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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Adrian Zahid

How to Lose a Battle Before it Begins

I also wanted to say thank you for that special music.

If He can watch over the sparrows, He can watch over us as well.

I have a feeling like the mic is cutting out, but can you hear me in the back?

So the title of the sermon is, How to Lose a Battle Before it Starts.

Now here's the thing, I had a sermon, I was asked to preach about 2 weeks ago, and I had a sermon in mind.

The thing about putting together a sermon is that you just keep thinking about it, thinking about it, ideas come and go, and you collate all those ideas, and you write them down in your cell phone or in a piece of paper by your bed, and over time you pray about it and you develop a sermon.

So I developed a sermon, and then I got a text message confirming my appointment here and also the message that was Visitor's Sabbath.

And now I had prepared a sermon that was geared more towards Seventh-day Adventists.

And since it is Visitor's Sabbath, I thought, well, it probably wasn't an appropriate sermon.

So the whole week, the rest of the last 3, 4 days, I was thinking about a different sermon.

And finally, Friday night, it's midnight.

I'm thinking, thinking, praying, there's nothing coming.

And I turned in my Bible to a sermon that I preached at Avon Hope several years ago.

But due to a technical glitch, it didn't make it up onto AudioVerse.

So most students that are here haven't heard it.

But if you are not a student and you're a regular attendee and you heard the sermon, well, my apologies to you.

But since we're talking about visitors, today I want you to feel welcome and I want you to know that although this is a Sabbath school, I'll just say this in general, church is a good place to go.

And if you're attending for the first time, you don't know what a Christian church looks like or sounds like or whatever, I hope that what I say doesn't offend you too much.

I'm trying to be biblical and at the same time, I hope I don't offend you.

And at the same time, if you're attending after a very long time, you've kind of backslidden and now you've brought yourself to church and you're trying to regain your spiritual vitality, this is a good place to be.

Just as a hospital is a good place for an unhealthy person to go.

I remember when I had cancer a year ago, and now I'm better.

I shouldn't say the word cured, but in remission.

This was right after my first surgery and I had gone home after the hospital, after staying 7 days in the hospital, and the oncologist had told me just don't get sick.

It's ironic to say don't get sick after you have cancer.

What he meant was just don't get too physically sick so that when you start chemotherapy, you don't have a cold or something like that.

I was recovering, taking heavy pain meds.

And the thing with heavy pain meds is that I'd learned that your stomach stops.

And so I kept eating while my stomach had stopped and just kept eating and it was going nowhere.

And then finally The night before, the day I had to show up in the morning at 7 a.m.

At the ER for chemotherapy, to go up to the hospital for chemotherapy, I threw up.

And it was just straight, you know, in those days with cancer, straight 4, 5, you know, 6 times, 7 times, 15 times, 20 times.

And then after you're done emptying your entire stomach, you still keep on wanting to throw up and your stomach just contracts and contracts And you just, it's a very painful experience.

And so here I was sitting there, I had vomit dripping down my ten-day-old beard I hadn't shaved because it was too much to shave.

And I was sitting there and I just decided to pick up the phone and I dialed my doctor's number and I composed a message in my mind as it was ringing.

And the message was, Dear Doctor, I'm too sick to come to the ER.

And then I hung up before the voice mail finished.

I'm too sick to come to the hospital of all places.

But the nice thing was I got a hold of myself and with the help of a friend, my father, I got into the car and we timed it just so between my throwing up.

They whisked me through the ER, got me a new robe, cleaned me up, put some morphine into me, and then I was relaxed.

And that's the thing about church as well.

Sometimes if you haven't attended church in a while, And you come back to church, it's like it's very hard.

It's very hard for you to see the need for why you need to be in church.

And just take it on faith that it's a good place to be.

So we're going to look at how to lose a battle before it starts and we're going to look at a story today and draw some lessons from it.

1 was the king of Israel, the other was the king of Judah.

And Jehoshaphat, it says, had riches and honor and abundance and joined in affinity with Ahab.

Step number 1 is to make unholy alliances.

So here, he has this good king, Jehoshaphat, he is rich, has abundance of goods, he is feeling okay.

And then he marries his son to the other king, to the king of Israel, his son.

And the thing is that the son, the daughter-in-law that he was getting, she was the daughter of Jezebel, literally.

You know, sometimes you might just say my mother-in-law is Jezebel.

But the reality was, this guy's mother-in-law was Jezebel.

And it was a terrible, terrible mother-in-law to have.

She had pursued Elijah until he almost killed him.

She had had someone murdered, stoned for property.

And to marry off Jehoshaphat, to marry his son to Jezebel's daughter was just a bad mistake, a very bad mistake.

And that is how he got into this battle and he lost it before it started.

Let's go on in this and it says that after certain years he went down to Ahab in Samaria and Ahab killed sheep and oxen for him in abundance and for the people that he had with him and persuaded him to go up with him to Ramoth Gilead.

So the problem with unholy alliances is that once you make this alliance, you join in their goals and their ambitions and their things that they want to accomplish.

And you join your efforts with these people.

And so here he is in this unholy alliance, and he has joined into, he's getting sucked into this losing war.

And Ahab, the king of Israel, verse 3 says unto Jehoshaphat king of Judah, will thou go up with me to Ramoth-Gilead?

And he answered him, I am as thou art, and my people as thy people, and we will be with thee in war.

So he joined with him and he gave him his word.

When you make an unholy alliance, problems result.

It's a source of entertainment to me, sad entertainment, but occasionally I run into friends that I knew way back when.

And it so happened 1 time I met this girl that I had known when we were little.

And so we went out to eat, she and her boyfriend, who was gonna show up at the restaurant.

And we showed up at the restaurant and she asked to sit in the smoking section of the restaurant.

Now this was years and years ago and so we sat in the smoking section of the restaurant and she just confessed to me that she had become a bad Ventist And I wanted to see the source of this newfound badness and the source was the boyfriend.

And not only that, but she was exerting a bad influence on him, making him even worse.

She had started up smoking and he was telling her that smoking is bad for you.

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How to Lose a Battle Before it Begins

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