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Village SDA Church

Confidence in Crisis

Ron Kelly

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

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

Confidence in Crisis - Part 3: Political Intrigue and Power

Confidence in Crisis - Part 4: The End or the Beginning?

Confidence in Crisis - Part 5: Prophetic Lockdown

Confidence in Crisis - Part 6: Faith Without Cloud or Pillar

Confidence in Crisis - Part 7: Covid-19 in a Post-Truth World

Confidence in Crisis - Part 8: Who Moved the Cheese?

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.

Finally, he comes back and destroys the city after 11 years of rebellion by the Jewish kings.

But God was trying to get their attention and show them what was coming.

God is not in the habit of keeping people in disadvantaged positions for making good decisions.

COVID-19 is the beginning, or it is a continuation, I should say, of a wake-up call.

Let's think about this, 911 about 20 years ago.

God was showing us that there was a general dynamic of hatred and instability that was growing into the relating of different nations.

We saw a restriction of some measures of liberty.

When I talked last week about survival in a surveillance state, We talked about permanent record, Edwin Snowden's book, about all the information that the United States government is gathering on us.

Now I'm not a conspiratist, although I know the Bible describes conspiracies, but the Bible reveals what those conspiracies are so that we can have confidence in the God who sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and isn't caught off guard by those who hate His faithful remnant and the advancement of His church.

I want you to think about 12 years ago, 2008, we had a wake-up call economically.

The whole thing, we could have seen all kinds of systems collapsing.

We could have seen financial chaos of an order that has never been known, that would have superseded the 1929 destruction of the stock market.

And I want you to think about the fact that right now, God is showing us how quickly the final movements can be rapid ones.

But in each of these, we see a recurring theme, and that is that our liberties can be restricted very easily.

And God is giving us a sense of the convulsions, the divine as it were deliverance pangs of God's soon coming.

So this morning I want to make a journey into the life of Esther, her experience, what it means to us.

God is calling us to recognize that larger than any political power and the muscle that can be flexed by the networks of civic structures, He's there for us in the midst of these moments.

The series in general is designed to show you the power of God to deliver.

God's people are to have confidence in times of crisis.

He's the God who takes care of overextensions of political oppression, as He did with Elisha.

He's the God who can deliver, and he delivers in the midst of political intrigue and power.

If you have your Bibles, turn to the book of Esther, just before the book of Job, just before the book of Psalms, and let's see how God related to the Jews who were not so much in exile but were still largely outside of his plan.

God had called his people to go back where the destruction had been wrought and to rebuild the temple and rebuild the components of Israelite society.

He still had plans for the nation of Israel.

The promises made to Jeremiah were promises that were to be kept.

Unfortunately, there were a number of Jews who decided that the luxury of the new Babylonian empire was more to be desired than the faith journey and the discomforts of glorifying God's name.

The beginning of this story is the story of Ahasuerus or Xerxes, depending on which version of the Bible you're reading, same person, a temperamental king, 1 not given to the steadiness of good decision making as the Bible narrative describes.

And in this introduction of this story, we find a huge party going on.

As a matter of fact, it's a party that lasts for upwards of half a year.

Verse 8 of chapter 1, the drinking was done according to the law.

There was no compulsion for so long as the king had given orders to each official of his household that he should do according to the desires of each person.

We come down to verse 10 and we find that Vashti is having her own party.

It seems to be in a much more temperate fashion.

It's the seventh day of a party, but there's an interesting commentary in this verse.

It says, the heart of the king was merry with wine.

So I want to assert to you in the beginning of this confrontation with political intrigue and power as we consider where the path of prophecy has us, I want to assure you that sobriety matters.

Inebriation, another name for intoxication.

Peter will tell us, be sober and be vigilant for your adversary the devil goes about like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

What is it that the devil would like to place into our lives that's actually poisonous to our spiritual progress?

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Series

Confidence in Crisis

Confidence in Crisis - Part 3: Political Intrigue and Power

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

For a Gift From God

43m

Unlock Revelation

16. US in Bible Prophecy

1h 14m

The Problem with Government

30m

The Great Controversy

36 The Impending Conflict

5m

Social Unrest and Prophecy

Battle Ready

49m

God is Love?

19-The Mark of the Beast

1h

Final Events

07 Satan’s Last Resort

1h 12m

Preparing For the End Times

Crisis or Commitment

47m

Talking Points, 1st Quarter 2021: Isaiah

04 The Hard Way

31m

Dare to Be a Daniel: Empowering the Final Remnant

Dare to Be a Daniel: Empowering the Final Remnant- Part 1

1h

InVerse, 4th Quarter 2019: Nehemiah: Principles of Biblical Leadership

08-Through Hidden Opposition: Strength

28m

Sound Doctrine