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Village SDA Church

Education Reformation

Ron Kelly

Education Reformation: Inexcusable Ignorance

We've been blessed already, and for that we are thankful.

And now I'm asking, Lord, that your Spirit would make our hearts ready, Make us willing.

Bless us now, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen.

This morning I am continuing in the second of a series of 5 sermons on education reformation.

Last Sabbath I talked about let the righteous women rise up.

We noted at least 5 individuals in the first chapters of the book of Exodus that put in place the delivery of hope through the deliverance of Moses.

This morning I don't want for a moment to minimize the power of the home.

And it doesn't cease to be a school just because people graduate.

The instructors, as long as they live, by God's grace, are blessings to those that they have put on the path of life.

So I'm appealing to you moms and dads, I'm appealing to you adult children, don't harden your heart and be stiff-necked.

Just because you reach the age of maturity doesn't mean You've achieved all things in relationship to the elements of our spiritual growth.

So may we be humble to each other and follow the admonition of the New Testament to have spirits that are submissive to each other.

This morning I'm going to go on the next leg of the journey.

And the next leg of the journey is a story that was prophesied 300 years before it came to be.

Take your Bibles this morning and open them up to the book of Kings, 1 Kings chapter 13.

I'm going to picture frame the story this way.

We've had the amazing journey of a king named Saul who was spiritually unfit over time because the pride of his place and his position overwhelmed his submission to the Lord.

He was a persecutor of the next king, but the next king was faithful in many respects and repentant when not.

And then finally, the son of David, Solomon, comes onto the throne, and Solomon is postured for the most amazing success, to fulfill the goals of the Israelite nation in the world.

And we see some of it with the Queen of Sheba coming and paying homage to the wisdom of Solomon's God.

This is a journey that was about to go wrong.

Solomon in his spiritual lostness becomes oppressive in the financial and tax structures of the nation.

And he multiplies horses and wives, as was prophesied in the Old Testament that would happen when they had a king.

And when his kingship is ended and his son is on the throne, Rehoboam by name, he gathers the sages, the ancient men, and he asks for their counsel, because the people are saying, relief, we need relief.

And Rehoboam hears the counsel and dismisses it, but then gathers his friends who speak to him the words of affirmation about the significance of his position and the power in his role.

And he tells the tribes that, my father's waist will look like my pinky.

There not only will be no relief, but since I'm in charge, it'll be my way.

There's a need for some kind of leader in the northern kingdom.

That man would be none other than Jeroboam.

Jeroboam had been exiled to Egypt, but he's come back and he is now the de facto leader of the 10 tribes, and he understands quite well that this is a spiritual people, given to spirituality.

And he sets up a place of worship in contradistinction to the temple in Jerusalem.

He understands these people have religious habits and the joy of Fellowshipping and if they continue going back to Jerusalem they will rejoin the kingdom of the south and so He establishes a place of worship in Bethel, and He enacts a decision that had been enacted by the will of the people before, and that is to have something to worship, something visible.

And in 1 Kings 13, we have a protest from God Himself.

Now this is 300 years before the subject matter of today's message, but it is the launching pad for education reformation.

1 Kings 13, verse 1, says, Now, behold, there came a man of God from Judah to Bethel.

By the word of the Lord, wild Jeroboam was standing at the altar to burn incense.

He cried against the altar by the word of the Lord, and he said, O altar, altar, Thus says the Lord, Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name.

And on you he shall sacrifice the priest of the high places, who burn incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.

Then he gave a sign the same day, saying, This is the sign which the Lord has spoken.

Behold, the altar shall be split apart, and the ashes which are on it shall be poured out.

Now when the king heard the saying of the man of God, which he had cried against the altar in Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar saying, Seize him!

But his hand, which he stretched out against him, dried up so that he could not draw it back to himself.

The altar also was split apart, and the ashes were poured out from the altar according to the sign which the man of God had given by the word of the Lord." God, in His great mercy, restores Jeroboam's hand.

And now I want to fast-forward 300 years.

I want to picture frame where we are in the story of Israelite history.

We've had good King Hezekiah, who made a mistake and showed Babylon the riches of the temple precincts.

We have his son Ammon, who comes to the throne and is only on the throne for a few years, and then we come to the experience of Josiah.

Josiah is the 1 who is 8 years old and who will become the 1 who institutes the final great effort at reform in the Israelite experience.

The 10 nations to the north are gone when Josiah is on the throne.

They've been disseminated by the Assyrians, never to be collected again, a warning to the final 2 tribes in the Saul.

And as we come to the storyline of our scripture reading this morning, the nation of Israel is on the edge of divine retribution.

Josiah will enact many and mighty reforms.

