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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

The Shelf Life of a Nation Without a Conscience

Father, bless us now as we open Your word.

We want to be in a relationship with You that is both empowering and directing.

So I pray now, Lord, do for us what only You could do as we open the word.

May our lives be properly calibrated for holiness by the indwelling love of Jesus and by an understanding of the word, to the law and to the testimony.

So now, Lord, I pray, guide our deliberations through the word and from this moment on Sabbath and from our moments with You individually out into the public, where we can be salt, a preservative and flavoring agent for a society desperately needing the beauty of holiness.

Guide us to that end, I pray now in Jesus' name, amen.

The shelf life of a nation without a conscience.

You have your Bibles this morning, open them in the Book of Genesis.

I want to talk with you about conscience.

Conscience is something that God has embedded in the lives of His children as a reflection of His very nature.

The dynamic of right was never to be totally gone, even though sin would seek to erase it from the experience of man.

Conscience is a subject oft discussed in the scriptures, and this morning I want to talk with you about it.

We're living in an age where it appears that the deadening of the conscience is upon us.

It can be in the mistreatment of another person.

It can be in the dialogues that build around our ideologies and the polarizing elements of our tribe gatherings.

It can be in fraud, a form of overextending, taking advantage of other people through their ignorance.

There's all kinds of ways that our conscience can be violated.

But of course, Satan is hoping that our conscience will be wrongly calibrated so that our actions have no moral speed bumps.

In the book of Exodus, chapter 20, we have the first use of the words conscience.

I don't usually swap mosquitoes while I'm preaching, but if the windows are open, I guess we'll have to do some of that.

It says, Abraham journeyed from there toward the land of the Negev.

And he settled between Kadesh and Shur, and he sojourned in Gerar.

Abraham said of his wife, Sarah, Speaking to the magistrate of the land of Imelek.

She is my sister So a Bimalik king of Geras and took Sarah now I want to pause right here because this will be a story about a Heathen Kings conscience, but we ought to ask ourselves at this moment, what about the conscience of Abraham?

God came to Abimelech in a dream of the night and he said to him, Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you've taken for she is Mary." Now, I want to pause right here and I want to make it very evident that God speaks to all people that will listen.

Paul will talk about this in the book of Romans.

The God Spirit is alive, moving on the heart of the earth, and He's speaking to all.

The conscience is not something given to the Christian and not given to the man or the woman who's never heard the word of Christ.

As a matter of fact, we know Martin Luther would say it's neither safe nor prudent to go against conscience, and we know Paul will declare that there will be men and women in heaven who have acted upon the light they know, they've experienced a measure of freedom, because through the power of God manifest in the creation of the world, they've moved in accordance with a type of reverence and awe for life and respect of person.

So conscience is not something that's just for those who've read the Bible or had Christian parentage.

Conscience is a function in some limited measure of the revelation of God through the awesomeness of a created world.

And in what other way God should choose to give spiritual sensibility to an individual?

God chose in this night when Abimelech had in his harem the wife of a man who had been promised that he'd be the father of a nation but had no children yet, God comes and speaks in a more direct manner and says, you are a dead man.

Now, there's something about the startling directness of God that might strike us as just a bit unfair.

Why is it that Abraham can create this moment for Abimelech, and Abimelech is the 1 for whom there is this confrontation?

We ought to take good courage here that God's at work, even with those who make no profession of faith, sometimes in order to save those who do.

Abimelech is a man who apparently will not go against certain moral codes and laws.

And by the way, we're many millennia in front of Mount Sinai, and yet the dynamic of purity in a marriage and morality in regards to the marriage covenant is very clearly understood by this heathen king.

You are a dead man, because the woman you've taken, she's married.

Then Abimelech remonstrates and says, Lord, will you slay a nation even though blameless?

Verse 4, Did he not himself say to me, she is my sister?

In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands, I've done this." You have to have some measure of pity for this man in this divine warning of coming judgment, for indeed, 2 people have testified somewhat truly and certainly falsely about the real dynamic of their situation to each other.

Then God said to him in the dream, Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart, you've done this.

And I also kept you from sinning against me.

Now, therefore, restore the man's wife, for he's a prophet and he will pray for you and you will live.

But if you do not restore her, know that you shall surely die, and all who are yours." It's interesting what happens here.

It's as if not only is Abimelech's conscience being reinforced, not recalibrated, mind you, that he will become God's instrument to remind Abraham that this is really not the right way to do business.

Now, in the book of Hosea chapter 4, it says, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

And I deal with a lot of people, and many times I'm reminding them of things they already have been taught, things they already know.

