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Strong Tower Radio

Philip Mills

The Land of Beginning Again

♪♪♪ Fresh manna fell to the ground as a gift from God while the Israelites were in the wilderness.

It was fresh from the ovens of heaven, baked by the master baker himself.

How the Israelites must have anticipated the taste and the smell of each morning's delivery.

Just like the Israelites, you too can now experience the taste and smell of fresh manna.

Today you will be listening to Phil Mills, pastor of Lansing Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Well, happy Sabbath and a happy new year.

I think it's only once every 6 or 7 years that we can say those things together on the same day.

I'm grateful that we're 1 Sabbath closer to the second coming of Christ and 1 year closer to when we have an eternity in front of us.

I'm so thankful that we have the promise that Christ is coming soon.

And I look forward to what God is going to do this next year.

I was thinking about it as the new year began at sundown, because you understand Sabbath began at sundown.

So some of us went to bed early last night.

But as I was thinking about it in the new year after sundown how much God has done for us this last year a lot has changed in the last year and I am curious and I'm thankful the Lord doesn't tell us what's coming but I'm curious to know what God is going to do this next year.

But I can know this, whatever it is, we'll be able to look back just like we can this year and say, praise God, you carried us through another year.

And whatever comes, Romans 8.28 will still be as relevant as the end of this year as it is right now, which is all things work together for what?

Good, to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

Would you bow your heads with me as we ask the Lord to guide us as we study.

Father in heaven, as we bow here, it's hard to believe it's 2022.

And as we take some time to meditate On the verses you've put together for us this morning, we ask that you will feed us from your word.

That you will prepare our hearts to hear the message, that you will anoint my lips with a live coal off the altar, and that you will hide me behind the cross.

It'll be Jesus brings his message to each of our hearts.

Our sermon this morning is called the land of beginning again.

Have you ever wished there was a way to reset?

Maybe there's a friendship you've had and you wish that something happened in that friendship and you wish you could go back and just start the whole thing over as if that had never happened.

Maybe you've had an event, some terribly embarrassing moment, and you wish that you could just start over and wish that that had never happened around you.

If you wish there was a place you could go where you could restart what had gone wrong.

When I was growing up, we liked to sing around the piano.

And sometimes, you've probably seen this, maybe not around a piano, but at something else, we'd get going on a song and then everyone would get lost on their parts and we'd say, okay, we need to go back to the beginning, we need to start over again.

Then someone would say, you know, let's start over and we'd go back and we'd start the song again.

How many of you have wished that you could go back and begin again?

And you know, I love watching her innocence.

She had so much fun with her cousins down South.

And sometimes, you know, when she's sleeping, you just kind of watch this perfect face and this child that doesn't know anything of all the things that we've gone through.

And it's just knows a life that's happy and joyful.

And sometimes you kind of wish you could go back to that, especially during COVID, don't you?

Sometimes I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could just go back and my dad worry about all the problems and I could just go out and enjoy building forts and not worry about whether the world is going to chaos or not as we see everything happening around us.

How many a married couple started off in their marriage with happy expectations, everything was gonna be golden and they had the honeymoon and then the honeymoon phase kinda lasted for a while but now they found that there's a lot of challenges in their marriage.

And they wish that they could maybe start over.

Their hearts' dearest treasures have been broken, and they wish they could go back to how everything was when they first got married.

I think sometimes that universal longing that all of us have had, and It's good to think about this on New Year's Day when we have New Year's resolutions and it's a new year and a fresh start.

But I think all of us have this longing in our heart that at some point we wish we could just start over and begin again.

There's a poem that I came across in my grandfather's collections, my grandpa Mills, he wrote this poem down.

It's called The Land of Beginning Again, hence where the sermon title came from.

I love the way that Louisa Turkington pens these words.

I wish that there is some wonderful place called the land of beginning again, where all our mistakes and all our heartaches and all of our selfish grief could be dropped like a shabby old coat by the door, never put on again.

I wish we could come on it all unaware, like the hunter who finds a lost trail, and I wish that the 1 whom our blindness has done the greatest injustice of all could be at the gate like an old friend that waits For the comrades he's gladdest to hail.

We would find all the things we intended to do, but forgot and remembered too late.

Little praises unspoken, little promises broken, and all of the thousand and 1 little duties neglected that might have perfected the day for 1 less fortunate.

It wouldn't be possible not to be kind in the land of beginning again and the ones we misjudged and the ones whom we grudge, their moments of victory then would find in the grasp of our loving hand clasp more than penitent lips could explain.

For what had been hardest we'd known had been best, and what had seemed loss would be gain.

For there isn't a sting that would not take a wing when we faced it, confessed it in tears, and God washed it away.

And I think that the tears and the reassurance of forgiveness and the reconciling laughter is what God is after in the land of beginning again.

So I wish there was some wondered, wonderful place called the land of beginning again, where all our mistakes and all our heartaches and all of our selfish grief could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door, and never be put on again.

You know it's in that moment of truth when you realize you've really messed up.

You know that you've made a huge mistake and you've hurt someone that you care about, or you've messed up the movements that God had, or you realize that you made a wrong decision that has led to consequences you didn't foresee.

It's that moment of truth when I think everyone looks back and says I wish that I could start again.

You know, humanity is fascinated with where things have begun.

This week, well actually I should say a week ago today, the telescope, the web telescope was launched.

They've been unfurling it over the next 6 months.

The whole purpose of this telescope is to be able to look back in time and see where man began.

Of course, they won't actually ever see it because man begins with the creation of God, what do you say?

We're looking in the stars to try to find where we came from to understand more fully where the land of beginning again comes from.

Geologists are looking at the different rock formations trying to understand how this world came into existence and are grasping at clues and trying to put together a narrative of millions of years and the descendants from Mollus.

We're looking back on all of these things and it's I think in some ways trying to understand how we began and maybe what's driving it is the desire to be able to understand not only where we came from but how we can start over because our world, let's face it, isn't going so great right now.

But as Christians, we understand where this all began.

Right there at the beginning of your Bible as the Word of God lays it out.

It doesn't say that we begin in some primordial soup.

It doesn't say that we begin with an explosion and then all of the cosmos around us came from a big vein.

No, the Bible says in Genesis 1 verse 1, are you there church?

It says, In the beginning, say it with me, God created the heavens and the earth.

Day 3, God creates the land and the plants.

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The Land of Beginning Again

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