<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jonathon Cherne

The Most Important Work

Father in heaven, Lord we are so thankful that you are our God, Lord.

You created us, Lord, that you died for us, Father, and that you offer us eternal life, Lord.

Pray, Father, that you use me today, Lord, as your servant.

Lord, speak through me, Lord, and may I give words of life father and tell about your glory thank you Lord amen okay the title of my sermon Do You Know Your Most Important Work?

Now Before I get going, here's a picture of my family.

Fortunately, my wife and my 2 daughters didn't come with me.

And when you get engaged, you do this premarital counseling thing, which is a good thing to do.

I think I would recommend doing pre-engagement counseling.

It's kind of hard to take back the invitations, you know, if something comes up, right?

So I would recommend pre-engagement counseling, but everything's worked out, so it's good.

But during this pre-marital counseling, the counselor told me, he said, this is the most important thing for your marriage.

Telling me this as a guy outside of Christ being the center of your life and of your marriage.

He said, this is the most important thing.

So that's something I would want to know, right?

If I want my marriage to be successful, I want to know what is this most important thing.

And so he told me the most important thing to a good marriage with your wife is openness.

In order to have intimacy with your wife, for a man you need to be open and have openness with her.

And so I've tried to put that into practice.

It's not easy for a guy or at least for me, but that is what he told me.

And so I was thinking, what is the most important thing for us as Christians, as human beings, as man and woman, what is our most important thing, our most important work to do?

That would be important for us to know, right?

If you are hoping for the soon return of Jesus and looking forward to that day, it's important to know your most important work to prepare you for His coming.

And so, we can look in the pen of inspiration, education, page 225 says that character building, what was that?

Character building is the most important work ever entrusted to human beings.

That's a pretty serious statement, don't you think?

Now how many of you this last week have spent time thinking about character building?

Yes, we need to be thinking about character building.

That is our most important work, more important than our jobs and our family and anything else.

We need to be thinking about building our character.

And so, if this is so important to do, it would be important for us to know what character is.

In order to work on building our character, we need to know what character is.

Before we get into that, let's look at what it's not.

Character building is not your mental ability.

In fact, I would say a lot of people who maybe have great mental abilities, maybe you're 1 of those people that you never had to study for the test and you always got an A.

That probably isn't helping build your character.

Another thing that's often confused with character that is not character is reputation.

Your reputation, how other people perceive you, is not character.

We can put on a good suit and come to church.

We can live our outward life in a way that fools those around us and maybe even fools ourself, but that is not character.

Character building, Volume 5 of the Testimonies, page 310, it says, if the thoughts are wrong, the feelings will be wrong.

And the thoughts and feelings combined make up the moral character.

Character is what's happening in here and in here.

Character is what's going on in your mind, what's going on in your heart, what are you thinking about, how is that making you feel, What are the feelings that you have toward that person or toward that situation?

What are the thoughts that you have toward others or toward the situation that you are in?

Luke 6 45 says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

From our thoughts and feelings come words and actions.

Ezekiel 16 30 says, how sick is your heart that you did all these things?

And so the Bible is telling us that our actions and our words are a reflection of our character, our thoughts and our feelings.

And our thoughts and feelings combined make up your character.

Your words and actions come from what you have put in and you can mask those things, you can hide them, but It doesn't change who you are inside.

The Bible says that man looks at the outward appearance.

You guys remember Samuel going to choose a king.

And the first time they chose Saul, right?

And he was about this tall, a strong, good-looking man.

And all the people were like, yay, this is gonna be a good king, right?

But after Saul's fall, Samuel was sent to anoint another king, and he saw the sons of Jesse.

And the first son, he says, surely this is the Lord's anointed.

But God told Samuel, don't look on the outside.

A character formed according to the divine likeness is the only treasure that we can take from this world to the next.

Character building is so important because it's the only thing that we are taking to heaven.

You have a mansion being prepared for you.

You got a facelift, you're not taking it.

The Bible says you're gonna get a new body, right?

This incorruptible, this corruptible will put on incorruptible and this mortal will put on immortality.

In my 30s, I'm already starting to feel aches in my joints, right?

Yeah, so it'll be nice if We get that new body.

So all these things we are not taking with us, but we are taking our character.

We are taking our thoughts and our feelings.

Can you imagine what your thoughts and feelings now would look like in heaven?

Back to Menu

The Most Important Work

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine