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Village SDA Church

Confidence in Crisis

Ron Kelly

Confidence in Crisis - Part 1: When Nature Dies: The Almost Last Supper

Father, we are here before You this morning looking for Your presence, Your anointing Spirit, Lord, to touch and to teach.

Thank You for Your provision through the years, and I pray may Your Word come alive.

We look to You now, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen.

Years ago, when I didn't have all of my 4 children, I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I was given the opportunity to go for an airplane ride with 1 of my wife's relatives.

He was a gifted pilot and had flown for the Drug Enforcement Agency, and he would fly over the mountains of Appalachia looking for plots of marijuana.

Now, I had not flown a lot, and little airplanes relate to the environmental conditions differently than big ones do.

Although, most of you have probably been in a big airplane and you've looked out the window and you've seen those wings flapping while you're going through the turbulence.

Most of us don't like running through the potholes of the sky on a large silver bullet.

The first time you experience though, you'd like to be with somebody who you could ask a question.

And the question you'd like to ask, and the question that I've asked at different times is, is this normal?

If the answer's no, your stress goes through the roof.

If the answer's yes, you remain with a measure of stress and duress in the midst of the moment, but it's not quite as bad.

So my wife, my 2 boys sat in the backseat of this small Cessna.

And on this given day, it was very sunny.

And I began to learn about thermals, the updrafts of the air and the downdrafts of the air.

And I can remember flying in that little bitty airplane, and it wasn't the rough ride like you just hit a pothole.

It was the fact that you felt like you were on a huge sea with swells of a thousand feet or more, and the airplane would all of a sudden just beat, you'd feel like you were being pushed into your seat.

And other times it felt like you were in a slow motion free fall.

And what was supposed to be a joyous ride turned out to be not very joyous at all, especially for the 2 boys who were very little, probably 3 and 5.

I have some pictures that commemorate the moment.

And you can see stress written on the face of the little children.

My pilot, however, was enjoying this and explaining to us that depending on what the surface of the ground was underneath us related to how much updraft there was.

And that little airplane was just riding along on these big swells of the unseen air currents.

When we finally got down to the ground, my wife likes to remind me of how my oldest son, finally with a measure of relief on his face, looked at her and said, I'm sure glad I had my seatbelt on.

There's something about a childlike understanding of a circumstance that illustrates to us something very important this morning.

And that is that God cares for His children, Whether their understanding is large about the issues going on behind them, or whether they're looking with simplicity of heart into circumstances that trouble them.

I can remember my first flight into Midway, living not far away from Chicago as I do, and the plane banked this way and banked that way and dipped and I did turn to my seatmate and say, is this normal?

This morning, friends, we're in a period of time that's not normal.

We're experiencing in probably 3 or 4 generations something that we've never experienced before.

Maybe never as a nation this kind of biological risk, but certainly it's been at least 3 generations, maybe 4, since we had to deal with the idea of food scarcity across the nation.

My grandfather fought in World War II, both in the Army and in the Navy.

During that period of time, those who lived stateside were familiar with something called a ration card.

Now, we don't have ration cards today, nor do we have long lines in most places.

But what we've seen in the supermarkets as of late is a little bit troubling.

People running to make sure that they have what they need and probably going beyond what they need.

1 healthcare worker was chastising the residents of a large city not long ago saying, look, we're working almost nonstop to serve you, and when we show up at the supermarket, it would be nice if there was some food left for us.

Are we looking out for ourselves in such a way that actually increases our stress, destroys our faith, and robs God of a witness?

Are we able to face this moment of uncertainty and other ones that are coming with confidence?

This morning, I've entitled my message, When Nature Dies, the almost Last Supper.

I want to talk to you this morning about the stories of the Old Testament scriptures that illustrate the future challenges of God's faithful covenant-keeping people.

And I've chosen this morning to focus on the life of an unknown woman and a very prominent prophet.

Take your Bibles, if you would, this morning and open them up to the book of 1 Kings, looking at chapter 16.

There is no real warm up to his appearance on the prophetic stage.

The abruptness of his appearance in Scriptures must be somewhat akin to the abruptness of his appearance before Ahab, the king of the northern 10 tribes.

When Ahab is confronted by Elijah, he's told that it's going to be a long time until it rains.

It's going to be a long time until there's dew on the grass.

The problem was that the nation of Israel had apostatized.

It had moved away from its simple fidelity to Christ.

It had brought into its ranks, no doubt with the help of Ahab's Queen Jezebel, the worship of Baal.

He was responsible for the rain that fell on the land of Israel.

