First-Time Visitor Knows All

By Eliane Hosokawa Imayuki

Brazilian immigrant Sandra Sato drove straight to a Seventh-day Adventist church in Kakegawa, Japan, to thank God for her newly acquired driver’s license.

Image © Pacific Press

She had promised God that if she got her license, the first place she would go with the car would be the church.

That evening, Sandra joyfully told members of the Tokai Christian Center church that God had answered her prayers to obtain a driver’s license.

“And I’m also ready for baptism,” she announced.

The church members were surprised. They had never seen Sandra until that evening.

Their astonishment grew as Sandra turned to various members and addressed them by name.

“I know many of you,” she said. “I have been watching live church broadcasts on social media.”

Then she told her story. Sandra and her husband, a former Adventist, worked with thousands of other Brazilian immigrants in factories in central Japan.

While discussing religion, her husband had declared that if she ever wanted to worship, he would only accept her attending an Adventist church. She had belonged to another Christian denomination. Intrigued by her husband’s former faith, Sandra had watched live broadcasts from the Tokai Christian Center church. With her husband’s help, she had completed Bible studies provided by Hope Channel’s affiliate in Brazil. Then she had promised God that she would begin to attend church in person if she got her driver’s license.

After a review of the Bible with the Tokai Christian Center pastor, Sandra was baptized. No family members attended the baptism, not even her husband. But her faith has remained strong. At her initiative, a small Bible study group has been established in another city, Iwata, for people seeking to know Christ. God’s word is spreading in Japan.

Read next week about how God is using the small group in Iwata to bless other Brazilian immigrants. Sandra became familiar with the Tokai Christian Center church after watching its online services. Part of this quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering will go to a project to help many Japanese people, especially young people, learn about Jesus through the Internet. Thank you for planning a generous offering.

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org

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Further Thought:

“How great the condescension of God and His compassion for His erring creatures in thus placing the beautiful rainbow in the clouds as a token of His covenant with men! The Lord declares that when He looks upon the bow, He will remember His covenant. This does not imply that He would ever forget; but He speaks to us in our own language, that we may better understand Him.

Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com

It was God’s purpose that as the children of after generations should ask the meaning of the glorious arch which spans the heavens, their parents should repeat the story of the Flood, and tell them that the Most High had bended the bow and placed it in the clouds as an assurance that the waters should never again overflow the earth. Thus from generation to generation it would testify of divine love to man and would strengthen his confidence in God.” — Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, pages 106, 107.

Since the founding of Christianity, there has never been a church that has partaken of the wealth and creature comforts that the church in some countries of the world enjoys today. The question is, At what cost? Such affluence surely influences our spirituality — and not for the good either. How could it? Since when have wealth and material abundance fostered the Christian virtues of self-denial and self-sacrifice? In most cases, the opposite occurs: the more people have, the more self-sufficient they become, and the less they tend to depend upon God. Wealth and prosperity, however nice, do come with many dangerous spiritual traps.

Discussion Questions:

<–Thursday

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Read Deuteronomy 5:15; Deuteronomy 6:12; Deuteronomy 15:15; Deuteronomy 16:3, Deuteronomy 16:12; and Deuteronomy 24:18, Deuteronomy 24:22. What specifically did the Lord want them never to forget, and why?

As we have seen, all through the Old Testament, the Lord constantly brought the minds of the people back to the Exodus, their miraculous deliverance, by God, from Egypt. To this day, thousands of years later, practicing Jews keep the Passover celebration, a memorial to what the Lord has done for them.

Image © Kim Justinen at Goodsalt.com

“It will come to pass when you come to the land which the LORD will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep this service. And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households’” (Exodus 12:25-27).

For the church today, the Passover is a symbol of the deliverance we have been offered in Christ: “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Read Ephesians 2:8-13. What are these Gentile believers told to remember? How does it parallel what the Hebrews in Deuteronomy were told to remember, as well?

