God, Please Send Me A Sign by Bill Hillebrenner

By CGI New York | July 15, 2016 | Category The Sabbath

God, Please Send Me a Sign

The year was 1969 (long, long ago to young people). God was calling me (I later realized). I had read the Bible as a youth and made a few marks in it, but didn’t really understand. I had gone to church on Sunday with my family until I went away to college. For five years during college I had quit going. Now in 1969, I had just taken a position at Lockheed Aircraft as a young mechanical engineer on the cockpit design of the Lockheed L-1011 jumbo jet in Burbank, California. But, “What was the truth of God?” was becoming a big question in my mind. So, I prayed to God and asked for a sign from Him. In the next few weeks I looked for something to drop from the sky or any little strange thing to happen in my life. Nothing happened.I was understanding the Fourth Commandment as meaning not to work on Sunday. I didn’t know which church was right. So I said to myself, “I am not going to do any work on Sunday. But since I don’t know which church is right, I am just going to go to the beach on Sunday and lay around there!My new job left me sitting at a design drafting board right next to a guy who was telling me about proving God exists. He gave me a booklet, Does God Exist? by this guy named Herbert Armstrong . It seemed interesting and correct. As an engineer I was especially interested in how uranium proved that there was no past eternity of matter as its molecules were always blowing apart. Then he showed me a booklet entitled Who is the Beast? He said the booklet was in my drafting board drawer if I wanted to read it. Well, I wanted to get ahead on my job. So I went on my own time to my Lockheed job on a Saturday. But while there all alone in the office, I remembered the Beast booklet. I loved math and the booklet told how to count the number of the beast, 666, the number of the Greek word for the “Latin one.” I found it so interesting that instead of working I sat there all the time and read the booklet.

My work associate kept telling me that I needed to send for the booklet What is the Mark of the Beast? Well, I finally did write for the booklet. It showed me the clear scriptures that Saturday was the Sabbath and a part of God’s law. The scriptures were:

“It shall be a sign unto you upon thine hand and for a memorial between thine eyes…the LORD’s law” (Exodus 13:9). “And thou shalt bind them [God’s law] for a sign upon thine hand” (Deuteronomy 6:8).

“Therefore you shall lay up these my words in your heart…and bind them for a sign upon your hand” (Deuteronomy 11:18).

“Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you” (Exodus 31:13).

I was so excited to learn of God’s Sabbath as “Saturday” and started refusing to work on Saturday. Ironically, I had gone to work on that earlier Saturday. It was as if God said, “No, you are going to begin to learn on this Sabbath at your workplace not to work on Saturday!” I contacted Worldwide Church of God and began studying every booklet I could get. Soon I was visited by a minister and invited to attend church. (In those days one must be invited to attend the now disintegrated Worldwide Church of God.) So, for two years I rejoiced in the Sabbath and meeting brethren and devouring literature of God’s truth. Oh, and the sign I had prayed for, I forgot all about looking for it. Then about two years later, I was again going over the above scriptures and suddenly realized “SIGN! Wow, God sent me His sign in a couple weeks after my prayer request! It took me two years to realize He had answered my prayer for a sign within a couple weeks!!!

Comments are currently closed.