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AMEN Bible Conference

Shaken but Not Forsaken

Eric Walsh

The Stress Equation

This message was presented at the Amen Missions 2017 Bible Conference, Shaken but Not Forsaken, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

For more resources like this, visit us at www.amen-missions.co.za Amen.

Our message tonight is entitled, The Stress Equation.

Father God, we thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to study your Word.

I ask, Father God, that you make me just a nail upon the wall, a rusty, sorry nail, Lord.

But upon that nail I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Let Eric Walsh not be seen or heard tonight.

Instead, Let us hear a word from the throne room of grace.

As our prayer in Jesus' precious and holy name, amen.

So this was the talk I was gonna do on Sunday, so I flip-flopped tonight with Sunday.

But I'm not sure, I don't think it'll make a big difference, so just follow me.

We're going to go to the book of 2 Kings, the sixth chapter.

2 Kings, chapter 6, finds us in a time in the Bible where the nation of Israel is at war.

Syria and the Assyrians are coming across the border, and they are doing border skirmishes with Israel.

This is the time when Naaman's maiden, the little girl who tells Naaman about the prophet in Israel who could heal him of his leprosy.

There are many who believe that she was snatched in 1 of these cross-border skirmishes, and they took her back to serve an Assyrian leader, and she wound up with Naaman.

So this is that time in the Bible's history.

But The king of Syria, as he's warring, he took counsel with his servants, who aren't servants like you think of them.

These are probably more like generals or leaders.

He's setting up camps and he's trying to trap the people of God.

1 thing that is good to remember about the Old Testament is that every battle is not simply a battle between nations.

And so, as I talk through the week, you'll see that every time there's a fight, there's more at stake than the battles of many of our modern battles nowadays.

These are battles over which God is a superior God, which God is the right and true God.

And so when Nebuchadnezzar is bold enough to ask the 3 Hebrew boys, who is this God that shall deliver you from out of my hand?

He asks that question because Nebuchadnezzar believes that his God, in conquering Judah, taking the king, and taking the princes captive is already a greater God.

So these battles are big in a spiritual sense, a spiritual warfare.

And once you understand that the Bible stories about these battles are more than simply military skirmishes, you begin to be able to better apply the principles from the battles to your life today.

The king says, Look, in such and such a place shall be my camp.

Verse 9, And the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying, Beware that you pass not such a place.

So the king of Syria says, look, we're going to set up camp over on this side of town.

We're going to wait for them, and we're going to ambush them.

The prophet calls in and says, hey, king, God has sent me a vision.

I want you to take a different route and go around.

Now, he would do this, and in verse 10 it says, and the king of Israel sent to the place which the man of God told him and warned him of, and the Bible says that these warnings from the prophet saved himself there not once or twice.

Principle, God gives prophets to give warnings to save us.

So In the modern times, oh, don't miss this.

And the words and the writings of the prophet, if heeded in the right context, will warn you we're not to pass through.

It's unfortunate that so many are giving up on the prophet.

Verse 11 says, therefore the heart of the king of Syria was sore troubled for this thing.

And he called his servants and said unto them, will you not show me Which of us is for the King of Israel?

The King of Syria says, all right, this is enough.

As they say on the streets of Los Angeles, somebody's a snitch.

And in the hood, they say snitches get stitches.

So he says somebody is a snitch and we've got to find who the snitch is.

So he says, all right, which 1 of us is actually for them?

Because that's the only way the finite mind that bases its intellect and its intel on the flesh could understand what's happening.

But 1 of his servants in verse 12 the Bible says, and 1 of his servants said, none of us, my lord, O king, but Elisha.

Ah, but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedchamber.

The Bible says that this prophet was so powerfully Connected to God that when the king is in the bathroom While he's in there scrubbing his back with his loofah while he's taking his time and shaving in the morning, while he's in there humming whatever songs the Syrians hummed, the prophet was being warned of his ideas and his thoughts in advance.

In other words, the king's servant is saying, when God is on their side, you have no privacy.

He said, listen man, he knows what you're saying in your bedchamber.

And verse 13, and he said, go and spy where he is, that I may send and fetch him, and it was told him, saying, behold, he is in Dothan.

