There is danger in clinging to our private independence in opposition to the rightful authority that God has placed over us. This message takes a look at the risks of bright lights going out.

<p>There is danger in clinging to our private independence in opposition to the rightful authority that God has placed over us. This message takes a look at the risks of bright lights going out.</p>

<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>

Village SDA Church

Kingly Power: Christian Leadership Series

Ron Kelly

01. Kingly Power, Alliance, and the Way Forward

Father, thank you for beautiful music, instrumental music, discipline, teamwork, and training.

Now, Lord, I pray as we open our hearts, may your spirit speak to us.

May we be susceptible to the divine impress.

I'm beginning a series on Christian leadership, and I've entitled this message, Kingly Power, Alliance, and the Way Forward.

Edwin Friedman was a Jewish rabbi, a family therapist, and a leadership consultant.

In his book, A Failure of Nerve, he says, quoting another author, the great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions.

There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand, and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard disciplines of reasonableness and honesty, will as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations." Now I want to ask everybody at the beginning of this message, how are you approaching the pursuit of truth in your life?

For I fear that inside Adventism there is a terrible pressure on to become ideologues on 1 side or another of a theological divide.

In other words, there is an amazing power of division that the devil is seeking to bring into our church to keep us from giving to the world that undeniable witness that the Spirit is in our presence, the sweetness of brethren dwelling and sister and dwelling together in unity.

The reason I'm asking this morning is that if you have not disciplined your mind to reasonableness and honesty, you can make anything say anything you want it to say, especially the Bible.

There is a spiritual architect to our journey.

We're on a journey where God is looking to lead us into all truth, knowing truth will set us free.

But there are minds that have not been disciplined for reasonableness and honesty.

Now this sermon won't be good for you if you have no desire for reasonableness or honesty, because in this message I'm likely to make people on 1 side of the fence unhappy with me and people on the other unhappy with me.

My job is not to make people happy with me.

Our church is in a little struggle right now, and I don't mean the village church, I mean the larger Seventh-day Adventist Church.

And unfortunately, throughout the history of Adventism, there have been these struggles, and Unfortunately, sometimes they've been public.

And right now, that's kind of where we're at.

Now, I don't really relish making this kind of journey, but after much prayer, I am compelled to make it.

Friedman talks about a well-differentiated leader.

In essence, what he's saying is that a leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected.

Now if you're a parent, I hope you readily put your mind around this phrase.

You have to care and understand your fiduciary responsibility to the ones God has given you to raise up.

You have to be connected but not be overly connected.

You have to have an emotional firewall that allows you to do what you know is right, and you need a large heart to do it in the right way.

Vision, he will go on to say, is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomena, depending more on a leader's capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree.

This should be a wonderfully encouraging statement.

Here's a man who has his doctorate in psychology.

And what he's really saying is the person who is best suited to lead is the 1 that can hold up to the emotional rigors of displeasing people sometimes.

He has to be able to, or she, to separate themselves from needing to please everyone and from needing to be affirmed by everyone.

I mean someone who can separate while still remaining connected and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence.

I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others and therefore be able to take stands and the risk of displeasing.

Probably some of you, as you made your journey here to Adventism, ended up paying a high price to make that journey.

He says, as he reflects on his life of family therapy, with families I stopped creating encyclopedias of data about all their issues and I began to search instead for the member with the greatest capacity to be a leader as I have defined it.

Soon I found that the rest of the family was in therapy whether they came into my office or not.

In other words, his approach was to see who was the healthiest and could be discipled into a healthier dynamic of family interacting.

I stopped pulling the workers or going around to the different divisions.

Instead, I concentrated on working with only 1 or 2 leaders at the top.

Soon I found that for organizations, too, by focusing on and supporting the strengths in the system, rather than letting the pathology or the pathogens, troublemakers, determine my focus, the rest of the network was in therapy whether or not they came into my office and whether or not I joined them on a retreat.

He builds his dynamic of leadership off the metaphor of the immune system.

And in the immune system, he says, the 1 thing that it is designed to do is to recognize what belongs and what doesn't belong.

And he said when you get a cell in your body that is not self-regulated, it multiplies out of control because it has no nucleus, it has no membrane.

These cells tend to be the cells that destroy the human being.

Uriah Smith wrote of James White, some have thought that he was deficient in social qualities and sometimes rigid, harsh, and unjust even towards his best friends.

I'm here this morning to suggest to you that James White was God's well differentiated leader prepared to get this prophetic movement up and onto solid footing.

But these feelings we are persuaded come from a failure to comprehend 1 of the strongest traits in his character, which was his preeminent love for the cause in which he was engaged.

To that he subordinated all else, For that he was willing to renounce home and friends." Now, James and Ellen White made tremendous sacrifices.