Paul wanted these people to remember what God had done for them in Christ, what He had saved them from, and what they now had because of God’s grace to them. As with the children of Israel, it wasn’t anything in and of themselves that commended them to God. Instead, it was only God’s grace, given to them, even though they were “strangers from the covenants of promise,” that made them who they were in Christ Jesus.

Whether Jews in the wilderness, Christians in Ephesus, or Seventh-day Adventists anywhere in the world, how crucial it is for us always to remember, and not forget, what God has done for us in Christ. No wonder, then, that we have these words: “It would be well for us to spend a thoughtful hour each day in contemplation of the life of Christ. We should take it point by point, and let the imagination grasp each scene, especially the closing ones. As we thus dwell upon His great sacrifice for us, our confidence in Him will be more constant, our love will be quickened, and we shall be more deeply imbued with His spirit.” — Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 83.

<–Wednesday Friday–>

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One former church leader, who had worked at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists^® for 34 years, told a story about how, many years earlier, he and his wife, having landed at an airport, had lost a piece of luggage. “Right there,” he said, “by the luggage conveyer belt and in public, we got on our knees and prayed, asking the Lord for the return of our lost luggage.” He then said that, many years later, the same thing happened: they arrived at the airport, but a piece of luggage didn’t. He told what happened next. “Don’t worry,” he had said to his wife, “insurance will cover it.”

With this story in mind, read Deuteronomy 8:7-18. What warning is the Lord giving to His people here, and what should it mean for us today, as well?

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Look at what their being faithful to the Lord would bring them. Not only would they possess a wonderful and rich land, “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” (Deuteronomy 8:9), but they will be exceedingly blessed in that land: flocks and herds and gold and silver and beautiful houses. That is, they will be given all the material comforts that this life affords.

But then, what? They would face the danger that always attends wealth and physical prosperity, that of forgetting that it was only the Lord “who gives you power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18).

Maybe not at first, but as the years go by and they have all the material comforts that they need, they will forget their past, forget how the Lord had led them through “that great and terrible wilderness” (Deuteronomy 1:19), and, indeed, think that it was their own smartness and talents that enabled them to be so successful.

This is precisely what the Lord was warning them against doing (and unfortunately, especially as one reads the later prophets, this is exactly what happened to them).

Thus, amid this prosperity, Moses tells them that to remember that it was the Lord alone who had done this for them and not to be deceived by the material blessings that He had given them. Centuries later, Jesus Himself warned, in the parable of the sower, about “the deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19).

<–Tuesday Thursday–>

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Read Deuteronomy 4:9, Deuteronomy 4:23. What is the Lord telling them to do here, and why is this admonition so important for the nation?

Two verbs dominate the opening of both these verses: “take heed” and “forget.” What the Lord is saying to them is: take heed so that you don’t forget. That is, don’t you forget what the Lord has done for you nor the covenant that He had made with you.

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The verb “take heed,” smr (which is also used in a different form in Deuteronomy 4:9, translated “keep yourself”), occurs all through the Old Testament, and it means to “keep,” “to watch,” “to preserve,” or “to guard.” Interestingly enough, the first time it appears in Scripture is even before sin, when the Lord told Adam to “keep” the garden that He had given to him (Genesis 2:15).

Now, though, the Lord tells the people, each one individually (the verb is in the singular), to guard themselves, lest they forget. This is not “forget” so much in the sense of memory loss (though over time and in new generations that could come) but more in the sense of being lax about their covenant obligations. That is, they were to be mindful about who they were and what that meant in terms of how they were to live before God, before other Hebrews, before the strangers among them, and before the nations around them.

Read again Deuteronomy 4:9 (see also Deuteronomy 6:7 and Deuteronomy 11:19), but focus on the last part, about teaching them to their children and grandchildren. What would that have to do with helping them not to forget?

It’s not a coincidence that right after Moses tells them not to forget, not to let these things “depart from your heart,” he tells them to teach these things to the next generation and to the generation after. Not only did their children need to hear about these things, but perhaps even more important, by telling and retelling the stories of what God had done for them, the people would not forget what those things were. Hence, what better way to preserve knowledge of what the Lord had done for His chosen people?

<–Monday Wednesday–>

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