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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Patriarchs, Prophets, and Parental Christ

I'm praying now, Father, that you would anoint us all.

We are the actors on the stage of the cosmos And I'm praying Lord from the prompts that are in your word verbalized through your servant May each of us move as we see the shepherd moving in front of us Stay close Lord and may we stay close to You.

Hear us now, I pray, and guide us, I ask, in Jesus' name, amen.

This morning I wanna talk with you about relationships.

I've entitled my message, Patriarchs, Prophets, and the parental Christ.

I was visiting with someone recently and I reminded myself that for all the trauma my mother put me through, I never doubted her love.

And if you're lucky, you have parents that put you through some trauma too.

Not the kind of trauma that you shouldn't go through, but the kind that you should.

When a mom and a dad are doing their job, the first thing they do is create security for the child.

But that security is established in the depth of their person and the depth of their relationship.

When those things are there, the child will have to make decisions along the way if the parents are real, if the parents are genuine, if they're trustworthy.

So from those earliest days when my mother made me go back to the store because I took that little root beer barrel off the counter without paying for it, to the moments when she called me out of class as a sixth grader because I didn't make my bed, and then she did the worst thing and sent me back to make it.

And then she sent me back to tell everybody why I went home.

From those moments when the crowd of my neighborhood friends who were foes, whom I had mouthed off too much, She said, all right, you can fight him, but 1 at a time, no ganging up on him.

She understood that I would have to face my self-made problems someday, so why not start now?

And in the process, she developed me for an adult life that had some confidence in it, that had some self-awareness, that knew where the lines of the relationships ought to be drawn.

And so I have a great debt of gratitude to my mother, who is indeed 1 of the most preeminent heroes in my life, who actually prepared me to deal in a very fragile world.

Now listen, truth has been surrounded by falsehood.

There is a siege that has been laid on truth, and slowly the devil is surrounding all who hang on to the idea that there is a God and there is absolute truth in this word.

And a society that's very fragile, and I want to combine some things right now.

Your relationships can never be strong and secure, or they can be fragile.

The more false of the ideas you're building your relationship on, the more fragile they are.

As you're gonna see in the Bible, and you've probably experienced in life already.

When you have a fragile idea and you're hanging on to it, all you need is for the truth to start to get close, and you get edgy.

And what's worse is when somebody with confidence speaks up and says, That's false.

If you're not going to abandon what's false, you have to attack what's true.

And that's what's going on in our society right now.

So the word fragile and superficial should go together.

She had no qualms about understanding what her responsibility was to me.

I grew up with confidence because I had a mother whose life, whose parenting practice was built on truth.

Those early days when I was a baby, she held me.

But I want to tell you, all along the way, I never doubted my mother's response to anything.

My mother clearly intoned in my mind, I understood the cadence of her parental journey very early on.

When she said to me, if you get in trouble at school, you're going to be in trouble at home.

She was defining a relationship and she basically said that person is standing in my place as an authority in your life.

Shape up or you're going to be in trouble.

When she had that bar of lava on my lips and on my tongue, she was saying, cultured people and people with the last name Kelly don't talk like that.

And as I'm anxiously trying to spit the residues of that hand soap out of my mouth, I got the message, but I never doubted my mother's love.

I was not raised with a fragile feminine identity.

I was raised with a woman who understood that her children would need to be strong and confident if they were gonna survive with functional relationships in this world.

Now this morning I want all of you to start thinking about your relationships and how they're defined.

Some of your relationships are so fragile, however much favor as people have for you, it's gonna do them or you no good except in the temporary.

A fragile relationship is usually fragile for a reason.

Or it's been allowed to atrophy because dysfunction has grown in and nobody's done anything about the dysfunction.

Or it's fragile because you haven't shared enough time and experience together to know each other.

And by the way, the devil is out to make the church fragile so he can run right over society and take everybody's eternal life away from them.

He's doing it by making sure we don't even get to first base and knowing the slightest little thing about each other.

You're sitting in a church right now, you're in the right place.

If you're not looking at the back of the head of the person in front of you, you might be looking up at me.

You're gonna learn something about me in this sermon, and you're hopefully going to learn something much more important about God's Word.

They are intersected because God has chosen to call me to this place, and the message is flowing through me from His Word.

But how well are your relationships defined?

You are a very blessed person if your parents have not worn their parental identity on their sleeve, and they're worried about what you're going to say about them when you grow up.

I've had children who for phases of their life probably didn't have a whole lot of good to say about me.

But you need to know that when they get past their immaturity, their fragility, and their attachment to falsehood, which this society is metering out with all kinds of confidence and pedigrees behind it.

If you have a lot of letters behind your name.

Get as many as you can as a consecrated Christian and use them as a tool.

But when those letters are in opposition and antagonism to the principles and practices of the Word, or the collective wisdom of 6 millennia of life, they don't mean very much.

Now we have sought to redefine what parenting is.

We have sought to redefine what family is, and in the process there is this growing corporate social pathology.

In other words, society is starting to come to the brink of implosion.

And what about all this adolescent, young adult, middle-aged, anxiety and depression?

People who feel like they're being victimized by society, they don't understand that the name of the Lord is a strong tower.

Yes, my mother made me do a lot of things, the chief of which was go to a church school.

She did not understand that in doing so, she was laying the future groundwork for a change in our relationship.

Because my mother, who had been truly the 1 in charge in my life in my home, she put me in that church school and all of a sudden I realized there's a higher authority.

Now authority was a big deal to my mother.

But when I met Jesus Christ, she moved into second place along with my father as Jesus Christ moved into first.

Every young adult comes to the place where they have to say, this isn't about mom and dad anymore.

For me, there were some challenges in our home.

For me, I could taste and see that the Lord is good, and I understand right away that he who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.

My love for Christ did nothing but elevate my love for my mother, But we did start to have moments where the Lordship of Christ ran into the authority of mom.

Along the way I wouldn't have known, couldn't have known, she did not know that eventually not only would the relationship change, but she would go from being my leader to where I would move into a relationship where Christ was preparing me to be a leader of people and be a blessing to her, hopefully, as she made a journey back to Christ.

Some people listening to me right here might be old and only be 20 years old because you might not have but a year left.

I want everybody to stop and think about this.

I'm here dealing in the commodities of truth today.

I'm not relating to you like I have a fragile relationship with you.

You came because either God prompted you or you wanted to.

I'm not here today to have a superficial encounter with you, but I'm here to tell you The farther our society moves away from truth, the more superficial it gets.

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Patriarchs, Prophets, and Parental Christ

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