Elder's Conference—2016 #4

Conclusion of Reports/Discussion  #4
Fred R. Coulter—May 17, 2016

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It was very informative and interesting hearing from each one of you individually. And it's important that we all heard everybody. We look at what we're doing as serving scattered people, because John 10 says that 'the hireling sees the wolf and flees, leaves the sheep and they are scattered.' You can tie that in also with Ezek. 34. So, that's where we are.

Always remember that those who truly have the Spirit of God will stand whether alone or in a group. When I resigned from Worldwide, I was labeled with the most derogatory terms, and be that as it may, but we had to be alone. I think there comes a time in the life of everyone who is a true Christian that he or she has to stand for the Truth alone!

That's important. Roy's [Mack] problem is a different one, which we'll discuss a little later. But being scattered and alone gives you an opportunity to draw close to God. That's what's important.

Fellowship can be a benefit if everyone is truly seeking God. You've been in congregations where they are not all seeking God. So, you have a lot of trouble—don't you? But when brethren who are alone get together with other brethren then the Spirit of God brings them together, and the love of God is very, very evident.

That's good fellowship for the scattered brethren. I like Steve's idea of Skype for those who can do it. We don't want to do live services from Hollister, because of the time zones and all of the things associated with; is everybody there? are you ready to sing? and all of this sort of thing! With a smaller group Roy's done it with a smaller group and that works well.

But, being scattered, let's look at it from this point of view: It's important for personal, spiritual growth. Coming together in fellowship is important for loving the brethren, and learning to love each other. That's especially true from what we've gone through.

How many here, before they finally left, really didn't want to go to Sabbath services, because of all the trouble? God is doing the repairing and the calling. So, look at what we have here today, and then I think about the day that I resigned on the Day of Atonement. Our family ended up alone with seven brethren. That was it! Things were so bad that I had to go out and get a job. I finally got a job as a loan broker. People hate ministers and they hate loan brokers, so I was double-hated, plus triple-hated from Pasadena.

We had a small group of seven and I just prayed to God and said, 'God, if You want me to just serve these seven brethren, and to see them all safely in the grave, that's what I'll do.' I had no ideas about anything. As a matter of fact, I didn't even write one word for eight years, because I didn't want to presume to be something that God didn't want me to be.

Gradually, God added. So, we're here where we are today. I'm thankful for it. My voice is not in too great a shape today, but we'll live through it. This gets down to one other aspect of groupthink. In addition to loving one another, there's another aspect that people might not think they have.

• Could it be an idol?
• Could it be that you want to get together with people because you want to get together for the sake of getting together with people?

We first have to be in fellowship with God! 1-John 1 says that 'our fellowship is with God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.' That's the important thing. Everything else God can work out from there.

With all of us being here, did I plan something like this ten years ago? No! I remember the first time we had our conference here, we had five of us altogether, not much more than that. Roger and Marlin were the first two. Of course, they also had to prove me, because they heard so many things about me.

So, we determined to just keep our noses in the Bible, keep our minds on God and let Him take care of it! That doesn't mean that we sat back and said, 'God, You take care of it.' That means that we get in and what God shows us we need to do now, we need to do!

During that period is when I was really studying the Greek, in contact with Dr. Dorothy and so forth. I'd come home every night after work and I'd memorize the Greek, the Greek, the Greek! I think it was about 1987-88 and here's our group of seven, and I said, 'How would you like to study the book of John, the Gospel of John? We recorded all of it. That's the last time I did anything in the King James. I explained some of the spelling in the KJV and why it is with the 'th' and the 'eth' and all of that sort of thing; what it means from the Greek.

So, we got done with that and I asked the brethren what they wanted to do. 'Oh, we want to study more like we've been studying.' So, I said, 'Okay, Dr. Dorothy has told me that I need be translating, so how about if we do this…' This is after 16 years of studying the Greek. It doesn't mean that I'm a total Greek expert; I'm not. But enough to know how to translate.

So, I said, 'How about if we do verse-by-verse through the General Epistles, starting with James?' We had these study translations with wide margins, and that's what we did; we went through verse-by-verse.

Now we've got that all on two things: CDs, James, 1st and 2nd Peter, 1st, 2nd and 3rd John and Jude. Plus the book: The Seven General Epistles.