And it's no wonder that we should find that there is this showdown between the god whose promise to create seasons and abundance of the ground and this false God concocted by the heathen nations around them." The Bible says in 1 Kings chapter 17, verse 1, Elisha the Tishbite was of the settlers of Gilead.

He said to Ahab, as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dune or rain these years except by my word.

The word of the Lord came to him saying, Go away from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is in the east of the Jordan.

It shall be that you will drink of the brook, and I've commanded the ravens to provide for you there.' So he went and he did according to the word of the Lord.

For he went and he lived by the brook Cherith, which is east of Jordan.

And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he would drink from the brook.

But it happened after a while that the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published what would become the first seminal work on issues of environmental dynamics in Western worlds.

The profiting of the title suggests that at some point in time the natural cycle of this Earth would be destroyed by man's ravaging of the natural environment.

A generation later, when I was in college, I can remember that the element that we were dealing with was acid rain.

In my speech class, I felt it almost my duty to dialogue about what our industrial pollutants, especially our power plants, were doing to change the chemistry of the sky and kill lakes in upper New York State.

Now, a generation later, as my children are going through and finishing up college, we deal with a whole new plight.

Indeed, there is a generation, especially amongst the young, who are growing in frustration and desperation relative to the treatment of the planet and the future inheritance or lack of that will be theirs.

There's no doubt that the Bible talks about the fact that this world will grow old like a garment.

And there's no doubt that eventually, whether it's man-caused or God intervened, that there will be trauma on the face of the earth similar to the trauma that's told in this story.

So I want to ask you, how did you relate to the idea of not being able to go out and shop as frequently?

Or even just the perceived idea that there might not be food on the shelf for you when you got there?

When I showed up to Walmart in our small community earlier this week, there was a police car parked out front.

The lights were on, we got into the store, I went in on the market on the home goods side as opposed to the side where the food is.

It just so happened that it was the food side where the police had been.

And there in 1 of the aisles of the market there had been a fight.

Now, I don't know if the fight was over food.

In this society, the population density is not like it is on the east or the west coast.

But I know later on when I was shopping with my wife, the police car was still out there and I heard things falling to the floor.

Little did I realize there was a person a few aisles away throwing them at the stalker.

Turned out she was related to the person that had been in a fight.

I told my wife, wait here, I didn't know what was going on.

And I peered around the corner and found the lane, later asked somebody what had been happening.

You probably weren't involved in a physical altercation to get your food.

Confidence in Crisis - Part 2: Survival in a Surveillance State

Father, thank You for the nearness of Your presence through Your Holy Spirit, opened by the great condescension of Your Son, reflecting who You are, showing us the desires of Your heart.

I pray now, Lord, bless us as we look for those revelations in Your Word.

Help us to understand for the times in which we live, the ever-present blessing of the simple and amazing gift of your gift of Jesus.

Now, Lord, we put this message, this time, our times in your hands.

Send your spirit now to both touch, annoy, transform, and teach.

You wouldn't be surprised if I were to talk to you with a message entitled survival in a surveillance state.

You wouldn't be surprised for me to talk with you about different countries around the world where we know a dictatorship is in place and surveillance and control through information about one's personal and private life are utilized as part of the apparatus to keep everyone in line.

Writing in November of last year, Charlie Campbell tells about the surveillance state in China, where it's estimated that they have 200 million closed captioned televisions or television cameras to keep track of their 1 billion citizens.

He specifically speaks of Chongqing with a census of 15.35 million and 2.58 million surveillance cameras.

He opens his article with the story about a woman waking early, going down to join a small group of other older women for a exercise class.

In her hurry that morning, she drops her purse, which fortunately is seen by 1 of the surveillance cameras and taken by a police officer to lost and found.

The article is bookended by 2 very positive stories from the Chinese point of view of how wonderful it is to have this security and this overarching sense of someone looking out for you.

The purse is returned to its original owner and she is glad.

Interestingly enough, China appears to be the leader in the artificial intelligence facial recognition technology, at least if not the leader, certainly racing to the forefront with other developed nations, especially the United States.

They've developed technology so good that at 150 feet away, they can tell who you are by how you walk, even if they can't see your face.

It turns out that white men are much easier to identify than women, especially women of color.

Japanese scientists have developed a type of glasses that is designed to fool the technology.

And he ends his story interacting with a shopkeeper in Beijing, actually in Chongqing.

Shopper Li Hongmei sees only positives with this surveillance state.

She says that the public CCTVs, closed caption television cameras, right outside her convenience store didn't stop a spate of thefts.

So she had 6 cameras installed inside the shop.

