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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Robert Rice Weekend

Robert Rice

Spiritual Antioxidants

Thank you Let's start with the word of prayer Lord we praise you and we thank you that you have not left us orphans but you send your Holy Spirit and you have written an account of the story of creation and told us what's coming in the future, so that we can have courage in these dark times.

We invite your Holy Spirit to be with us as we dwell on your Word.

We pray that you transform us by the renewing of our minds.

So many years ago, not many, but a few years ago, I was at the Kentucky River Gorge in Lexington, Kentucky.

So I went down and I was going down to the river and I walked from my house to where the river was.

And as I got to the parking lot, before you go down the hill, there was a lot of commotion.

There was a fire truck and I'd never seen a fire truck before there.

There was people in coming in and out to look like some frantic thing went on.

I thought to myself, Oh no, there was a ropes course around there.

I thought maybe someone got hurt at the ropes course.

So I walked by and I talked to the fireman and I said, hey, you know what's going on?

And he just kind of kept walking, didn't really want to tell me.

So I saw this young lady and she was walking over to her Jeep.

And I walked up to the young lady and I said, hey, you know, I just noticed there's a lot of stuff going on here.

And she looked at me kind of sheepishly a little bit and she said, well, actually, it's because of me.

And when you go down the gorge there's 2 trails down they both end up at the same spot pretty much and if you go to the left or to the right you can't get out because it's just cliffs on 1 side and river on another side.

Well, she went down to the bottom of the hill and she went down to the left.

She ended up getting too close to the water and she slid down in a little mud pit that was a kind of cup shaped.

So, slid right down to the edge of the water and she got stuck there.

And in her own words, she was like a trapped caged animal.

She tried to climb up out of the mud, but she would just slide back down to the river and she was barely able to get enough cell phone service to make a phone call and get out of the trap that she was in.

So they went down, they got a boat, they picked her up on the side of the river, and they brought her back out.

And I thought to myself, I wonder why she kept going that direction.

So I just asked her, trying to be helpful, you know, maybe she comes here often.

I said, hey, did you know there's a map here?

I said, oh, Would you like me to get you one?" And she's like, sure.

So I went and I got her a map right from the trailhead, brought it back to her, and hopefully it was a blessing to her.

We can get in a lot of trouble in life if we don't have a good map.

And I praise the Lord that He wrote a map of life, and that's His Word.

His Word unmasks the spiritual warfare that we're unaware of if we don't read it.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, does God exist?

There's times when faith is stronger, and times when faith is weaker.

Well, I just had a prayer 1 day, and I said, God, can you please tell me, can you please show me the spiritual warfare?

1 day I was, this might have been a few days or a few weeks later.

And we walked down the hill behind her house.

And as we walked by a creek, I noticed a tree that was leaning over the creek.

And I noticed it was leaning a little bit farther than normal.

It's going to eventually lean and fall over.

And my kids were like, oh, we don't want to walk.

So I said, okay, you can play in the creek.

And as I was walking, I decided to go back, check on the kids.

I walked back past that dead tree, and all of a sudden I felt the earth shaking behind me, under my feet.

Now this was not an earthquake, not a big earthquake.

It was a very tiny 1 and it was happening right under my feet.

What was happening were the roots for that tree that was leaning over the river started snapping and that tree started falling right when I was walking by it.

Now, the big problem for me was my kids were standing where the tree was going to fall.

He saw what was happening, the oldest, and he ran away.

Now he was not in the path where the tree was going to fall.

Not by a lot, but it was going to miss him.

So I just stood staring at him, said, hey, you're going to be okay.

It's like a front stage show to my kids about to be destroyed by a tree falling down.

Now the tree falls down and it misses my kids.

It was a tall, dead ash tree, and it hit a walnut tree on the other side of the creek.

And it knocked down a walnut branch about 20 feet long, thick and heavy, and that smashed down right behind them.

So I had a tree in front of me, smashing down on the left.

I had a tree falling behind my kids, and I'm here front row watching all this happen.

And I'm thinking to myself, I didn't know those invisible roots were going to snap.

I didn't know that my kids were going to get in all that trouble.

But that shows me that there are invisible forces out there that are there.

Word Warfare

Lord, we praise you and we thank you so much for this Sabbath day.

We praise you for this rest, a chance to grow closer to you, to learn from you.

Lord, we pray that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds by meditating on your word, Lord.

So we invite your presence to be with us, that your spirit will lead us in the name of Jesus.

I would like to start with a proverb for you that tells you where a lot of power comes from that most people take for granted.

Some people realize this and they use it for good or for bad, but it's a very serious proverb.

Proverbs 18 21 says this, death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

Death and life in the power of the tongue.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Kentucky, I was walking around in their gigantic library and I came across a magazine on the special forces.

You know how they used to choose special forces for America, for places all over the world, they would say to themselves, okay, we're gonna test to see who is the smartest and we're gonna test to see who is the strongest and that's how we are gonna pick our special forces.