That's how God works. If we look to Him to fulfill our needs and help us understand what we need to do, we need to do it and God will be with us. Ask God to lead us! So, that's when I started translating. Then we got done with that and it was time to redo A Harmony of the Gospels, so I started to do Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then the brethren wanted to go through some of the Epistles of Paul. I said, 'Okay, let's do that.' Then I think it was—I will have to back up a little bit—1988… Our cassette list started out in 1983 with three people. Martha Anderson was one of the original seven had one of these cassette to cassette duplicators, and Joseph DeCarr(unsure of correct spelling) was one of three on the mailing list.

Well, I didn't know it and different people were copying them and sending them around, so here a whole group from Detroit called and said, 'Where are you keeping the Feast of Tabernacles (1988)?' We told them in California, a beautiful place. They come, and at that time we had about 12 brethren. They came with their families and that was another 12, so we doubled. They came to checkup on us, and they said, 'Is the Church?' I said, 'Yeah, all 12 of us!'

Then things gradually expanded from there, as the Church began to disintegrate. But, as I've mentioned, the way we got to the New Testament in Its Original Order, A Faithful Version, was I was about halfway through the New Testament and someone sent me the Inclusive New Testament, neuter gender produced by homosexuals and feminists in England.

Not pointing fingers, but the British are the most 'politically correct' people in the world, that their intelligence is stunted to the point that they can hardly think straight. That's the problem you have, Lyall! So, you need to pray about it so that you can get through. You've got to ask the questions, questions, questions!

Anyway, they eliminated as many 'he's' as they could. They called the Son of man 'the human one.' And what got me was that 'the name of God the Father was a metaphor.' I read that and just about came unglued! 'Therefore, we're going to create a new metaphor for God': father/mother.

Knowing what God says about changing His Word, this just absolutely devastated me! That they would have the gall to do it. So, I said right there, standing right there with that Inclusive New Testament in my hand: if we—Church of God, all 12 or 20 of us at that time—let that stand without an answer back, God is going to hold us responsible!I will finish doing the New Testament. That's how that came about.

Then with Michael Heiss, we got the Old Testament and now we have The Holy Bible in Its Original Order, A Faithful Version. It's online—afaithfulversion.org—and if you have an Apple, you can go to the Apple Apps and download the whole Bible. If you have a Microsoft devise, you can go to that App Store and download it free, the whole Bible. And every month now we have:

• over 100,000 visitors to afaithfulversion.org
• we have close to 85,000 coming to cbcg.org
• we have about 15,000 coming to the Spanish website: idcb.org

And that will grow even more.

• theoriginalbiblerestored.com is where we have the Bible available for a donation, and we avoid all taxes and businesses and things like that

We need a way—this came to me this week… We don't have people sitting out there saying, 'I wonder how I can find God? Oh, I know, cbcg.org'

We have to fill in, Roger and Marlin were here—so was Bob Hunnicutt at that time—when I flew in for the conference that year in November. I was reading the book Christianity Without God by Sir Lloyd Geering, and when I landed I said, 'They can take away the Bible, they can re-do the Bibles, they can do anything they want to, but they can't take them out of our mind, and they can't come in the home and take it out of our heads.'

That's when God inspired me for Church At Home (churchathome.org). The first announcement was here, right in this hotel. Now we have on Church At Home we're getting close to 100,000 visitors a month.

So, being scattered, and we look at us here and we think we're few, what is God going to do? What can we do? Well, God can do things we can't do, if we do what we need to do! God will take care of the rest!

We have thousands of people we know nothing about! I just got an e-mail last week. We've had church at home and there are ten of us that meet every Sabbath. No indication that they're from any other church organization—they may or may not be—I didn't ask them. I just got it.

I get e-mails that say 'we have two or three and we meet every Sabbath.' We can also, with those scattered people, give them the Church At Home advertisement cards and let them distribute it around. Who knows what will happen.

God says that His Word goes out 'like casting it upon the waters.' You know what happens when it's on the water, think of an oil slick, it just goes and goes. And God says that 'it won't come back to Him empty.'

Always remember—speaking of numbers—if you're in a stadium with 10,000 people and two are converted, how many do you have? Two! It's not the numbers! It is the Truth! Frankly, people are turned off with 'religion' and Christianity in the world, but they still desire God, but they don't know how to do it.

Church at Home fills one of those voids. We get e-mails saying, 'I've been listening to you for two or three years.' They've been lied to enough! Go on Trinity Broadcasting Network and look at that circus for a while. This is what people see. So, we don't know what it's going to be in the future.

Add into the mix that there are great troubles coming in United and Philadelphia. I haven't had time to read the book thoroughly, but there's a big thick book put out by Flurry: The Last End—A Book of Remembrance. In case you didn't know it, Edmonds, Oklahoma, is Jerusalem in prophecy. His building is the house of God. Their church is the house of Judah.