Today, I think it might behoove us to consider such a commitment to the apple of God's eye, the bride, his body, this cause, the church, no man would have been more glad than he to enjoy continuously the pleasures of domestic and social life and the company of friends, had he not thought that integrity to the cause called him to take a different course.

But when this was the case, the voice of duty was first and all else was secondary.

Now I want you to really think about this paragraph.

Some in whose nature this principle is lacking.

In Uriah Smith's mind, this kind of commitment to God and His cause is valuable.

This kind of commitment to God and His cause is significant.

And he's saying that if you don't have that kind of commitment, if truth doesn't matter more than anything else, if pleasing people is what you're after, if deciding which group, the larger group or the little group is the 1 that you're going to please, you would never be a good friend of James White.

But if you have this principle, you can comprehend the actions of a man who's governed by such motives.

But how would a man be fitted without such an element as this in his character to be the conservator of the interest of any cause whatsoever.

Now I'm talking to a number of dads and moms and I'm going to assure you to take your children from the cradle to their adult footings is a difficult journey.

It is 1 that requires the deep, well-rooted love of God, the wisdom of the Word, hopefully the teamwork of 2.

But along the way, Friedman has his phrase, from parents to presidents, a man or a woman who is not well differentiated, who doesn't know who they are and what their duty is, will be a poor excuse as a leader.

Leaders do what's right because it is right.

Leaders do what's right in as best a way as they know how to do it.

Leadership is about moving forward, understanding what the people who are depending on you need.

Now this phrase has been thrown around a lot in Seventh Day Adventism over the last year or 2, maybe longer.

Kingly power is a phrase that is used by Owen White over 130 times, about 136.

Some of the database has quotes that are very, very close.

It looks like a secretary changed a word or 2.

And I tried to look at all 130 plus of these quotes this week so that I can understand what kingly power is.

Because it's an awful slur to say you're grasping for kingly power.

But it's been thrown around inside the circles of Adventism to the hurt of our own organization.

I mean what good would it do a child if a wife said to their husband, you know, you're just after kingly power.

What good would it be for those whose lives are working underneath the shadow of this tree of marriage of 2 people that are supposed to love each other and be united in the raising of children.

But this phrase has been used in a very haphazard manner to wound and to discredit.

And I'd like to just take a few moments with you and help you understand what kingly power is, what it is not, when it was used, when it wasn't, and what it means today.

Well, kingly power is used 1 time to describe unsanctified humanity.

It appears that in all of us, we'd like to make a good run for kingly power.

King of Shibbosheth, you remember he was the son of Saul.

He was attemptedly put in place to be a leader and by Abner.

And Abner tried to give him all the kingly power he could.

And then there's the componentry of choice.

02. Kingly Power and the Scarlet Letter “A”

Lord, our lives are yours by creation, by redemption, and by our surrender.

Please speak to us now, help us to hear and obey.

May we find joy in that obedience and freedom empowered, initiated by You.

Now, Lord, bless the words that You have given me.

May they be words from The Word and give us hearts, all of us, especially me, to be people of proper submission.

Ellen White writes in Evangelism, page 165, Fearful perils are before those who bear responsibilities in the cause of God.

Perils, the thought of which make me tremble.

But the word comes, in quotes, My hand is upon the wheel, and I will not allow men to control my work for these last days.

My hand is turning the wheel, and my providence will continue to work out the divine plan irrespective of human inventions.

And the great closing work, she writes, we shall meet with perplexities that we know not how to deal with, but let us not forget that the 3 great powers of heaven are working, that the divine hand is on the wheel, and that God will bring His purposes to pass.

I want to encourage you as we take up our second in the series of kingly power, that God will take the work into his own hands.

In the meantime, we do not need to take it into ours.

And that's what I wanna talk about this morning.

Now, I'm gonna pick on Americans for a while, partially because I am 1.

But what I say about Americans will be very likely true of all human beings So I'm holding in my hand a story from the Associated Press dated October 23, 1999 It's a story of a woman by the name of Jan Davis Jan was a 60 year old skydiver, and Jan didn't like a rule.

You see, there's something that Americans do in these extreme sports.

It's called base jumping, and it's an acronym, which I'm not gonna try to cite from memory, but they find a spot that is connected to earth, but far enough up to where their parachute will open when they jump.

And it just so happened that Jan liked to jump from El Capitan in Yosemite.

Now, the problem was in the 1980s, the park rangers had established a rule in Yosemite that actually allowed base jumping During certain times and in certain places, if you wanted to, you could get your adrenaline rush by going to the edge, leaping off the side, and at a certain point in time, opening your chute.

But people broke the rule so many times about when and where to jump that the park said you can't do it here anymore.

So what is it about people that as soon as someone tells them they can't do something, that's the only thing they want to do.

