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Cedar Lake SDA Church

The Everlasting Gospel

Mark Howard

1. The Goodness of God

2. Another Gospel

3. The Lord Our Righteousness

4. Preparing the King’s Highway

5. Righteousness by Faith

6. And They Don’t Take American Express

7. Looking Unto Jesus

Father in heaven, we are so thankful for the Sabbath day.

And more than that, Father, we're thankful for the sacrifice of Jesus.

That serpent on a pole pointed to that incredible sacrifice that we only have to look to and live.

I pray, Lord, this morning, as we spend this time together in your word, that your Holy Spirit would teach us and speak to us very clearly.

Father, convict us and convert us anew, that we may reflect the image of Jesus more fully, for this is our prayer in his name and for his sake.

I'd like you to go to Revelation 14 with me, as I said.

We've looked at a number of different things throughout this series.

1 of the, probably the most important that we're going to build on this this morning is the whole concept of the gospel, good news of the gospel being predicated on the fact that Jesus Christ came into humanity and did in humanity what nobody else could do.

He lived a perfectly righteous life and he offers that righteousness to us when we receive him.

We had a message on this we talked about the name that Jeremiah calls him by the Lord our righteousness That in Jesus is all the righteousness you or I will ever need.

But it's a sad reality that many, the Bible says, are going to take the broad road and they're going to reject that free gift of righteousness.

1 of the things that we highlighted and I just want to spend time highlighting this this morning is that the gospel sometimes as we talk about the gospel, we talk about our personal salvation, and that's important, isn't it?

I mean, that's where it comes closest to home, but it's important for us also to understand that in the scripture, my personal salvation is not the fullness of the gospel.

Your salvation is not the fullness of the gospel.

And oftentimes even when I speak about salvation, we think more in terms of forgiveness, but the gospel plan is God's plan to restore humanity to his original design.

To get rid of all sin and suffering in this universe.

Now 1 of the things I hate about PowerPoint slides is when I put them together, A lot of times pastors like to edit on the fly.

You know, when we preach, there's certain things we say, oh, I'm gonna change that around.

I have some really good slides I'm gonna share with you, but I'm gonna pass them up because I am not gonna share those right now.

Desire of Ages, page 824 says, the very essence of the gospel is what?

I'm going to look at a few passages this morning and show you that this really was the hope of the early church, the restoring Power of the gospel.

It's something that we've lost sight of in fact again beginning in Revelation chapter 14 verse 6 The first of the 3 angels messages the Bible says in Revelation 14 6 then I saw another angel flying what?

In the midst of the heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell in the earth, to every nation and tribe and tongue and people, saying with a loud voice, fear God and give glory to him for the hour of his judgment has come.

Now that judgment hour is a part of that gospel, we're going to talk about that in just a minute, but as you go through the 3 messages, when you come down to verse 12, and I want you to understand what we're looking at here, in verse 12 we are given a view of the result of the preaching of the gospel.

In other words, when we read in verse 12, here is the patience of the saints, here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, what we're seeing are the people who've received the gospel and this keeping of the commandments and the faith of Jesus is the result of the transforming power of the gospel in their lives.

So these are those who have received that message.

And what it's telling you and me today is that God will have it.

Look, you've heard me say before, everybody keeps some of the commandments some of the time.

This is talking about people who through the grace of Christ have come to the point where the character of Jesus is reflected in them perfectly.

And the book of Revelation pictures them as a harvest of sorts because a few verses later we see Jesus coming back and he's going to harvest the harvest of the earth.

And in that harvest you see the righteous and the wicked being harvested.

So you have a culmination of the gospel work here.

Now let's go to a few places in, notice what the first angel says.

I'm not going to all the passages today, but we've done this before.

When we read about the glory of God in scripture, what is it often referring to?

And in the, what's been the big question in the controversy, the great controversy?

What was it that the devil cast question about?

What does the Bible say here when it says, fear God and give him glory?

God's saying there's going to be people in the end of time who are going to vindicate the character of God by letting him live out that character in their lives.

And so it's important to understand that term of glory because we're going to see that in a few different places.

Let's go to Colossians in the New Testament after 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians.

Now we're in the middle of 1 of Paul's thoughts, but you'll get the point.

Colossians 1 verse 27, in fact many of you will be familiar with this verse, it says in Colossians 1 and verse 27, to them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this what?

Mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you the hope of glory.

Now we're going to pick up on that word mystery again in a minute, too.

Well, I'm not specifically, somebody says second coming and yes, but when we use the word, I'm hoping for anything, what is it?

Hope is what we do when there's something that we want that we don't have.

In fact, the Apostle Paul says in Romans 8, why does a man hope for that which he already has?

You hope for what you don't have, but what is promised, what is coming, what you're looking, it's what you're looking forward to.

And here the Apostle Paul says that what he's looking forward to is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

His hope, the Apostle's hope, was not just that his sins would be forgiven, although that's a glorious thing, his hope was in the fact that there was a promise that the character of Jesus would become his character.

And he would begin to speak and to act as Jesus did.

In fact, it wasn't just Paul's hope, but we're going to see this in another place.

2 Corinthians 4 and verse 16, this is also the Apostle Paul.

We're gonna look at the Apostle Paul in a few places here.

2 Corinthians, if you go back just a little bit, chapter 4 and verse 15.

Now the Bible says this, therefore we do not lose heart even though our outward man is what?

Perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day For our what?

Now if you read the Apostle Paul's life, it was anything but light affliction.

Anything we would call light affliction is not what Paul was dealing with.

There are people today who are looking for Christianity, and it's prevalent, you can find it anywhere, a Christianity where it's all smooth sailing and high times.

You go to the church service, it's all rocking out, you're having a good time, things are great, it's feel good stuff.

His experience that he's relating here is very, very different from the experience that many people look for today in Christianity.

You look at all the different trials that he went through and what does he say?

Hey this is light affliction and it doesn't matter because this light affliction is but for a moment but this light affliction that we go through is working for us a far more exceeding in eternal what?

See in Paul's mind the whole goal here was that we would have the character to get there.

I mean that's what Christianity was about for him because he understood that you're not going to live in heaven and neither am I with the characters we have on this earth unless we receive the righteousness of Christ and his character becomes our character And so he understood that the trials of life, the things we go through in this life, they do something for us, don't they?

Series

The Everlasting Gospel

7. Looking Unto Jesus

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Accepted

41m

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

20 The Judgment Continued Phase 2

50m

God is Love?

17-Jesus Is The Answer

1h

Restoration 2023

The Case for Your Savior & Why You Need It

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Present Truth or Cunningly Devised Fables

Present Truth or Cunningly Devised Fables-Part 1

1h

Unlocking Prophecy

12- The Certain, Unavoidable Identity of the Antichrist

1h 8m

Keys of Revelation

16. The Day the Devil Dies

57m

Antichrist: The One You've Never Known

Antichrist, Episode 5: More

25m

War of Thrones

Prophecy’s Signs of the Times

57m

The Greatest Witness

19m

The Law of God in the Great Controversy

41m

These Things We Know

These Things We Know: God Stands for Us

48m

Sound Doctrine