That's as much as I've read. But you know they're on a collision course for disaster. Those people are hurt. I know of three suicides because of the strict you can't visit… 'If your folks are not in the Church you can't talk to them. You can't talk to any other brethren in any other church. You cannot do it, otherwise you're going to lose salvation.'
So, with Victor Kubik as the head of UCG (United), watch out, troubles are coming. Some of these people are really hurt! We have one woman who was the wife of a minister in Philadelphia that was beaten up by him, caused her to have such back problems she should hardly walk and she said that the ministry is filled with pedophiles.

So, even though we're alone, God knows what's going on everywhere. We need to stick to the Truth! That's what the people want.

I thought of this coming over here: How are we going to get more people to come to cbcg.org. We have churchathome.org. More people will come there sooner than they will come to cbcg.org. So, I asked Ron Cary to check out this: Truth of God. Do a Google search. So, we picked up and purchased:

• thetruthofgod.world (new extension)
• the truthofgod.net
• truthofgod.org (no the)

If we do some Internet advertising on Google and Facebook we can get people to come to the websites. We'll work something up—Phil Neal and Randy Vild will help us work it up—where we can have a website and link direct to our other websites.

We currently advertise in Washington Times quite extensively, and the advertising is on our mailing list and we get a $1200 for $400. So, we advertise on there quite a bit.

We also advertise with home schoolers, and we need to get into as many home schooler publications as we can, especially with what's happened with Obama saying 'everybody has to use the same bathroom. That's going to cause mothers and fathers who don't want that to teach their children at home. And now there's so much available online that they can go from kindergarten to graduate school certified education.

You couldn't do that five or ten years ago. So, we have advertise there, and we get a lot of requests from there. For the new book that came out—From a Speck of Dust to a Son of God: Why Were You Born?—we were able to secure the website: whywereyouborn.net

So, on the advertisement in the Washington Times that's where they go to order the book. We don't know what that is going to do, but I'm sure that that book is going to end up being one of the most requested books that we have.

When you get to the book with the CD—the whole reading of it—we were able to do it because we had some delays in getting the cover. The cover came from England—a good thing from England. It took him quite a while to get it all lined up, so I did the reading of the book.

Then Randy Vild re-edited the 12 segments, so when you get to chapter 11 and 12, take the DVD when you finish chapter 12, and do segment 12 with the hymn at the end of that and it will literally inspire you; it really will!

It's not to get the numbers up, but let God do the calling, and the message is not one to bring in members, but the message is to have them repent to God! Totally different message.

Tomorrow I'm going to tell you I learned one thing from William Tyndale, which he figured out over nearly 500 years ago. Carl Franklin finished the Daniel 11, so this is my project to read going home. You better be ready to crank up your brain cells when you read it. I just got it and haven't read it.

I did four DVDs on the calendar, so when people want that we send out the four DVDs and we have a lot to study. I read the whole book by Maimonides translated by Goldfine. They knew everything about the moon, the 5,000 perambulations, variations of the moon: it's close, it's far away, it wobbles more, wobbles less. They knew all of that.

God preserved the calendar in the Old Testament through the Levites within the Jewish community, in spite of them. So, if someone comes along and says, 'We reject what is called the Jewish calendar,' then tell them to get rid of the Old Testament, because they preserved both of them. That doesn't mean that they kept them.

What I will have to do, is publish about the second Passover in a letter, but we do have it online.

I think we've covered about everything we're going to cover today. I think that today was very profitable for all of us. It gives us a lot of things to pray about in general, and in particular. We've got some really good things we can talk about tomorrow, and look forward to it.

Scriptures referenced, not quoted:

• John 10
• Ezekiel 34

Also referenced:

Sermon Series:

• James
• 1st and 2nd Peter
• 1st, 2nd and 3rd John
• Jude

Books:

• The Seven General Epistles by Fred R. Coulter
• A Harmony of the Gospels by Fred R. Coulter
• New Testament in Its Original Order, A Faithful Version by Fred R. Coulter
• Inclusive New Testament
• Christianity Without God by Sir Lloyd Geering
• The Last End—A Book of Remembrance (Philadelphia Church of God, Gerald Flurry) {pdf at: eleazarphinehas.files.wordpress.com/.../the-last-end-a-book-of-remembrance)
• From a Speck of Dust to a Son of God: Why Were You Born? by Fred R. Coulter

FRC:bo
Transcribed: 6/22/16