Now, if you can identify with that, I hope the rest of the sermon will speak to you.

The sad part of the story is, is that people continued breaking this rule until finally there was a young man who actually jumped, landed successfully, but while being chased by the Rangers drowned in the Merced River which was overflowing.

Now Jan thought to herself with 4 other people, I'm going to make a protest.

And my protest is I'm gonna go up there and jump.

Now what you need to know when the jumpers jumped, it's 3, 200 feet from the top to the bottom where they would land.

But every jumper that was caught forfeited their parachute equipment and were fined 2000 dollars and were put in jail.

Now going to jail wasn't a big deal and I suspect she must have been a fairly well to do woman because she had jumped 3000 times in her life.

She was the first woman to jump from Oahu Falls in South America, if I'm naming the right Falls, no, Angel Falls in Venezuela.

And so she must have been a woman of some means.

So the $2, 000 wasn't a big deal, but she did have a phone detachment for her own skydiving equipment.

So on that day, as she summited the launching point, She had borrowed somebody else's equipment.

And number 1 went and took several, I don't know, 3 or 4 minutes to float down.

Number 2 went, took 3 or 4 minutes to float down, expecting to be accosted by, is that the right word when you've broken the rules?

How about just apprehended by the rangers?

And she stepped back from the edge and took a run and leaped.

Now on the forest floor was her husband Ken, who had actually done skydiving work in association with the James Bond movies.

And pretty soon the 150 spectators started saying, pull the cord, pull the cord.

It only takes about, I believe it only took about 20 seconds and never was the cord pulled.

Her husband slumped over the camera that he was taking pictures with.

Well, where you pull the chute on her equipment was different than where you pull the chute on her borrowed equipment.

Sixty-year-old Jan Davis protesting a rule, losing her life.

There was 1 more parachutist at the top, and he walked down off the mountain.

I need to ask you at the beginning of this message, are you accountable to anybody?

Do you know what it means to submit to authority?

Or are you the only authority in your life?

I think that America is fast approaching the same sentiment that is written in the last chapters of Book of Judges, that every man did what was right.

And by the way, that includes the women, too, in their own eyes.

We find ourselves in a unique position today as members of a global church that has processed a divisive topic and said as a whole, although not unanimously, that this is how we feel about it.

It was processed again by Representatives 309 in Battle Creek in the month of October.

And this is what we're going to do about it because it appears that our formerly held sense of unity is no longer in decision making, is no longer at some level the currently held sense of our practice.

But the body at large has not come quite to the place where we're willing to surrender our theology of process and our nobility of person and our sense of collective accountability.

Now whether you like the decision or not is beside the point.

We could be talking about any 1 of a number of things.

The actual subject matter over which the division has found its initiation, its genesis, while it may be the issue to some, we have left that issue behind as we have decided that independence of spirit and independent thought is the forum for the day.

Now, just in this last week, I've had 3 very interesting things that have happened to me.

Item number 1 is that I had somebody from this faith community, this actual church, send me an email.

And in the process of their email, they described them working with someone in the Southwest Michigan territory here, and in the process of their dialoguing, they must have both been, they actually were both Seventh-day Adventists.

1 had worked very high up, if you want to refer to it that way, in the administrative circles of our church.

It appears to me from the email that was sent that somewhere along the way, they lost the simplicity of a child's faith and had a very jaded experience because in the experience between the village member and this other individual, they happened to pull out of 1 of their files or off of 1 of the stacks in their house, a picture of our General Conference president wearing a Nazi SS uniform.

And the person who provided the cartoon, the character, thought it was very funny.

But the person that received it did not think it was funny and actually challenged the individual who provided this caricature of leadership.

It doesn't appear that the village member persuaded the other member, but nonetheless, there was a proper engagement that suggested that we ought not to speak evil of our leaders.

Do you remember when Paul was being interrogated before the Sanhedrin?

And he said, it's in all good conscience that I stand before you here today.

And the high priest motioned to someone standing by him to strike him and he hit him in the mouth.

And Paul said, God will strike you, you whitewash of law, for going against the law.

And the man standing next to him said, do you speak such about the high priest?

And Paul said, Oh, I didn't know it was the high priest.

You see in the books of the Old Testament and the Pentateuch numbers, I believe, it says you shall not speak evil against a ruler.

The second thing that happened to me this week was that I listened to a presentation by 1 of the groups in our community that like to meet on a semi-regular basis, and the message was entitled, A Time to Speak Out.

You know, I have no problem in my understanding of Christian governance with somebody speaking out.

As a matter of fact, I do it every Sabbath.

The problem was, is that the way the dialogue was picture framed was that we were at a Martin Luther moment.

And it wasn't that we were at a Martin Luther moment against the oppression of civil authority or apostate general church.

