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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Hard Times and Strong Kids

Father, we want to take our children with us.

And on this Sabbath, where we have a little foretaste of joy, being a family, May we have the commitments and the confidence to raise our children for you so that they could know the joy of serving and sacrificing and being at that Wonderful celebration, that table where Jesus will serve.

So bless us now, I ask in Jesus' name, amen.

The theme in our VBS this week was the Healing Heart Clinic.

And I wanna just take a moment to make sure you understand in society how powerful and how potent that is, that theme.

There is a group in our larger global community, and certainly in the United States as a leading community, who does not believe there's anything really wrong with the human heart, at least not in the way that most of the Christian world for most of its history has thought right from wrong.

And the discovery of oneself by living out one's feelings is the new Christian way, the secular gospel, I might suggest, where all of us which were created for a purpose find our new purpose in making sure nobody ever feels bad about self-discovery.

But this morning I think it's important for us to understand beings that were in a Christian church that the Bible teaches us, according to the book of Jeremiah, that the human heart is deceitful and wicked beyond all understanding, and it requires, we require a heart transplant.

We require something very different in order to know happiness.

Now, I'm going to read a verse or 2 from a hymn book, and it's a song we sang here not too many Sabbaths ago entitled, Am I a Soldier of the Cross?

Am I a soldier of the cross, a follower of the lamb?

And shall I fear to own his cause or blush to speak his name?

Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize, and sailed through bloody seas?

Is this vile world a friend of grace to help me on to God?

Sure, I must fight if I would reign Increase my courage Lord.

I'll bear the toil endure the pain supported by the Word The saints in all this glorious war shall conquer though they die.

They see the triumph from afar with face discerning eye.

And when that lustrous day shall rise and all thy armies shine, in robes of victory through the skies, the glory shall be thine.

Now I'm here to remind every parent, especially today, you're living in a war zone.

We call it the great controversy, and how you prepare your children will have an awful lot to do with whether or not they have a good life on this earth and whether or not their entrances granted them into the new kingdom.

But if you go by the directives of modern science and the current age, you might find yourself in that moment when Jesus asked an account for The parenting stewardship, where is your little flock?

Now I'm the father of 4, the youngest is 21 years old, so I've been over this road.

I've pastored in places with large numbers of young people, including an academy for almost 20 years.

And as a child, I was raised in a home where God was not the center.

I sucked down all kinds of secondhand smoke, listened to rock and roll music, had to hear the profanity, worry about the financial well-being.

And while I love my parents and they were doing their best, without God, it doesn't work very well.

Fortunately, my mother decided that I would be placed in an Adventist school, Even though she was not living, practicing minimally in any way, promoting Seventh-day Adventist values.

And I still remember as a boy going fishing in the Illinois River and catching a bunch of little catfish.

Does anybody know anything about a catfish?

Does anybody know anything about Leviticus chapter 11 and what kind of fish we're supposed to eat?

The fish are supposed to have scales and fins.

Well, that rules catfish out because while they have fins they don't have scales and you got to be careful how you skin a catfish Those catfish all got skinned They have thorns near their their dorsal fins, and if you're not careful, they'll poke you.

My dad and I went to all the trouble of skinning all those fish, and they went into the freezer, but they never made it onto the table.

My mother had not abandoned all of her value system.

And there were many other great values my mother taught me but the fruitful fragrant side of life and the preparation to live for God was Very very nominally there hard work respect all those things if my mom's watching today.

Thank you mom I appreciate all that you did but when my mother put me in a seventh-day Adventist school I Fell in love with a seventh-day Adventist teacher Actually it was a couple Carlisle Linda Bennett They led me to the cross and from that point forward the cross transformed my life a living Jesus That living Jesus is at the center of the courage the strength that your kids are going to need for a darkening age Now I'm going to do something here that I don't know how much explanation they'll want to be on behalf of the parents this is going to be mainly for parents so if the children don't totally understand that might not be all bad But I'm going to show you a few articles of clothing that I bought Thursday at Meyer.

And I'm going ahead and saying the name of the store because I think at some level, if you do something, you ought to own it and just be responsible for it.

And I'm doing it because I believe our culture is locked in a war.

And the war is such that if nobody ever speaks up, and I mean respectfully and kindly speaks up, we're just going to keep going the way we're going.

And when I was a little boy, You know, I grew up watching programs that were largely a waste of time, but they weren't really repugnant or in direct violation of any of the 10 Commandments.

It was a total misshaping of my mind to spend hours watching shows like Gilligan's Island, which will date me for sure.

