Dave Pack: All the beautiful hoity-toity people left the church and the non-beautiful ones stayed

 

From an RCG source with an excerpt from sermon 287:

Now whenever Mr. Armstrong used the term, "whenever God shook the tree" back in Worldwide, I watched this over and over, because I pastored more people than anybody ever. And I knew many, many ministers, and I just saw a lot. And it was part of my training. I noticed that all the beautiful people would always leave. All the "hoity toitys," the people who wanted to be seen and the flatterers, it was always at the end of one of these sweeping problems, like 1974 or other times, even in the apostasy, in the early nineties. The beautiful people would go over a cliff like lemmings, because their heart wasn't here. It was the non-beautiful people, who stayed. People didn't care, who “read” the beautiful people like they were a book, like they were "McGuffey's Reader," "See Spot Run." That's how hard some of them were.

And you know, this well-known evangelist's wife standing there talking to a bunch of other ministers wives said, "I'm so glad my husband is an evangelist so that, I can buy several mink stoles." And then she showed them her mink stole, what a filthy attitude. Well, she's long gone. Their husband's long dead, but I knew I knew her well. So the beautiful people would leave, like rabbits in a storm. The old timers, sometimes but when the going gets tough, the tough got going, and the rest got out! They were gone.

Now, the church is growing all over the world. We bring people to Headquarters and sometimes because you have greater needs at Headquarters--small church--you have to accept people who don't belong at all, even in the church, nevermind Headquarters.

But you can't tell, because the first flatterers the earth will see are not going to be during the first kingdom. There are other flatters, and they will come here and they may be, almost like "rocks "God raises up to Abraham, to help and do a certain work and then they're gone. It's like we were just on their "bucket list" and they get a "check mark" and off they go! That was it. "You didn't think I was serious about this did you?" Well, I drew a salary for five or 10 or whatever number of years, "You didn't think I meant it did you?" "I'm a fraud, I'm out of here!" But it would always have to be [that] things were a little tougher or didn't go like they thought it should. "I can't take this!" They practically stamped their feet and ran out, like a brat in the grocery store aisle.

And I just tell you, at the end of all of this, the people that come through, are the ones that trust in the Lord. "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith in the earth?" The beautiful people who are always the ones that rise in power, they have more gifts and more skills and they're more in love with themselves, they're more self-focused and self-centered, and self-righteous, we would call them the “elites.” They believe God put them on to run the world. But as soon as he wants to run the world, watch for how many of them are gone. When you look for, you know, the house of the wicked, Psalm 37 says there they're gone in their house too. So, it's, it's a lesson to us. We stayed the course. It's part of why I said we stand first in line. We not only had to do this, we had to do it in the Laodicean age. And that was not easy.

The RCG source notes:

I do find it funny all us Ex-CGers were considered vile, ax grinders, heretics, opportunists, rebels....but now we are the BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE... gotta love it!