Of course, I'm also dealing with a group of people for whom, after a journey of study into the Word, things are stated, and the response comes along the lines of, well, that's your conviction, it's not mine.

And mind you, God makes all the allowance in the world for you to grow into a knowledge of right and wrong.

And indeed, there is a measure of conviction that ought to be embraced personally before it's acted out.

We're not supposed to be walking through life carrying out other human beings' dictates.

At the same time, the failure to immerse oneself in a study of the Word, and I would say for Seventh-day Adventists, to fail to read the spirit of prophecy is to put oneself in dangerous ground where 1 is walking through life not properly calibrated, not knowing how dependent the world is upon the sweetness and the holiness that makes for the beauty of holiness.

In other words, there is a ignorance that sometimes has infiltrated our Christian experience that gives a false assurance and leaves us comfortable arm in arm with the world when indeed discomfort will be the result of when conscience is awakened.

The other night, the other afternoon, as we made our way through Steps to Christ in our Bible study, or I should say, our prayer sessions, I was just struck with the apparent simplicity of the journey in Christ.

God comes along and plants in your heart the seed of eternal life, the knowledge of forgiveness, the assurance that you're a child of God.

That seed has been watered by the Holy Spirit, and it has in it this word, as it lodges in the heart, has in it the principle of eternal life It sprouts and comes to life inside of you This is a good illustration for this time of year as many of you are watching your plants come up in your garden that seed will grow not because of anything that you really are responsible for, but cooperating with the laws of life, God takes what he put in it and makes it a miracle.

As that seed continues to grow, it's absolutely imperative that we continue to cooperate with those laws of life.

And by the way, our own Pastor Paige is gonna have a fantastic presentation called Restore 10 on the character of God and the 10 Commandments during our Forward to the Finish camp meeting.

Now, yesterday, in the midst of all the things that we need to do to be ready to actually practice some social distancing and have some organization about coming together to worship, my wife reminded me that she had planted some plants in her school garden over at Ruth Murdoch, and she was hoping I'd go check and see how they were doing So not knowing whether or not I'd have access to water over there I took a ice chest from this church and I filled it with water and I drove over there and I took my picture and I just poured a little bit of water on all those plants because you see, in the beginning of their journey, they're way more fragile than farther down the road when their root system is spread and established.

Yes, for those plants to grow, they needed to be placed in the dirt where they could get nutrient.

They needed water to be poured upon them.

They needed some protection from the elements of whether it be fungal attack or attack from bugs or whatever it might be.

But if those plants are placed in the right condition, they will grow.

If they're surrounded by the proper environment, they will be fruitful producers.

And eventually, some point in time, when the children are back in school and they want to go pick a little cherry tomato off the vine and taste the sweetness of the gift of life in the vegetable world provided by God, they'll have that pleasure, but along the way, there's a surrounding that they need.

Satan understands this, and he has thus attempted to destroy Christianity by surrounding us with all of the influences of the world.

So surrounded are we, not physically necessarily, although depending where you go, yes, physically.

You might be working on a site where every other word is blue.

You might be working in an environment where all the notes of music are evil.

You might be working in an environment where when you turn your eyes, it's vile.

But whether you work in those environments or not, the devil has sought to surround us by making sure there's something in our ears and something before our eyes, most of all, something in the sanctuary of our mind that is reshaping the fabric of who we are because what you're surrounded by shapes what you become.

What you're surrounded by determines whether or not you live, And when it comes to spirituality, the last 5 or 6 decades have been a war on righteous living.

The devil knows if he can surround us with unrighteous influences, he can actually bend the vine and reshape it.

He can destroy the life of the tender plant of the gospel.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

When Paul will write in the book of Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 25, that we ought to assemble together and all the more so as we see the day approaching, He could not know how the siege for the surroundings of the sanctuary of the mind would be underway at the end.

But he would be writing through the direction of the Holy Spirit in providential provision that we could be sustained by each other's prayers and encouragement, the preaching and teaching of the Word, the discussion and study of the Bible, he was making provision that God's people could actually surround themselves the right way while they were being surrounded by a technological Society and a mind or an attention economy Yes friends this morning Whether you're watching online or where you're actually in this building what you are Surrounded with is what you become And it's important for us to understand this.

It's important that we teach our children Some of us are assuming the church school will do it some of us think we we must be about the pursuit of other things, but when it comes to the Direction of a life of bent towards what is holy a preparation for citizenship in heaven It's important for us to understand what Paul wrote, that all of we with unveiled faces beholding is in a mirror.

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The Shelf Life of a Nation Without a Conscience

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