They realized that there was a flaw with that system.

They said, there's something else that we need here.

It doesn't matter just if you're strong and smart.

There's 2 other vital things to choose special forces.

Teamwork and leadership are all done through words.

God knows the power of words, and He wants you to understand them better, so that way you can use them in your own life to make your life better.

That way you can use them with others to make their lives better.

And that you know the secrets of the devil, how he tries to pull us down.

I want to share with you those 3 things that words can save, words can kill, and I want to show you what Jesus was like in the worst hours of his existence here on earth, because he's our example.

I just want to tell you a quick little story.

I see all these masks, you know, we're all supposed to be wearing masks, social distancing, all these things.

Well, a mask could be a good idea in some situations for a mouth.

When I was a college student at Andrews, an undergraduate, I was sitting around in the cafeteria.

There we were a bunch of guys, and then 1 girl, and this girl was talking to everybody, and she was saying how great she was at this and how great she was at that.

And, you know, she was 1 of my friends and a closer friend of my other friends.

And after hearing her say all these things, I thought, well, I would tell a little joke to help her, you know, not a good joke.

So my 10 little words to put her in her place ended up like a match to fire and it lit the table up with laughter.

And it also lit a fire under her seat because She disappeared.

She was gone at about 2 seconds flat, out the door, walking out of the cafeteria.

I had to run after her, chase her down, apologize, say that's not what I meant, and try to clean up a mess that I had created with just a few words.

It was a beautiful place to be, a beautiful place to live, until someone came and sowed seeds of discord and deception.

Words swept one-third of the angels out of heaven.

And words are still sweeping away our own peace and happiness right now.

There is a word that we can go to that will train us up so that we can use our tongues for peace and for love.

And that's what we're here to discuss today.

There is actually a verse about spiritual guardianship over your mouth, and this is in the book of Psalm, Psalm 141.

And it's a verse that reminds us that maybe we should have a mask over our face.

It says this, it says, this is David speaking, "'Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth "'and keep the door of my lips.'" We'd all be a little better off if we were a little bit more careful with what we said.

Now people in Bible times took words very seriously.

Remember his brother came, took his birthright, and then Esau comes in to his father, and he starts crying like a little baby.

Please didn't you save a blessing for me?

He all he wanted was his father to bless him to use words to bless him So it is something that we should probably all take a little more seriously.

Someone, I was given this message recently, and someone came up after me, and they said, did you know that the astronauts, before they, when they go up into space, they play music in the morning to set their tone for the day?

I went out into the sunshine for a few minutes before giving this message and it felt very good.

Well, we can bring sunshine or we can bring clouds, we can bring driving rain, and in some instances we could even bring lightning, and we do not want to do that.

Let's go to Daniel, and I'm going to go to Daniel chapter 2, and we're going to read a story where someone was on the edge of death.

Literally, a death sentence was being carried out against them.

So Daniel, we're gonna go to Daniel chapter 2 and see what those words were.

King Nebuchadnezzar, he had a dream, and in his dream, you know what happened, but he couldn't remember it.

So he told his wise men, he's like, wise men, you got to come and tell me this dream.

So not only do you have to interpret it for me, I want you to tell me because I can't remember my dream.

So then all the wise men, they say, hey, Well, we can tell you what it means.

All you got to do is tell it to us first.

And King Nebuchadnezzar, known for getting a little angry at times, says, No, I know you guys are just trying to buy time so that way you can tell me lies.

Tell me now or I will have you destroyed.

I think he was going to cut them to pieces.

They said, oh king, nobody has ever asked this of any wise men.

He said, no, you're trying to buy time until the seasons change, and I forget what I was going to do.

It says, okay, I'm going to send the captain out to kill all the Wyatt's men of Babylon.

So here comes the captain of the guard to Daniel's house.

Let's see how Daniel reacts with his words.

It says, And the decree went forth that the wise men should be slain, and they sought Daniel and his fellows to be slain." Verse 14, then Daniel answered with counsel and wisdom.

He said, why is the decree so hasty from the king?

Series

Robert Rice Weekend

Word Warfare

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Got Thinking Problems?

Coping with Our Problems - Part 1

1h 13m

Going to Extremes

1h 10m

Getting Through to God

02-I Have Trouble Everywhere

26m

Right Thinking: How to be Happy and Healthy in a World of Depression and Sickness

Right Thinking: How to be Happy and Healthy in a World of Depression and Sickness - Part 3

1h 3m

Let the Words of My Mouth

Let the Words of My Mouth- Part 1

30m

Finding Peace in the Time of Chaos

04 Tribulation’s Song

1h 7m

The Atheist Who Found God

1h 25m

Speak it in Love

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Emerging Church Symposium

The Serpent’s Whisper

1h 10m

Plenary

Humbler, Harder (and Better)?

58m

The Anchor Holds

52m

Personal Evangelism

New! Balanced Living and Fit & Free!- Transforming Health Programming Into Soul-Winning

1h 17m

Sound Doctrine