When he dies in 609 B.C., there will only be 3 years before King Nebuchadnezzar shows up and begins orienting the nation of Israel to its new future.

Over a period of almost 20 years, Nebuchadnezzar will give Judah a chance to play by the rules, to be a cooperative vassal state.

So I want to explain right from the beginning of this message that Josiah is a last best chance for reformation, and Josiah is God's instrument for a message of repentance.

Now take your Bibles and go to 2 Kings 22.

And let us look at the story, the story of a boy who grows into a man and becomes a great reformer.

He was 8 years old, verse 1 says, when he became king.

Verse 2, he did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David, nor did he turn aside to the right or to the left.

Now, this phraseology, 1 commentary said, was common amongst the Israelites in regards to the rectitude of a leader, but where does it come from?

Take your Bibles and go back to the book of Joshua.

Joshua chapter 1, I want you to see where it comes from.

Because it is a promise that is important for us in the moment in which we live.

Joshua chapter 1, beginning with verse 5.

It says, no man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life Just as I have been with Moses.

I will not fail you or forsake you be strong and courageous for the Lord shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them only be strong and courageous Be careful to do according to all the law which Moses my servant commanded Do not turn to from it to the right Or to the left So that you may have success Wherever you go verse 8 This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.

Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." This morning, I want to assure you that the promises made to Joshua were as true and waiting to come to fruition for Josiah as they are for you and for me.

God does not intend that His church come to the end and stumble in exhaustion across the spiritual finish line.

God intends that His people receive blessings that can be attributable only to divine partnership and divine intervention for your life individually and for the corporate work of the church.

There is indeed this continued covenantal blessing that God wants to place upon His people, and that relates specifically to fidelity to the law of God.

And this expression found in the book of Kings is an expression about Josiah moving according to a knowledge of right and wrong out of the law, out of the inspired word.

We have come to an interesting place in society where we have found, and more importantly in the sub-society of Adventist faith and the 3 Angels' Messages, where we have found ourselves taking our cues from the latest scientific study, the latest sociological data.

And this morning I'm here to announce, as we continue in this journey of education reformation, that it is time for us to come back to a partnership with God and the instruction of inspiration for the success that the world needs and deserves so that it can be warned through an army rightly trained, even an army of youth.

This morning as we look at a young person, a young person whom I believe was saved from the sullying licentiousness of his age.

His father only reigned for 2 years before he was killed by his own servants.

And what this does is it places a young boy who has not yet been caught up in the meat grinder of the licentious cult that was operating in the temple precincts.

He's a boy still in his intimacy with a tendency to spiritual sensitivity and God will go around the generation preceding him and he will do a work which is built upon an amazing discovery.

Verse 3, 2 Kings 22, Now in the eighteenth year of the king of Josiah, the king sent Shaphan, the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshalam, the scribe, to the house of the LORD, saying, go up to Hilkiah the priest that he may count the money brought into the house of the Lord, which the doorkeepers have gathered from the people.

Let them deliver it to the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord, and let them give it to the workmen who are in the house of the Lord to repair the damages to the house.

So the carpenters and the builders and the masons, and for buying timber and hewn stone to repair the house, only no accounting shall be made with them for the money delivered into their hands, for they deal faithfully." Quite an amazing statement of trust in a generationally compromised royal situation.

Verse 8, Then Hilkiah the priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.

And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan who read it.

Shaphan the scribe came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord.

And moreover, Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.

And Shaphan read it in the presence of the king.

When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.

Education Reformation: The Prophet and the Professor

We've been blessed in song and reading and giving.

Now Lord, may our hearts be impressible by your Spirit.

May we walk in your path and know the joy you intended.

This morning I'm going to tell the story surrounding the most famous verse in the Bible.

So if you don't know it, take a Bible out of the pews and let's turn to it together.

Many have committed this to memory, and this morning, we're gonna look at how it came into being.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Now this nation is peculiarly a religious nation, And that tone or that culture is under siege.

I have an article here up from The Independent in the United Kingdom, and it's entitled Almost Half of U.S.

Millennials don't know, believe, or care if God exists, the study finds.

More than 4 in 10 millennials in the United States do not know, believe, or care if God exists, according to Arizona Christian University research.

A report produced by the University's Cultural Research Center concluded that the generation of Americans currently between 18 and 36 are threatening to reshape the nation's parameters beyond recognition with 43% either atheist or apathetic towards the existence of God.

Now if I was a member of that nation, if this was my culture that was being talked about, I'd have to ask myself What value does the presence of God bring to benefiting society?

I know just the other day, actually yesterday, as I was pulling away from a department store, I watched probably 2 or 3 cars go through the intersection when the light was clearly red.

