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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Preparing and Passing Through the Time of Trouble

Lord, we are gathered together in your house to receive direction and encouragement from you.

I'm not assuming, Lord, that everyone here has given you perfect permission to be the absolute leader of their life.

So I'm praying Lord at the beginning of this message, may that be where we're all at when we're done.

Thank you Lord for this fellowship we have.

Thank you for our system of Christian education and all the dedicated people.

Bless the parents that are sacrificing, the churches that are partnering, the staff and the teachers that are discipling.

And now Lord, help us all to determine again, we wanna go home and not to love what's here.

I've just finished 21 hours of listening to a book called Appeasement.

It is a history of what became official policy as well as mentality in the British government leading up to World War II.

If there's 1 thing that is clear in the journey to World War II is that fear destroys confidence.

And this morning, my message is entitled Going Home, Preparing for and Passing Through the Time of Trouble.

When Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister of England, He had an inflated sense of his own ability to make good decisions and to negotiate.

Unfortunately his real experience had been fostered and developed in the business world and he made a fatal mistake of thinking that all the people he was dealing with were just like him.

The colossal mistake which became official British policy in the form of continuing to give away to Hitler things that Hitler never should have had, which destroyed in effect the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty.

First, it was the taking of Austria, the Anschluss.

Later, it was the rearmament of the Rhineland.

Later, it was the Germans in Czechoslovakia, the Sudentland.

All Along the way, fear had immobilized the British government.

At 1 point in time, when a British envoy was surveying the amount of planes in the German Luftwaffe, they did not realize that as they were viewing the planes on the ground in 1 spot in Germany and then boarding the train, the Luftwaffe was flying those very same planes to the next airfield and landing them there to be counted again by the Britons.

I'm gonna tell you the point of the message before I go farther into the message.

There is a time of trouble coming on the face of this planet.

If You have recognized the Lord's call to release your hands from the things of this world that have tried to wrap themselves around you.

And if you're willing to put your heart and soul into a life of daily surrender that leads you to the great colossal work that is before us, which is announcing to the world that the hour of judgment has an end and the invitation of mercy is to be heard.

Years ago, 1 of the first sermons I preached was called the Red Badge of Courage.

It probably wasn't the best sermon in the sense of its exegetical and theological underpinnings, but it was a message relative and I didn't know how formative it would be.

It was a message built off the book by Stephen Crane with the same title of a young man in the Northern Army who went into battle and was so terrified.

He was the standard, well, I don't know if he was the standard bearer, but he went into a battle in the Civil War.

He was so terrified that partway through the battle, he threw down all of his accoutrements of war and he ran.

He did not just run back to where the army had marshalled itself, he ran farther away, and farther away, but something got a hold of this young man, and he realized that while he was now free from the sound of pieces of lead whizzing by his head.

And with a new resolve and a new sense of what he was about, he comes back to the same army.

It's been probably 30 years since I preached that sermon.

And he throws himself with a passion into a cause minus the fear, and he is an unstoppable force.

I want to say right from the very beginning that Ellen White states that we shall have to stand before magistrates to answer for our allegiance to the law of God, to make known the reasons of our faith, and the youth should understand these things.

Well, it's almost become the method of understanding the culture of our church that somehow these things shouldn't be thought about by the youth or anybody because all it does is make us afraid.

This morning I'm here to tell you that if 1 is willing to give Jesus Christ Lordship of his life and understand the great privilege of pulling together and announcing to the world that he's coming soon, we can lose the things that make us afraid on the inside and gain the courage of moving from 1 victory to another in the actual engagements that will actually make the future something we're preparing for in the now.

And it has nothing to do with saving up food or money or anything else.

It has nothing to do with continually examining ourselves to make sure we're okay.

By the way, friends, there's a lot of Seventh-day Adventists who conscientiously do want to be right with God and they examine and examine and examine themselves when the real call is the Abrahamic call to move out of an examination of our own readiness and be concerned about somebody else's readiness.

I want to tell you there's 3 phases you can be in.

You can be in the self-centered phase and I'm sure there are some people there listening to me this morning who are in the self-centered phase of living.

If it doesn't suit them, then it isn't going to suit anybody.

Don't anybody call them to a higher standard?

Don't anybody do anything that gets in their way.

I don't suspect most of the individuals here today are in that category, but it's possible.

Seems that we have the sinking pulpit of village here.

So my hope and prayer this morning is that if you've been living like that you'll see a new vision of the love of God for you and have a new heart to love God in return.

But then there's a very subtle dangerous place for Seventh Day Adventists.

They're not self-centered, they're just self-focused.

Well, the difference is, is that we read these narratives in the scripture and sometimes these segments in the spirit of prophecy, and we realize that our heart is to be cleansed from sin.

But somehow we think looking at what's bad and not wanting to be it is going to turn us into what's good.

But I'm here to tell you, you will not become what's right by trying not to be what's wrong.

When you focus on yourself, you could be a very conscientious, self-focused, seventh-day Adventist and it will ruin you.

You see what Adventists are to be, what true Christians are to be, is they are to be self-aware and self-honest so that when the Lord God in the universe says to you, you know, you didn't get that right, That was wrong.

You shouldn't be gossiping about your boss.

And you shouldn't be stealing time by being lazy on the job.

That is the kind of honesty that allows for a true intimate relationship.

So he's going to come along and take some sentiment that has a measure certainly of value, but he's somehow going to twist it around so that it actually ruins the journey, immobilizes the Christian, makes them afraid, and knows how unfit they are.

And it's that unfitness that is potentially driving them into deeper cycles of self-focus.

It's a good thing that He's more than everything for us to make us fit, but our focus on Christ and our daily ordinary lordship, letting Him be Lord of our life, focusing on what He's calling us to do and who He is is what's going to take us from being self-focused into being Savior-focused and self-aware.

So at the beginning of this message I'm here to tell you, every person who is of an age of reason can listen to this message and understand what it's about.

And every person that desires to go home, or everyone who has a home, should take just a moment to think about what it would feel like to the ones who want you at home for you either to be uninterested or afraid of what stands between you and home.

Friends, I'm here to tell you today, when you came to Christ, the Holy Spirit put a seal on your heart that distinguished you from all those who have yet to recognize the Lordship of Christ.

That seal will be sealed again, farther down the road as we come to the nearness of Christ's return.

There will be a special sealing upon us relative to the apocalyptic or the end time issues.

That seal will be over the living presence of God in our life and evidenced by the Sabbath.

While there will be turbulence between here and home, I'm here to assure you this morning that God will carry us with those everlasting arms underneath us and we are not to face the future with fear.

So the coronavirus is here and there and it might be everywhere.

So we've lost 2000000000000 dollars out of the stock market in 5 days.

You do know there's a time coming when the only people will have what they need will be the ones who are receiving it from God.

Going home, preparing for and passing through the time of trouble.

My aunt got us the stories back when they were on these big pieces of black vinyl and they rotated 33 1 3rd times a minute and you'd set the needle down and it'd be a little scratchy and sometimes it'd stick and repeat itself.

But you know, there was a message I heard as a boy, which I want in your head as we go into this.

You know Sir Hildebrand, Sir James, and I can't remember the last Sir, but it was time for a new king and the king had no heir.

And so he called his 3 knights together, and he said he was looking to have someone that was revealed by the journey with these sacks, what he should do.

1 of the servants went out, 1 of the knights as it were, went out and immediately did amazing things with his sack.

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Preparing and Passing Through the Time of Trouble

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