bible study distribution activity and there were some receptive people—they celebrate that, and that’s exactly where they stop. They don’t realize that there are thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of people around them in their territory who still need to be reached, and they haven’t given a second thought to them. They have reduced their vision down to that which is manageable by them, and that is what they celebrate.
Ladies and gentlemen, the work will never be finished that way. And let’s be clear: those of us who are daily involved in administrative routines—you know who you are, sitting here with me—there are lots of things to do, meetings to attend, committees to run. It is all too true that we can get so concerned about controlling the complexities of our organization that we no longer take godly—and I want you to listen to the word here—risks, as Nehemiah did.
So let me just ask you again, in the quietness of your own mind: When was the last time you did something risky in your leadership for God? Notice I didn’t say something stupid. I didn’t say something reckless. Wisdom is not dispelled when risk comes into the room—at least not for a Christian. It shouldn’t be.
Instead, what Nehemiah does is use great wisdom. Did you see the list? He was ready to go. The king gave him an opening, and bam, bam, bam, bam, he goes right down the list. He gets construction materials. He walks out with an armed escort. Can you believe it? Every box has been checked. He was thinking about this in advance. He was wisely planning.
Was it a risk? Oh, yes, it was. The very fact that Jesus could say, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” shows that even God takes risks. Why do we make ourselves an exception?
Ladies and gentlemen, the sad truth is that sometimes we are too safe in the church. We need to be wise. We need to put the best minds around us to work and prayerfully seek the will of the Lord, and then make sure that when we make our plans for the next step in achieving the mission of the church, if it’s achievable only by us, we are wasting our time. It must have the God factor in it.
Every single good decision a Christian makes, in some sense, has them overdriving their headlights. It requires God to intervene if it’s going to be successful. So don’t be unwise. Be wise. And don’t be afraid when God opens doors to take God-ordained risks.
The Reward of Passion
Do you remember how the story of Nehemiah finishes? We could talk about it all evening. Nehemiah goes to Jerusalem, and in just over 50 days the wall is completed. It’s an incredible accomplishment. Translation? When we are passionate for God, wisely taking risks for His kingdom, great things will happen.
I leave you with a story. Many years ago, in the last millennium, when I was at the seminary getting my master’s degree, I played for a seminary softball team. I don’t remember our name, though I’m sure it was something theological. For those of you who don’t know, softball is like American baseball, which, I’ve been told, does not hold a candle to cricket. My apologies to those of you who appreciate cricket.
I was willing to suffer pain in my shoulder for a silly little trophy. But we stand to gain a crown that will never fade.
We played well enough that season to make it to the championship game. I’m not going to say which denomination we were playing against, but I will tell you, I don’t know what they were feeding those guys. They were big. These were some of the largest men I had ever seen gathered on one sports team. Their necks were huge. Their arms were like oak trees. During batting practice, when they tossed the ball up and hit it, the ball screamed for mercy: “Please don’t hit me again!” They were that good.
We were just seminarians. This was something we did in our spare time. We got to the seventh inning, which in that league was the last inning of the game. We were ahead by one point. If we could just get three more outs, we would be the champions—whatever that was worth.
They scored a run. The game was now tied. All it would take was one more run for them to win the season. One out. Two outs. Just one more to go.
Now, you need to picture this. At Andrews University the softball field had no fences. The only way to get a home run was to hit the ball so far that no one could get to it in time for a throw back to home plate. We had already seen these “sequoias” of men swing their bats, and we knew what they could do.
My friend Squeaky—so named because he wore a knee brace that squeaked when he ran—and I were in the outfield. I was in center; he was in center-left field. One of their biggest hitters came up to bat, and the pitch came to him. Those of you who’ve played softball know that moment. You can tell when it comes off the bat where it’s going to go. And this was an incredible hit. We were already way back, but it was very clear that we were not back far enough.
We both took off running. You’re not supposed to beat your friend to the ball—it’s an unspoken rule among men with fragile egos—but this was the championship, so all bets were off. I knew I could beat him, and I did. The ball landed just in front of me.
Now, what you’re supposed to do in that situation is pick up the ball and throw it halfway to the infield to what’s called the cutoff man. He catches it and throws it home to tag the runner. But I knew these guys were fast. By the time I picked up the ball, that batter would probably already be rounding third base. There was no time for the cutoff man.
So, I picked up the ball and threw it overhand as hard as I could. There was just one problem: a year earlier I had injured my shoulder playing flag football. I had damaged the cartilage in my right shoulder, and it had ended my days of throwing overhand. Every throw since then had been sidearm. But in that moment, I knew that a sidearm throw wasn’t going to make it to home plate in time.
So instinct took over. I thought, I think I can make it. I threw overhand with everything I had. There was a pop, pop, pop in my shoulder as I released the ball. I fell to the ground, and apparently, in sympathetic pain, Squeaky fell too.
The ball went flying. It soared over the cutoff man, over second base, over the pitcher’s mound. It bounced once in front of home plate. The catcher caught it and tagged the runner out. Game over.
When we are passionate about something, we can live to fight another day, and great victories can be won.
And if that’s true for a silly little softball game, how much truer is it for people who are dedicated to the cause of Jesus Christ? I was willing to suffer pain in my shoulder for a silly little trophy. But we stand to gain a crown that will never fade.
God took one Nehemiah, and look what happened: a city was transformed, and the city that bore God’s name was restored. What if there were a dozen more Nehemiahs? What if everyone in this room decided, “I want to be a Nehemiah as well”? What if everyone here said, “I will do whatever it takes to become a passionate follower of Jesus Christ. I will pray honestly. I will live for Christ. I will take wise and even risky steps so that the kingdom of God will advance”?
I’ll tell you what if. My sense is that if that ever happened, the work would be finished in short order, and we would go home.
May the Lord bless us with His passion and His strength and His love, that the work might be finished, and we can go home.
To read part 2 of this sermon series click here.