We were at a Martin Luther moment because of some of the leaders of our own church.

Now as soon as you picture frame a disagreement where you're Martin Luther, What does that make everybody else?

It's exceptionally unfair and accusatory and even if you feel it you ought to be careful about where you say it for fear that your influence might empower people who aren't quite so committed to this body of faith.

When I think about the elements that are raging inside of our church at this moment.

I'm convinced that the devil would like nothing more than to tear this place apart.

Satan is an accuser of the brethren, Ellen White writes in 1888, and when he can set the leaven of disaffection to work in human hearts, he is exultant.

When he can divide the brethren, he has a hellish jubilee.

I think if our brethren could see, as I have seen, how much wrong is done in speaking evil of our brethren, there would be an entire change in the way we treat 1 another.

You measure them from your own finite standpoint.

Your feelings, your tongues, which are not sanctified or employed in a service and a work that is anything but holy and Christ-like.

So how many of you want to sponsor a party for the demons and call it a hellish jubilee provided substance, form, and sustenance, courtesy of the Seventh-day Adventists themselves.

When it comes to considering where we are in our society's experience, We've come to a place where truly consumerism and capitalism has found the ascendancy and everyone is a customer and nobody is accustomed to being held accountable.

03. Kingly Power: Bright Lights, Dark Nights and The Morning Star

Lord, open hearts and open ears, free lips, and the Spirit flowing freely is what we seek.

May truth be what we desire, and may following it give us the freedom and the joy that it only can give.

This morning, I'd like to couch what I'm going to say against the backdrop of the larger picture of this sermon series.

If you've not been here for the other sermons, you can find them online.

Our church occasionally will go through cycles of trauma.

I'm not talking about this local church, I'm talking about the larger church.

We found this to be the case in actually before the church was formally constituted in 1863.

There was a period of time the Church went through trauma in regards to a lack of order and some really kind of out of balance experiences with people.

And the Spirit of prophecy and the leaders of the pre-Advent church had to face off with a number of fanatical elements.

The church later went through another serious trauma when the work of Jones and Wagner was being promoted by Ellen White and there was some insecurity and stress between the young upstart preachers and the denominational leadership.

Ellen White stood in the gap to give support to them, But some of the stress between the leaders and Ellen White spilled out into the general public.

There was another point in time not long after that, when Ellen White, having been, some would say, exiled to Australia, where she willingly served as a missionary for Jesus and started to work there, found herself battling against the administrative process that was overcontrolled by the testimony of her own writings by 2 or 3 people in Battle Creek, something she came to call kingly power.

And in the reorganization of the church, we found that some of the trauma that was more at the upper levels of administration actually came to be understood by the general populace of the church.

It would just so happen that in 2018, the church has found itself in another realm where what maybe ought not to be the fodder of the mind is part of what's understood by the local churches in that there has been stress between different levels of administrators and decision making in our world church.

It's against that backdrop that I've been presenting these messages on Christian leadership, which I've entitled Kingly Power and, and this morning, it's Kingly Power, Bright Lights, Dark Nights, and the Morning Star.

In the first sermon, I talked about the phrase Kingly Power and how many places it's used and repeated, and what it means and what it doesn't mean.

In the second sermon, I talked about authority, the proper exercise of authority, and the improper use.

I also was dealing with the dynamic of accountability, And I want to remind everybody that we are living in an age in which as a result of apostate Protestantism, partially and our own carnal heart, secondarily or primarily, however you want to look at it, we're living in an age in which in collection with the general sense of the culture and its focus on liberty and freedom, that we want assurance that what we're doing is right, no matter what it is.

The problem is, is that assurance and accountability can be the opposite ends of the spectrum, or they can be bound up together in the same thing.

If you want assurance outside of the truth, then you are living in a very dangerous place and you don't want to hear anybody tell you anything you don't want to hear.

But if you'd like true assurance, the best place to get it is in the truth, which means, as we hearken back to Edwin Friedman's book called The Failure of Nerve, that we need to be both responsible and honest about ourselves.

Now that goes for the preacher as well as all that might be listening to him.

That goes for the conference president, union division, and general conference president.

And this morning, I'm going to broach a topic that has to do with the keeping of our own hearts, no matter what our role is.

There is 1 thing you are responsible for in the end.

That is your own actions and your own attitudes.

Back to Menu

Series

Kingly Power: Christian Leadership Series

03. Kingly Power: Bright Lights, Dark Nights and The Morning Star

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

01. Kingly Power, Alliance, and the Way Forward

51m

02. Kingly Power and the Scarlet Letter “A”

54m

03. Kingly Power: Bright Lights, Dark Nights and The Morning Star

1h 2m

04. Kingly Power and the Darkest Hour

51m

Sound Doctrine