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But now, in the past FORTY YEARS there has come a SPECIAL
PURPOSE -- a SPECIAL TREMENDOUS COMMISSION to be carried out --
which today is the PRINCIPLE REASON WHY GOD HAS GREATLY INCREASED
THE NUMBER CALLED over that of the immediate preceding years.
Notice carefully! It is important that you UNDERSTAND!
God's Church Today
Now we come down to ourselves in God's Church today.
In the autumn of 1926 God called me. For sixteen years I
had been specially prepared for it. I was challenged into
intensive study and research into the Bible. I was astonished
-- shocked -- to see that the "Christianity" I had been brought
up in was almost the antithesis of the Christianity of Christ
and His Apostles. Against my will, as it had been at the time,
I had to acknowledge I had been wrong about God's Sabbath.
That was the beginning of learning God's TRUTH. It was
like a sudden awakening to a whole NEW WORLD. I was impelled to
keep on studying. My complete surrender to God, His Law, His
Word, His Will changed my whole life. I was baptized and received
God's Holy Spirit. It was a total NEW AWAKENING -- A NEW LIFE.
Now for the first time God opened my mind to understand the Bible.
The intensive study became my life. My conversion was in
the spring of 1927. In 1931 I was ordained by the Oregon
Conference of the Church of God. After many tests lasting seven
years from my conversion, God chose me as His instrument to
raise up the present era of His Church, to proclaim His GOSPEL
OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD to the world and to feed the flock which
He was to put in His Church.
The END TIME Was Here!
This proved to be the start of the fulfillment of the
prophecy of Matthew 24:14.
But the Gospel was not to go to all the world right away.
First, radio opened in the smallest way at the start. The
first week in January, 1934, the true Gospel -- the KINGDOM OF
GOD -- went out to reach perhaps a few thousand people in the
northwest corner of the United States -- in Lane County, Oregon.
The PLAIN TRUTH started February 1, 1934 with the VERY SMALLEST
circulation -- just a few hundred copies. By late 1942, we were
reaching a scattered national group of listeners and readers.
Not important national leaders -- all just the "grass-roots"
common people.
Gradually Jesus Christ, the living HEAD of this Work, called
more and more of you brethren as Co-Workers with Him and with me
in proclaiming this GOOD NEWS of Christ's GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM.
The Work, on radio and by the printing press, grew. It spread
to reach many MILLIONS over the United States, Canada, and