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Boosters and protectants for melanin-rich skin.
Pornography seeps in the voids of silence and opacity.
Help yourself to spiritual SUCCESS with these biblical principles.
90 Years of Message
Ninety Years of Good, Black Art
What were you created to do? That’s what God is asking asking of you.
A better place for the misdirected shame, guilt, and blame for the symptom of obesity.
Sweet outcomes for a lifework of faith.
Media that takes you higher
William Barber, II on Conservative Theology
Voter Turnout
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
A Different Look at Faith
Faith Crisis and Faith Loading
The Judgment Comes to You
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© 2024 by the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists, 9705 Patuxent Woods Drive, Columbia, Maryland, 21046, U.S.A. Address editorial correspondence to MESSAGE MAGAZINE, 9705 Patuxent Woods Drive, Columbia, MD 21046-1565 U.S.A. All subscriptions are prepaid. If you did not order MESSAGE, it is being sent as a gift from a friend. You will not be billed. To subscribe, mail payment to MESSAGE, 1350 North Kings Road Nampa, ID 83687, U.S.A. or call 1-800-456-3991. Subscription price: one year, $19.95 U.S. currency; single copy, $4.00; overseas, add $10.00 per year for postage. Prices subject to change without notice. Periodicals Postage paid at Nampa, Idaho and additional offices. Vol. 92 No. 9 May/June. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to MESSAGE, 1350 North Kings Road Nampa, ID 83687, U.S.A. Printed in the U.S.A.
Unless otherwise noted, Bible texts in this issue are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Statements in this issue attributed by an author to other speakers/writers are included for the value of the individual statements only. No endorsement of those speakers’/writers’ other works or statements is intended or implied.
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— “Watch and Be Ready—Jesus is Coming,” by Charles E. Bradford, Message, September October, 1984
Phillip McGuire Wesley, jr.
Read
By Athena C. Shack
It has been nine years since Athena C. Shack published her first book, and it is still making a difference in people’s lives. The transparency of her story is a page-turner, however, the spiritual tools she gave along the way is life changing. Now, it’s an audiobook! This is a book that helps individuals learn how to navigate back to the land of the living after tragedy, trauma, or loss. Her book can be found on Amazon and Audible.
editorial
he rainbow flag, and Black Lives Matter sign, and cars with bumper stickers outside let me know this was a very liberal community of faith. That, and the members of a multi-generational, multi-racial choir with at least one trans person who sang their faces off on “The Stone That the Builder Rejected (became the cornerstone of a whole new world).”
This “Afternoon of Challenge and Hope” at the Immanuel Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut almost came to an abrupt halt when the special guest, The Reverend Dr. William Barber, II, declared pointedly, that he was, and is, a “theological conservative.”
Barber is the President and Senior Lecturer of the Repairers of the Breach, and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He is also a past president of the North Carolina NAACP, and the founding director of, and Professor in, the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. Those interests, and those affiliations, usually land one squarely in the land of liberals. Barber meant to challenge even more than the labels that day.
BY EDWARD WOODS
s we embark upon another presidential election, voter turnout continues to remain at stake. The American Presidency Project reports that voter turnout “refers to efforts to measure the extent of popular participation in elections.” It measures eligible voters, sex, race, party affiliation, age groups, religious affiliation, education attainment, income, etc.
In 2020, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that United States Voter Turnover ranked ninth in the world at 62% in an national election. When measuring the grouping of high-income countries, OECD noted that the U.S. was three points below their average of 65%. Some of the reasons for the low voter turnout rate include low registration rates, Voter ID requirements, polling-place accessibility, and voter apathy.
Many national organizations have organized and developed to combat the issues at the heart of low voter turnout. They include the Center for Voter Information, Fair Elections Center, Faiths United to Serve Movement, League of Women Voters, or We Are Voters. Yet, questions arise on the macro level challenging whether voting turnout is really at stake.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born in the 1,600-person town, but began her musical career in Chicago at age 6. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singing evangelist for the Church of God in Christ and nurtured Rosetta’s stage presence, guitar playing, and singing. The Black Church prepared her for national and international crowds of up to 20,000 people.
I’m sure that you’ve seen it – even if you didn’t know that you were seeing it when you saw it! Allow me to share a few of the passages where Hamas gets mentioned:
“And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth” (Genesis 6:13).
“O Lord, how long shall I cry, and You will not hear? Even cry out to You, ‘Violence,’ and You will not save?” (Habbakuk 1:2)
Each of those passages mentions “Hamas,” but you would only see it if you were looking at the passage in its original Hebrew language. In the above passages the word translated as “violence” comes from the Hebrew word, “hamas,” and though commonly interpreted as violence, it actually connotes any type of unjust violent and harmful behavior.
Now if you did do this, and send a note to the editor of Message and tell her that you did, OK?
As African Americans, God has blessed us with beauty and a variety of skin colors. The darker the color the better we are protected from the ultra violet (UV) radiation coming from the sun.
With this blessing however, comes a disadvantage. The darker the skin color, the less vitamin D is made and this deficiency can lead to health problems.
A 2017 study showed an overall increase in vitamin D deficiency and this is because doctors are evaluating vitamin D levels more. In my practice I have found that more than 95% of my African American patients suffer from vitamin D deficiency.
Sex came up during the young people’s rap sessions, however, sexuality rarely stood in a positive light in these discussions. Only married people did it, but we hardly ever heard from married people about the wonderful God-given blessing of the sexual act.
The silence on this is one major factor that has led to the boom of one of the largest industries that exists today pornography. In Peg Streep’s 2014 article in Psychology Today, she notes that in the United States alone, 40 million people visit porn sites regularly. My argument is that millions of people in this country feel the need to view pornography.
