In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Lord's almost constant problem was what to do with human leadership. King after king led the people into apostasy until the two nations were devastated and had to go into captivity under pagan rule.
But never has the Lord had a more difficult problem to solve than the lukewarmness of "the angel of the church of the Laodiceans," the human leadership of His last-day remnant church. The solution Christ proposes is to "repent." Our usual "historic" understanding has been that such repentance is only personal, or individual.
This sounds easy enough, but our history of nearly a century and a half demonstrates that the experience has thus far eluded us. Could it be that He is addressing us as a corporate body, and therefore He is calling for corporate repentance?
Discussion of this topic has been suppressed for decades and is therefore a new subject to many people. But it is now beginning to attract serious attention.
This book is a complete revision of a previous work entitled As Many As I Love. The author dedicates this effort to the One who has every right to call us to repentance, for it was He who gave Himself on His cross to redeem us, who died our second death in our stead, and who gave us His life instead.
But the vast proportion of the world still understands little or nothing of that divine sacrifice or of the love that prompted it. While it is true that we do many diligent "works," the Book of Revelation discloses that the most difficult-to-solve hindrance to the finishing of that gospel commission worldwide is the spiritual unbelief and lukewarmness of "the angel of the church of the Laodiceans."
How can the Lord solve the problem? Will it help to let punitive judgments and disasters come upon us? More terrible world wars? More lethal epidemics? A rending of the mountains and breaking the rocks in pieces? More storms and earthquakes? More fires like those that destroyed the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the Review and Herald early in this century?
Or could it be that understanding that a still small voice is calling us to denominational repentance might be effective?
Hopefully this modest contribution may help to demonstrate that such repentance makes very good sense in this last decade of the twentieth century.