Within days, she says, she nabbed the serial thief who had been pilfering milk from her shelves.

And the article ends with this statement, from lie.

She says, Chinese people don't care about privacy.

Truth of the matter is, Americans are watched more than they know.

Some call it a surveillance capitalistic environment.

It's not so much that it's about limiting our freedoms as much as it is tracking our habits, our appetites, our spending.

Writing in what is a tracking pixel, we get this summary.

Well, you say, sure, I know what a pixel is.

That's how you define what the resolution is on my computer monitor.

These small units measure digital images and graphics that you see on websites.

And when all these pixels join together, they form an image, a text, or a video that displays on a computer device.

But if you're a marketer, you've also likely heard of tracking pixels.

Tracking pixels are code snippets added to websites in order to gather information.

They're crucial for marketers when it comes to retargeting ads and improving conversion rates.

And today, tracking pixels are used over the internet without most of us even realizing it.

This snippet of code is added to your website to create a one-by-one pixel graphic.

The tiny size makes it unlikely to be noticed by visitors, and tracking pixels are usually designed to blend in with your existing site or to be transparent.

And when a user visits your site, the tracking pixel loads to collect information about them as they browse your website.

The opening system they use, the operating system they use, the type of device they use, the screen resolution they use, what time they visited, activities during a session, and your computer's IP address.

You're familiar with cookies, where you are at least warned that you've gone to a site that they exist.

Most of you are not familiar with the tracking pixel, and yet this is why when you get online to look at some item, later on on another webpage, that advertisement for that exact same item is going to come up along the sidebar of your website.

And you sort of know and you've sort of known, but what you don't realize is how much they know.

The New York Times tells us that health officials in Britain are building an app that would alert people who come in contact with someone known to have the coronavirus.

The project aims to adapt China's tracking efforts for countries wary of government surveillance.

So we don't want exactly what the Chinese have, we want something different.

But if you have this app on your phone, because they're using this GPS locating technology along with a wide network of information, they can tell you if in the course of your day you came into contact with someone who has the coronavirus.

Wall Street Journal records this, as the country scramble to control the rapidly spreading coronavirus, government agencies are putting in place or considering a range of tracking and surveillance technologies that test the limits of personal privacy.

The technologies include everything from geolocation tracking that can monitor the locations of people through their phones to facial recognition systems that can analyze photos to determine who might have come in contact with an individual who later tested positive for the virus, according to people familiar with the matter.

In Shenzhen, China, just outside of Hong Kong, They have facial recognition software installed on many of the stoplights, to where if you cross as a jaywalker, before you get to the other side, you've been recognized as a person and publicly shamed for breaking the law.

Some are suggesting that 5G technology is not so much about enhanced phone ability as it is the backbone, the bridge for an enhanced artificial intelligence and surveillance system that would allow for things like the massive influx of information that's needed to keep this kind of track of people.

Just a little over a year ago, as I was looking through my AARP magazine, they were dealing with the idea of how much data are you leaving behind, how much personal information are you sharing.

And in 1 part of the magazine, they were referencing to the idea of having 1 of these Google devices or smart speakers in your home.

Doc Searles, editor in chief at Linux Journal, calls a smart speaker a personal data fire hose squirting from your house.

Now, I don't think the word squirting fits with a fire hose.

Gushing, pouring, whatever the word might be.

So, actually this morning I'd like to invite 1 of my associates to come up here because he had an interesting experience with 1 of these devices.

1 of your relatives bought you this device, Pastor Dennis, and you used to enjoy almost trying to annoy this device.

Tell me about some of the questions you'd ask.

My son did buy us the device and the Google Home device.

And, you know, I'd ask it questions about who is Jesus, what day is the Sabbath.

I'd ask it about the weather and different things.

And I'd ask it, are you telling me the truth, Google?

And it would give me this spiel about how honest it is.

I'd even ask it at times, are you spying on us, Google?

Oh, your security is of the utmost importance.

And 1 day a friend had come over and I was sharing with him some of the questions I'd ask and I was asking Google these questions and we're going through the whole spiel and my wife would tell me, stop messing with that thing like it was an actual person right, right, And I just, I said, you know what honey, I said, it makes me laugh.

And you know, you have to say, hey Google, to get it to talk to you.

Now, It's supposed to be that way because by design this device is listening for commands.

And in some of the early days of this device, they say in the beta format before it was really out in the public, it was taking in scores of information, scores of chapters of people's lives that they didn't know about.

And I had stopped talking to it because now I'm entering in dialogue with my wife, and I'm still talking with my friend.

Now, and my wife just reminded me, this thing laughed at me at that moment, But it did not laugh in a woman's voice.