Life Design
How to Cultivate Your Spiritual Productivity
Join me on a short journey as we explore the concept of spiritual productivity and discover how aligning out daily actions with our spiritual purpose can lead to a life of greater faith and spiritual SUCCESS. To realize true progress intentionally follow these six practical steps:
First, think. Then resolutely define and select your spiritual goals and objectives. Where do you want to realize progress? Devotions? Outreach? Reconciliation? Stewardship? Health? Mentoring? Self-denial? Other? Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) and then write them down. *Develop and base your goals based on spiritual growth principles (Proverbs 16:3).
Regularly evaluate your progress toward your goals and be willing to adjust your strategies as needed. Stay flexible and open to new opportunities for growth and learning. *Nurture self-awareness (Philippians 3:13-14).
90 Years of Faith and Focus on the Black Community through Images and Art
1937
How Did I Get Here?
by A. Wellington Clark
“There is an infinity to the number of things created, and infinity to their sizes and shapes and colors. There is an infinity to space in which the stars, the suns, the moons, the meteors, the satellites, and the atoms float. We are faced with a profundity which staggers imagination! In whatever field we attempt to study, we are compelled to see that a universe with such infinite varieties of things could only be created by a God who Himself must be infinite in power.”
Black Family Empowerment
“Love involves emotion, but love is not all emotion. Youthful love, prenuptial and nuptial, lifts into ecstasy; but ecstasy cannot last long,–while love never fails. Love is possessive, but it holds by unselfishly giving. Love comes from God, and the more it retains its original character, and the less it is perverted by human misconceptions and human faults, the more fully will it accomplish its purpose in marriage: the purpose of uniting two souls, not only to each other, but to God.”
We had a little group: my dad, the four of us. My sister played the piano and my brother played the drums. I played the piano a little later because I was taking piano lessons and we just, we sang.
For the next 20 years, I did every conceivable thing to lose weight including joining gyms to workout like crazy, swimming miles, walking, biking, and, of course, Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, the Cambridge Diet, Jenny Craig, Optifast, the cabbage soup diet, high carb, low carb, Overeaters Anonymous, and literally wiring my jaws shut for a month. Every time, I lost and gained more and more weight.
After I had my first child, I was nearly 400 lbs. I was chronically anemic, lost the function of my thyroid, was malnourished, chronically fatigued, with bulging vertebral discs and severe sciatica, arthritic knees, and bursitis in my hip. I had struggled with severe depression and anxiety for most of my life. I finally sought treatment and had to face the deep-rooted cause of my problem. I had been a victim of sexual abuse by friends in first grade. It happened again as a teenager when a trusted doctor molested me. I told no one until I was 31 years old. The trauma I experienced was my darkest secret.
The award, which recognized Brown’s “transformational global leadership, innovative educational practices, and embodiment of nursing at its most human,” was presented at a gala in June of 2023. “It still has not hit me fully, to be recognized nationally by such a prestigious organization,” Brown reflects. However, looking back it is evident how God had been ordering her steps.
I am a millennial who was fortunate to be raised in a faith-filled home with parents who loved me and did their best to raise me according to what they believed. I made it to adulthood with my morals and faith still intact and married a Christian man who shared all my values and beliefs and was raised in the same manner I was, down to the same church denomination. Yay! But one unintended consequence of being raised in a Christian bubble is the fact that you live in a faith-filled vacuum.
Fast forward three kids later. I was hurting and broken. Even though I had escaped the worldliness on the outside of the church walls, I had a front row seat to the failings of “godly men.” I watched as people I trusted did sinful things in the name of Jesus. At times I was the victim of abuse at the hands of “godly men.” I was in my 30s and now questioning if what I had been told to believe my whole life was in fact true. I had completely stopped attending church and kept myself busy with my tasks in children’s ministry. I was losing my faith while actively serving the church. Nothing made sense and it was all compounded by years of hurt, abuse, and pain I had never dealt with.
During these conversations, it blesses me to hear them testify about how God listened to their cry and, in His time, answered their prayers. And we rejoice in these moments, sometimes remembering the promise of Matthew 7:7 or Proverbs 15:29. How easy is it to celebrate when God seems to come through on answering our prayers?
However, I also have conversations with others who seem devastated because their prayers have gone “unanswered.” The promotion at the job didn’t come through, the financial blessing they prayed for did not come to fruition, or the specific spouse they asked God to send them never turned up.
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Baron Sovory
Jesus created a faith crisis as Messiah to the world. Here is an encounter recorded in the Gospel of John 7:37-53, NIV.
On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
This is often the starting point of our biblical journey, and it is a good one. It is a description of expectation and current reality. The transition from hope, or “hoped for” to evidence, is the space where faith is often lost. The hope stage.
I invite you to journal for the next seven weeks. Write out your prayers. As the weeks move forward, write the changes in your mindset from day to day about the topics you have written about and how God has used them to increase your faith, no matter the result from day to day.
The Old Testament Hebrew words for judgment that I pinpoint for this article are first encountered in the book of beginnings, Genesis. Misphat (Genesis 18:19), means verdict, sentence, or formal decree. Then, we see Ahphat, (Exodus 12:12), which means sentence or infliction. An example is the judgment was expressed in the final plague on Egypt that also facilitated the exodus of Israel from bondage.
As you research, notice the context of these and other texts related to judgment in the Bible. Always consider the contextual framework for biblical teachings, noting the author/speaker, audience, timing, location, and issue. As a serious Bible student, carefully consider the context as essential regarding judgment, whether it relates to a regal, civil or rulership context; a covenant context; or an eschatological context.
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