Now I want to tell you, law abiding is a beautiful thing.

And I want to tell you graciousness in the people you deal with.

I was standing in a line and somebody asked me if I'd like to go in front of them because all I had was 1 item.

I can tell you there are cultures, atheistic cultures in this world, places I have been, where the only value that's operative is me first.

And it's as simple as standing in a queue to get a ticket to go on a train or an airplane, everybody crowding and having no qualms of conscience about cutting you off, etc.

What does it mean to you to live in a society where the attributes of God as evidenced in the 10 Commandments matter?

Now it's not hard for a society to lose its way.

As a matter of fact, if you tinker with education and you remove the presence of God from the character building, you're left with minds that are powerful, but with hearts that are untouched by the conscience, untouched by the sense of goodness and things that ought to be done for the betterment of man, not for money, not for personal gain.

When it comes to the element of education, if you could change the way the parents are parenting, and if you could change the way the parents are parenting, and if you could change the way the teachers are teaching, within a generation or 2, you could change the whole culture.

And this is exactly what's gone on in our country over the last 50 years.

And as Jordan Peterson will mention, a life without responsibility is a life without meaning.

The problem is, is that we've become wealthier and more educated with more opportunity, and we've lost the sense of our humanity, of our flawedness.

We've lost the sense of our carnal nature which is naturally bad.

And we found a generation that isn't very aware.

There's a basic vacuum of calm reflection and thinking in our society and consequently people are moving on not aware that they're lost in a need of a Savior and seeing God and religion is in the way of progress.

I want to take you into the Bible, into a story of a man who saw himself in somewhat of the same way.

If you're in John chapter 3, we're going to look at the story of a very intelligent man by the name of Nicodemus, a member of the ruling class of the Jews in the day of Jesus, a 1 who did not see himself in need of the presence of the Messiah that was upon the face of the earth at that time, and yet indeed his need would be brought to his attention.

John chapter 3, looking at verse 1, the New Testament gospel of John, fourth book of the New Testament.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of The Jews.

The Pharisees were a group of people that were in charge of making sure the society of the nation kept the law.

This man came to Jesus by night, and he said to him, Rabbi, we know that you've come from God As a teacher, for no 1 can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

Jesus answered and he said to him, Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless 1 is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old?

He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless 1 is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that Which is born of the Spirit of Spirit do not be amazed that I said to you you must be born again The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it But you do not know where it comes from and where it's going So is everyone who is born of the Spirit and Nicodemus said to him?

How can these things be And Jesus answered and said to him, are you the teacher in Israel, and you do not understand these things?

Truly, truly, I say unto you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we've seen, and you do not accept our testimony.

If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

No 1 is ascended to heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man." That's a reference to Jesus.

"'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

These next 2 verses are very important, and they relate specifically to the article I mentioned of 43% of our millennials not caring, knowing, or believing in the existence of God.

For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

But he who does not believe has been judged already because he's not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

This is judgment, that the light has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil.

Now let me make sure you understand what we just read.

You have a very intelligent man who believes he's not lost.

You have a prophet who has no professional education or training.

You have a poor man who's come from heaven.

He spoke the cosmos into existence, and the billions and trillions of stars began sparkling.

He's sitting there in a poor man's garb on the Mount of Olives just outside of Jerusalem, and a very well-to-do, well-informed, well-educated man, too embarrassed to be seen with Jesus in the middle of the day, finds him in the dark of night.

He comes with a compliment for Jesus and Jesus immediately tells him we can't have this kind of conversation Because Nicodemus you don't understand who I am and you're not acknowledging your need a need only I can fulfill Jesus tells him unless you're born again.

Nicodemus has been in the mindset of looking at things with the wrong set of glasses.

In our scripture this morning, we saw that spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

Now, Nicodemus has an interest in understanding Jesus.

Jesus has cleansed the temple in the last part of John chapter 2.

He drove the merchandisers out of the temple precincts.

And Nicodemus was under the same conviction that much was going wrong in the church, but he was not under the conviction that much was wrong in his own life.

And so when he compliments Jesus as a teacher, Jesus says in effect, I'm much more than a teacher, unless you're born again, you'll never go to heaven.

And for Nicodemus, this is a very alien thought because he's born of Abraham, and he thinks he's got an automatic pass into the heavenly courts.

It's not your lineage, it's not your parents, it's not the promises made to other people, it's the relationship you have with Me.

And Nicodemus, you're a sinner, and you need what I've come to bring, and you've got to be born again.

Now, it's not a storyline of physical rebirth.

It's the selfish carnal nature that is able to be remade into the beautiful nature of Jesus.