But most of the shows were not an open warfare against the traditional Judaic Christian value system of America.

But when I went to the store Thursday and I'm walking down a main aisle, I come across a big clearance rack, and I love clearance racks, actually, and don't mind a good deal.

This 1 was all about rainbows, and it got my attention.

And while I love the rainbow, I need you to understand that what the rainbow meant, you know, 3, 000, 4, 000 plus years ago, and what the rainbow means in modern society are somewhat different.

The rainbow given at the end of the flood was a statement that God's severe judgment against evil would not include a worldwide flood But you need to know that the rainbow followed the most grievous intervention of divine power to stage a statement of opposition to evil as A matter of fact the world to become so evil that man constantly thought evil, and it wasn't just that there was a rainbow, but shortly after that, there was a dissemination of languages because God understood how quickly the human race could go the wrong way.

So now the rainbow, almost as a statement of opposition to traditional values, now represents a completely different moral system.

But the rainbow has now become a statement of live like you want, define love as you want, express human sexuality as you so desire.

And there is a measure of science, I would call it an unverified science that suggests that this is indeed a legitimate thing.

So the first shirt I want to show you in rainbow color says that this little child wearing this was born to love.

I do think children are born to love, and I think we should teach them to love all people.

And that means people that are walking ignorantly or willfully against the direction of what God calls holy living.

The second shirt that I purchased there on the rack, which I was…had to question myself if I wanted to do this, but because I felt that making an impression on you as to how far we are as a society in tipping points, to make sure I had your attention, I wanted to do this because I'm quite certain that Fred Meyer, whose biography I have and I've enjoyed reading did not see it as his mission or mandate to use his store as a Secular magnet megaphone for values that went contrary to his own and his grandparents etc.

Etc Nor did we would Sam Walton and nor would James Cash Penny and There was a store when I was growing up called Montgomery Wards Many of these stores were started by Christian businessmen who felt that their business should be a ministry and yes, it was opportunity to make money as well.

This 1 here off the same rack says, love is love.

In other words, whatever you feel, that's good enough.

And don't miss the rainbows because love is love inside a rainbow framework.

I want to make sure, I'm going to say that again.

And Paul writing to the Corinthians will say that God's grace was powerful enough to reach you in some of those lifestyles.

And some of you were practicing those lifestyles.

But when I start, when I'm in my department store, especially when it started out as a grocery store and expanded into a mega store, and we've turned it into a messaging center for cultural values.

I feel like it's probably mine to say to you pay attention because as a watchman on the wall my job is to say to you do you know what's going on?

The world your kids will inherit as adults is very different than the world you grew up in, and this world right now is very different than the world I grew up in.

Some of the progress has been good, but societally, not so.

So I'm gonna take another shirt off the rainbow rack, and this 1 especially got my attention.

It says, it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

Now, if I had not been reading articles about adult parents who have no say over gender transforming or at least attempted gender transforming surgeries, and they've been cut off from even dealing with their children, I might not be as ready to put my arms around this subject matter once again.

But I'm telling you, hard times are not only coming, hard times are here.

And If you want your children to have a value system that knows how to love somebody who's living the wrong way You're you've got your work cut out for you but the last 1 that really got my attention was this 1 made for an adult and this 1 just seemed especially unacceptable to me as it said, gender is a spectrum.

Now you know, I know of a God in heaven who actually did make this planet And I want to say thank you to Mr.

Atkins at Anders Academy and the videos that were made that we showed your children every night.

We talked about the complexity of a real, well, we didn't look at a real eye, but we saw the models, both life size and larger than life.

We took time to look at this amazing device or machinery, the human machinery, and as I sat there night by night, just looking at a lung, a real human lung, on the dissecting table, I'm thinking to myself, this is an absolute preposterous insult to God and an impossibility that this happened by accident.

Now listen, the very Creator who spoke physical law into existence and created this amazing machinery spoke social relational law and value into a definition of love.

The love that we practice is not exactly the same love that the world wants us to practice.

This love is supposed to be acceptance of all things.

I know that I told the kids a story a Couple nights ago.

Maybe it was last night My mother did not accept everything about her eldest son And so sorry kids if you have to hear the story over, but you know I had some cousins that their value system was a little different than mine, and they used words my mother said I should not use.

And it just so turned out to me that I was older, and I don't remember all the psychological machinations or decision-making processes that said to me, but maybe it was something like this.

How do these little kids get to use those words that only adults use, and I'm older than them.

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Hard Times and Strong Kids

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