Confidence in Crisis - Part 3: Political Intrigue and Power

This morning I've entitled my message, Political Intrigue and Power.

This is a series called Confidence in Crisis.

In the first of the messages, we looked at the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.

And what we saw was that God has faithful people, sometimes in the most surprising places.

The widow of Zarephath was in the habit of offering hospitality.

She had been directed by God to put the needs of his work first in the form of his prophet.

If she had not done that, she would have missed out on the sustaining power of God and the amazing faith-building journey of God sustaining her needs.

Elijah had to actually cross a line and put himself first in this situation because it was an actual test in regards to the experience of this woman.

We also saw that in Elisha's ministry, there were more miraculous miracles with food than any other prophet in the Bible.

And So for those hundreds of days where the woman was provided food miraculously, which sustained Elijah and also with the raven and also with the angelic preparation of food and also with the fact that Elijah ran 40 days down to Mount Sinai in the strength of those 2 angelic meals.

Important for us to understand, God has no problem providing food for his people in the time of trouble.

There will be hunger at different times along the way.

No doubt this will be a test to see if we trust that God can provide for us as He provided for those in the past.

So, let us not think as we march into the future that we will never be hungry.

We will have bread and water provided for sure, but we will also be tested to see if we can be okay while we're waiting for God to meet our needs.

Last week we looked at confidence in crisis while we were surviving in a surveillance state.

And we saw that Elisha was God's instrumentality for knowing the words of the Aramean king when he was in his most private palatial estate.

That Aramean king didn't like this insight that was coming providentially to the prophet, and he surrounded the city of Dothan, and we saw that God is well able to take care of his children when they are limited in their freedom by way of regimes or laws that limit mobility or the exchange of idea and thought.

This morning we're going to be looking at an amazing story, and this time we're going to be looking at political intrigue and power.

Now I have a purpose in this series of sermons and it's to show you that in the time of the end the only provision that will be any good in the sustaining and protecting of God's people will be the presence of God.

In other words, it will be the spiritual confidence in this unseen God who is absolutely real and alive to us that will be our shelter in the time of storm.

There will be no provision of money or food or wilderness survival skills or any of these other things that will make the difference.

Now, there will be a moment in time in which country living and being out from under the watchful eye of the masses and the dynamics of networking inside these highly intensely populated areas, there will be some measure of validity to a bit of preparation that precedes the time of trouble.

But when it comes to the moments in which the battle is on and the intense desire of Satan is to destroy God's people, 1 thing and 1 thing alone will keep us alive, which is why learning to practice the presence of Christ in our ordinary day-to-day lives today is so important.

Maybe God prompts you to put a little more money on the offering plate.

Maybe he's actually prompting you to a consistent systematic giving that puts you out of your comfort zone.

Maybe it's less money in the savings account.

Maybe it's not as nice a house or maybe it's getting by with an older car.

Maybe it's learning to get by with secondhand this or secondhand that.

There was a phrase that was in my mother's or my wife's mother's family.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.

We would do a lot better to be practicing that right now so that we could put more time, energy and money into the cause of God.

It's not our 401k that's going to be our salvation, although if Jesus lingers, we'll need it, so I'm not suggesting we don't make provision for it, but friends, learning to hear the voice of God moving us in the now, getting us out of our comfort zones into a discomfort zone that's divinely architected creates faith because learning to hear the voice of God is the preeminent relational skill that we're going to need in the time of the end.

That voice behind us saying, as Isaiah 30 says, this is the way, walk ye in it, is not waiting for the time of the end.

And like our Sabbath school lesson is taking us on a journey with the living word of God, the living Word Jesus, we're to be walking with Him in that now.

Now I had somebody email me this week asking how I was sure that COVID-19 was not the beginning of the end.

Well, I'm not a prophet, So I can't say absolutely that it's not the time of the end, although we're living in that general time of the end.

But next week I'm going to spend, I think, most of the sermon, if not the entirety of the sermon, focusing on why the spirit of prophecy and the scriptures are not describing this as the final movements.

I want you to think about how God wants people to know what's coming.

He's not out to surprise people and then pull the rug out from under them.

There were 10 plagues because God wanted to wake up every Egyptian who would be willing to be woken out of their stupor.

When we think about the experience of 20 years of Babylonian oppression upon the Jews in the sixth or seventh century BC, Nebuchadnezzar came, he took Daniel back.

This time he took Ezekiel and 10, 000 artisans and craftsmen.

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Confidence in Crisis

Confidence in Crisis - Part 1: When Nature Dies: The Almost Last Supper

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