Nicodemus doesn't really understand this, and that's why Jesus is able to say to him, you mean you don't understand that the carnal nature has to die and a new nature has to be reborn?

Education Reformation: Cancer on Christian Education

Father, thank you for something better to think about and the hope of heaven, and I pray Lord please write your words on our heart and may we love being with you and reflecting on what you're looking forward to doing and reflecting on what you've already done.

We put all things in your hands now and ask that you'll bless our time together.

We're in the midst of a series of sermons on education reformation.

And this morning we're gonna take on some challenges.

I wanna encourage everybody to be sweet and humble.

I've gotten a variety of text messages after the first service, and the last 1 said you did not touch on my idol and you're right there's a lot of things I won't touch on here today but I am looking to deal with the things that corporately affect us as we disciple our young and it's important that we are humble and gracious and kind and that we just grow with each other.

But sometimes we find that we have drifted off course.

We have what our educational superintendent in the Michigan Conference calls mission drift.

And this morning I don't use the words cancer casually.

It is something that is these are things robbing us of our passion for Christ and the proclamation of the 3 angels messages.

So let's do a little preparation for the message like this.

The message of John the Baptist if you were to sum it up in 1 word, what was the 1 word?

The message of Jesus when he started preaching was repent.

He was God in the flesh, and he said, John the Baptist is Elijah if you can accept it.

Now in the book of Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, chapter 4, the scriptures tell us that before the great and terrible day of the Lord, he will send Elijah the prophet.

It is a call for us to recognize God's preparing a people to give a message.

And that same message will be along the same lines.

Now, are we to live in this constant sense of condemnation?

No, there's no condemnation now, those that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh but walk according to the Spirit and So this morning I'm inviting you to come humbly to a journey in which the Spirit can speak and whatever he says we will do but along the way the message of gospel proclamation has involved an acknowledgment that our feet are on the wrong path and they are to move to a different 1.

Now if you practice Seventh-day Adventism as a somewhat preferred lifestyle, it's a ritual of your youth, you come here every Sabbath, that's about all you do, this message won't have a lot of relevance to you.

I don't think that's many, but I am challenging you this morning to make sure that you are a true seeker on the path that is narrow and upward leading.

Our goal is heaven and today is a day to think about how we might need to adjust course.

1 more thing I'll say before we open the Bible and that is this that When you go to a physician you're Praying that that physician will do a good job of diagnosing your problem And then a good job of prescribing a plan to remedy it But we all know that Some doctors seem to have a particularly good gift for the ministry of health, and some maybe not as much.

My point is this, in the day of Jeremiah, there were true prophets and there were false prophets.

And what the difficulty of this day and age is is that as we anticipate the coming of Jesus and Jeremiah's message was a message of judgment it's important that we tune our ear with the spirit sensitivity so that we can discern and test the spirits.

And this morning, I want to challenge you to be a humble Berean.

You know, those who examined what the Apostle Paul had to say, they searched it out in the Scripture.

And for me, I'm hoping when we're all said and done that we have more encouragement for the path Jesus is marking out for us.

No wagging of the fingers, no negative condemning spirits, no we're-better-than-them mentalities.

Instead this morning I am hoping that we can go away with a collective sense of some things we may need to adjust and let go of and other things that we want to embrace more wholeheartedly.

Now when an institution loses its way it usually requires some sort of crisis to get it back on track.

Some of those crises are seen by the general public, and some are not.

And I can tell you that in each of the larger churches that I've pastored, there's been a crisis in the beginning of the ministry.

I don't think most people knew there was a crisis going on in the beginning of the ministry, but I can assure you about 6 and a half years ago there was a crisis in this church between me and some of the leadership.

I fasted and prayed for 3 days, and if it hadn't been the Lord's intervening, there would be no Ron Kelly in the pulpit here today.

But through God's intervention, God brought elements of spirit and life and power and fruitfulness to our corporate journey.

So this morning, If you happen to be involved with an institution in which there is mission drift, if you happen to be in a place where there's been a collective or corporate cozying up to the ways of the world, change is hard, and it always involves some form of trauma, sometimes for the whole organization, sometimes only for the leaders, sometimes in the home.

But this morning, I want to remind you, no institution that's gone off course changes its direction, its trajectory, without a little bit of trauma.

And for those that might have a role in a Christian education institution, which as I look out here this morning are several and varied, I want you to understand, Jesus holds the tiller.

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Education Reformation

Education Reformation: Cancer on Christian Education

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Education Reformation: Inexcusable Ignorance

59m

Education Reformation: The Prophet and the Professor

34m

Education Reformation: Cancer on Christian Education

59m

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