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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

The Peril of the Republic

Father, we're here before you, and whether we're in this house or whether we're watching online, I'm praying, Lord, that our hearts would sense Your nearness and that they would burn within us.

We want to honor You, Lord, with our lives, not just our lips.

We want to be bold and committed to the premises of freedom and willing to pay the price.

So I'm praying, Lord, strengthen us in the inner person.

Give us that sense of confidence that our lives are hid in Christ, that our righteousness is a gift, and this relationship an amazing privilege.

May we truly worship you for what you've done.

Bless us in this moment, in Jesus' name, Amen.

This morning is a unique morning in that it is a Sabbath, which is a day that proclaims and affirms our liberty in Christ, and it is also a anniversary of liberty for not just the American peoples, but for so many others because of the social experiment of the American peoples.

And so this morning, I'm going to extend a tremendous sense, I hope, of honor for the greatness of this country.

And if you are not a citizen of the United States of America, no offense is intended.

And yet, certainly this nation, on the surface of this globe, represents the most unique experiment in governance and the most awesome governmental issuance of liberty that the experience of humanity has ever known.

And so it is my hope when we're done here today that you will understand the great privilege and the great responsibility of the Spirit and the principles behind the American governmental experiment.

It is also my hope that we would understand the potential perils upon this system of governance and that we would be wise about the time and the age we're living in so that we might not allow the liberty, the light of liberty, to flicker or go out in our homes, in our churches, in our schools, and in our society.

You don't usually get books in the mail, And when you do, you try to understand where they're coming from.

It's an interesting book entitled The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity.

Now if you want to get the book, it'll cost you unless you're on the same mailing list.

And this is not like I signed up for a book club.

But someone figured that I might be a good recipient for this book.

The subtitle is How Modern Culture is Robbing Billions of People of Happiness.

Do you think it's actually possible that modern culture is robbing billions of people of happiness?

It's not a book that's way off on some agenda left or right.

And it's written by a New York Times bestselling author with a good last name, his name is Matthew Kelly.

I've just done a little research on it and perused it.

But I do know more about the book this morning than I knew yesterday evening when I picked it up.

It's put out by an organization called the Dynamic Catholic.

And so I want you to understand that this book is an outlier to where the book of Revelation tells us we're going.

When I say it's an outlier, I mean it's a messenger ahead of the curve.

And effectively, the American experiment gone wrong, in other words, individualism and license over responsibility and morality, is leading us on a trajectory to where eventually the resulting slavery of addiction through lack of self-control and the resulting dysfunction will call the American people to lead the way in a return to a neo-biblicalism or a neo-conservatism.

It's going to be a call back to the simple old-fashioned ways of returning to God and a people of holiness.

And 1 of the main premises of this book is how to experience holiness, how to have a holy moment.

Because the threshold of frustration with the dysfunctions of unbridled individualism and unbridled license is filling in society.

We have people right now who are refusing to work because they're making more money on unemployment than they get at their jobs where they would actually be producing something for a paycheck, which means in effect, if this is what you're doing, you're stealing from all the taxpayers who have put money into the till, not so that you could freeload on where society is in the moment, but so that you could actually protect, provide, and make your fair way in a society.

In other words, we've come to the place where the twin pillars of religion and morality are no longer holding up a free society, and without a collective conscience and without an individual conscience, people will do what's best for them.

They'll move by the emotion and the feeling of ease, complacency, and self-indulgence.

Yes, the biggest lie in the history of Christianity is an outlier to where the book of Revelation tells us liberty-loving societies are headed without even knowing it, because without the proper balance in a liberty-loving society, in other words, without self-control, self-governance cannot work.

Without moral self-governance, liberty-loving people will find themselves enslaved to their privileges their desires It matters Margaret Thatcher once said The price of freedom is still and will always be eternal vigilance.

Now let's talk about another book for a moment.

The Peril of the Pastorate is too many books.

But I'm holding in my hands now another book written by an old professor at Battle Creek College.

Percy McGann wrote a book entitled The Peril of the Republic.

I don't know how I got this book, but every once in a while, I'll notice a book on my bookshelf and I'll get it out.

And I'll set it by the chair at home, where occasionally I have time to sit down and read, and I'll start going through the book.

Or I'll set it on my desk here in the office and I'll start looking through the book.

McGann does a masterful job on the front side of his book explaining to us the amazing componentry of a government designed and legitimated by the consent of the people.

