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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Faithful to the Finish

Lord, as we open the Bible, and as I testify of your goodness, I pray that your spirit would be here, that our hearts would be soft, that we'd know the great calling is in your work, no matter what kind of work we're doing.

So I'm praying, Lord, for school, for work, for home.

I'm praying for communities local and far away.

And I'm asking, Lord, that your spirit would rest upon us and that you'd raise us up to honor and glorify your name.

Please be amongst us, teach and impress, I ask in Jesus' name, amen.

I wanna share something with you I didn't share with the first service.

Not this week when it was super cold, but a week before we had a waterline break in the church.

And it was over here in the men's restroom.

And I want to tell you how God looks out for us.

And unfortunately, and I surely would hate for anybody to try and figure out how it happened, but unfortunately, and I'm guessing it happened several years ago, when we were trying to save money, the vent was placed in the wall to allow warm air into the cavity because the pipe was running in an outside line and an outside wall.

So there was a vent there about this big.

But in an effort to save money, somebody had taken the vent off and put in cardboard behind the vent.

Well, on Tuesday night, a week ago, so this is about 10 days ago, the fire department calls Lon Reinholz, who has the unfortunate blessing of being on the call list when something goes wrong here.

And when you get a call very early in the morning and it's a problem, what Lon came over to was, he was actually here a little before the fire people got here.

At first, they didn't really think you ought to be in the building, but after they went in and they realized they needed somebody who knew the building.

When they got inside, they went down into the youth kitchen.

They heard water running in this bathroom over here in the wall.

It went down into the kitchen and the kitchen next to the youth room, the tiles, the ceiling tiles were a mess, water run through the cabinets and into the closet.

He was working in the dark with his headlamp and his shop vac and reinforcements came.

It was wonderful to see the church turn out to take care of this mess.

But I'm starting this meeting just a little bit different, this service, because I want you to know something.

In spite of the challenges of life, the Bible says many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them out of most of them.

That water could have run for days because we don't go downstairs and we don't use those restrooms during the week.

But in God's providence, he took something that could have been a disaster, not quite like the worldwide flood, but it might've felt like that for us, and he caused the water to run through the grid and across the tiles and short out a smoke alarm, which brought the fire department and our own men and women.

And instead of that thing running for days and somebody going down there and going, oh, we can swim down here.

It was found within hours of it going off.

And then I'm gonna tell you something else.

Because of the good relationship that some of our men have in this community, a plumber was called.

You know, It's a great way to make money in the winter, going around fixing people's pipes that burst.

But I wanna tell you something, when this plumber was done, he handed us an invoice and he said all he wanted was a tax deductible receipt that he came and took care of it.

I'm praising the Lord for the relationships of the people, the generosity of the plumber, and what could have turned into thousands of dollars will end up being a little bit more than what our deductible for the insurance would be.

So we don't, I'm not sure how we'll take care of that in the end, it hasn't been decided yet, but I want to praise the Lord because He saved us from trauma that we might not even know existed for hour after hour, but God in His goodness short-circuited, literally, a fire alarm so the fire people would come and we're here today.

God's blessed us immensely, mostly with His Spirit, also with the resources we need and with a vision.

Now, most of us know the 10 commandments.

You can figure it out and you can understand that all of them are an injunction to do good.

On the wall behind us is a reminder that there's a people at the end of time who keep the commandments of God and they have the testimony or the faith of Jesus.

This morning I want to talk to you about the 11th commandment for just a moment, because this is the 1 that is very easy not to fulfill.

Now I've plucked this verse from Matthew 28, verse 19, and of course there's a missing word.

And the missing word, I was reminded, after the services can be found in the word God and gospel, it's this word, go.

Now we know with modern science that sitting in our chair and staying, that fossilizing on our furniture, it's as bad as smoking cigarettes.

The new pack of cigarettes is your office chair.

There might be a perfect corollary or teaching symbolism for spiritual vitality as well.

And here I'm today to assure you that there are special blessings that come from God when we seek to give the 3 angels messages that God doesn't send to those who fossilize on church furniture.

Now, I'm here today to talk with you about your neighbor.

I'm here today to talk with you about your coworker.

I'm here today to talk with you about the person in your home who's not sure about God, or maybe have said, I don't get it and don't want to get it.

I'm here today to talk with you about Neighbor to Neighbor, just down the road, 1 of our collective missions.

I'm here to talk with you today about the least of these ministries that monthly make a journey over to Chicago and the mission we have in Brazil.

I'm here to remind you today that deep in the heart of the Christian filled with gratitude for the new assurance of eternal life based on Christ's gift to you, not your obedience, there is a growing desire to live for Jesus, and that means to let the rest of the world know.

Now the problem is the devil's out hawking his wares trying to sell things to us that short circuit our own spirituality to what we'd feel very unnatural talking about God.

We sense that there might be dwelling within us a measure of resident evil, and we feel a little bit disingenuous taking the name of Jesus on our lips, because whether it's the Holy Spirit or the devil, 1 way or the other, we feel just like we shouldn't be moving 2 directions, 1 way with our mouth and another way with our actions.

So starting this sermon out, I just wanna remind you, there is an 11th commandment.

And it is the priority of all those that have tasted and seen that God is good.

And it's the first word letters in God and it's the first letters in the word gospel And it should be part of the mantra of our life And I hope you're not so busy going that you get up in the morning And you don't go to your knees and go to the word and go to Jesus in a sweet communion So here we are the first Sabbath in February.

The month of January has gotten away from us already with a good start.

Now I am gonna share with you, this is a little bit of an eclectic presentation.

I'm gonna try not to confuse you second service will probably get off a little better Than first service did on the confusion factor because at least 1 of the stories I have to tell It's a little bit of a challenge to follow But they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.

And this morning, that's what I want to do.

Now, I've made with some of your brothers and sisters the last visit to El Salvador in readiness for 150 people from 7 churches.

And in the process of going, it appears to me I couldn't get away without something to testify about.

Now that's the law of reform of church the funds from this church have paid for that, praise the Lord, and that's the daughter church from the Fords.

The funds from this church paid for that.

And this church right here is being built not on this Sabbath day because it's the Seventh-day Adventist church, but every evening or many evenings and most Sundays, they're here working at this church.

And I told you about Brother Victor, that's his daughter, I believe on the left and his grandson on the right.

He broke out into crying when some Americans showed up and talked about funding the rest of his church.

He's a man of God and he's lived to see his dream.

And I shared with you about Steve Haddix.

In that quest for meaning and future hope, he got a brochure in the mail called Unlock Revelation.

And he went and his pastor, which was once your pastor here, Pastor Errol Roldan on the right, has been shepherding and discipling.

He was only baptized last March, but he was on 1 of the site visits with us, and while we were looking at those Honduran hills, and me talking with them about going back and talking to their churches about helping our El Salvadorian friends, he said, I'll pay for this 1.

Now I want to take you to just a few days ago.

Here we are, the van is a small van by American standards, but it's pretty big for El Salvador.

It holds 15 people if you fill up every aisle and pull the jump seats down.

But it couldn't make the corner to get to this little church.

And it didn't matter how many times the driver backed up and repositioned the van, he just couldn't get around the corner.

So he went down another road, dropped us off, and we had to walk through some cow pastures and some farmland.

So this is 1 of those old through the fence kind of mechanisms where people could get through but not cows.

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Faithful to the Finish

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