I want you to understand that the American Revolution and other revolutions, let's contrast the French Revolution, are built on 2 very different premises.

The American Revolution was built on the idea of God, Christ, and the Scriptures, the idea of man's inherent right to be recognized as a person of dignity.

It was built on the concept of self-control, self-reliance.

The French Revolution, which followed ours, was built on the concept of anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Scriptures.

In that French Revolution, they erected a woman as the goddess of wisdom and placed her on the altar in Notre Dame.

Robespierre followed with the reign of terror and 20, 000 heads rolled in the street.

The glorious beginning of the French Revolution was termed Year 1.

And what we see between these 2 revolutions is 1 is a glorious success and 1 is an unmitigated horror.

I want us to recognize in the beginning of this journey this morning that if Margaret Thatcher is right, If the price of freedom is still and always be eternal vigilance, we as a people holding a stewardship of a prophetic message ought to be eternally vigilant about understanding where we are in the ebb and flow of governmental time.

That we ought not to consider it simply our best efforts to prepare ourselves for the coming implosion of religious liberty, the coming implosion of constitutional privileges and protections.

We ought instead to proclaim that the genius, as a matter of fact, I don't want to skip over this, that word genius has captured me.

When looking at the web page of the Dynamic Catholic, the mission of the Dynamic Catholic, go there and check it out, that's where I got my book from Matthew Kelly, is to re-energize the Catholic Church in America by developing world-class resources that inspire people to rediscover the genius of Catholicism.

Now I love my Catholic brothers and sisters and don't want anything I say today to be personalized, and yet as a system, I'm about to contrast 2 things, that the genius of self-governance, the consent of the governed, is the power of the governors.

And the genius of Catholicism, what sets itself above the Bible itself, are 2 completely opposite ends of the spectrum of governmental philosophy.

The 1 dictating not only who has the right of access to the Scriptures but the right of interpretation, the 1 determining issues of life and death relative to discussions of theology and whether it bends 1 towards the heretical side or towards the Orthodox side, again based on an authority much higher in their own description of governance than the Scriptures.

In other words, this morning, what I want you to understand is that completely antithetical, in other words, opposite from the structures of all medieval governance.

And by the way, McGann will point out as well as others that for years the diabolical theology of the divine right of kings, which was heralded, supported, nurtured by the church itself for a period of over a thousand years, is the exact opposite of that which nerved the men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence.

In other words, the Scriptures teach in Acts chapter 10 verse 34 when Paul, when Peter is at the house of Cornelius, Peter announces something that has perhaps been re-echoed over time by that which true Americanism espouses is that God is no respecter of persons.

And by the way, the concept of religious liberty is different than the concept of religious toleration.

For millennia, the idea of religious liberty was something that was to be stepped on, tamped on, put down.

That's why we have the rack and the faggot.

It's because all of these things were designed to protect a ruling class, a ruling elitism of power, whether it was political or religious or combined, which for most of European history it was.

But when we come to the storyline of the American people, there is this sense that put inside every human being was a God-given Inalienable right, that we were all created not equal in capacity, not equal in ability, not equal in so many things, but in the God-given right to the freedom and pursuit of happiness.

This is a scriptural teaching, and this is a truly inspired form of governance as far as it goes, this idea that governance is a issued privilege given by those being governed.

It is a consent of the governed that you have the right to govern.

This is a biblical sentiment, standing in direct contradiction to all the lines of regalness and royalty throughout all time.

The American experiment is not only an act of genius for which we would describe far too man-made glory, the American form of government was actually a final act of governance on the face of the planet of the work of inspiration.

That God would re-remind all that in the sight of God there are not 2 tiers in society, the royal with the illimitable and unlimited powers to confer their will on the people, those of a lesser status, who must simply open wide and receive.

No, the American experiment believed in the rule of law and order, governed upon, as Washington would say, the 2 principles of morality and religion.

And while the Constitution was to respect no religion over another or to support it, It was understood that the componentry of self-governance would be a function of a culture, a home, a family, a church, a society in which God And the principles from which these inalienable rights were given and recognized would be the center, the operating locus, the loci, the centering point, as it were, for how a people should live and move and decide.

In other words, for these men who signed their names to these documents, there was this new sense that all could be a part of the journey of a nation developing, moving, growing, establishing, and in the end, That there would be accountability for all, whether they were on the voting side up or on the political side down.

This morning I want to remind you that the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Reading from Patriarchs and Prophets, page 616, the context is the fact that Saul has been made a new king.

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The Peril of the Republic

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