This story tells you just how crazy folk get when they try and fight God.

When you try and come against God, you get foolish.

If he knows what you think in your bedchamber, can you sneak up on him?

You can't sneak up on him if he knows what you're thinking in advance.

But he says, go spy on him and fetch him.

Now what's interesting, if you really look at the story, is if he's this much of a weapon, wouldn't you want to kill him?

Wouldn't you want to take him off the set?

But he doesn't because the king of Syria, if you study ancient history, is also at war with the Babylonians.

He's trying to get a leg up on the Babylonians.

He does not see Elisha as a threat as much as he sees Elisha as a weapon.

He doesn't want to kill Elisha, He wants to capture Elisha.

And you know, it's funny, when you look at our health message, it's funny how much the world now is listening to our prophet.

I went into a restaurant in Atlanta called the Soul Vegetarian Restaurant, run by a black nationalist organization called the Hebrew Israelites.

And when I went and ate Soul Food, which is black American food, it's actually our derivative of African food mixed in with the process of being slaves in the United States.

And so they made really good vegan food out of it, plant-based.

And I was in Atlanta, and I went there, and I wandered into their bookstore.

And would you believe That in their bookstore was Ministry of Healing councils on diets and foods Funny they want out this day.

They want the prophet we trying to get rid of.

Verse 14, therefore sent he thither horses and chariots and a great host.

And they came by night and compassed the city about.

Now, again, he knows what you're thinking in your bedchamber.

And you have to understand, the Syrians had an amazing armor.

That's 1 of the things they were known for.

It was a metallic armor that they polished till it shone brilliantly in the light, almost like wearing mirrors.

So when they would go into battle and the sun hit them the right way, it could literally blind the enemy.

And it was very overwhelming when thousands of these guys are marching on you and they light up in the daylight.

So they would be seen from a long ways away.

They had to come at night so that there was no sun so their armor wouldn't give them away.

My Testimony

I think God calls that pause to give me some time to think and just to give a little bit of my, a little testimony before I get into the sermon because I think we'll have enough time actually to do that.

So I'm a speaker who really believes in not wearing out the saints, probably because I've studied medicine and I know how long the human attention span actually is.

So the average human really only has about a 20, 25 minute attention span.

So you need something in between to bridge.

So music is actually an excellent way to extend the attention span.

A laugh here and there is also, but it's actually very difficult to hold people's attention.

In America, the attention span is more about 3 or 4 minutes honestly.

And that's largely because of the huge diet of television that we're on in the United States.

And now with the cell phone advent and Snapchat and all that stuff, it's gotten even shorter probably.

So I don't want to wear you out, but I'm gonna just give a short testimony.

It's been 3 years exactly since I went through a very unique trial.

I was at the time actually being considered to be Surgeon General of the United States.

As you probably would understand, it's a pretty high position in America.

At the time, the president was Barack Obama, and his surgeon general had stepped down.

And I was running a health department in the city of Pasadena, California.

Pasadena is 1 of the gem cities of the United States.

If you visit Los Angeles, Los Angeles is 1 of the most beautiful, ugly cities in the world.

And that is because we have some of the highest homeless rates in the world.

Huge drug problems, gangs, historically high murder rates, and many other problems that you probably have seen on NCI and all kinds of other shows.

But Pasadena's 1 of the little pearls of LA County.

It's a beautiful city, very wealthy city.

I've had dinner at the houses of billionaires in Pasadena in my time working, directing the health department for the city of Pasadena, California.

In fact, I took over the health department.

By the time I was finished there, we had over 130 employees.

Our budget went from $6 or $7 million to almost $15 million.

And most of the money I brought in, I brought in to battle HIV and AIDS among poor people in Los Angeles County.

In fact, we started the first dental clinic, probably 1 of the first, if not the only dental clinic in California and maybe even the United States that was government run for poor individuals with HIV.

And we were doing pretty amazing work on a lot of fronts.

We passed new legislation in the city against tobacco and secondhand smoke.

We passed nutrition standards for all city buildings.

I used to go to work and think that God had a Joseph effect on me and whatever it was that we put our minds to do in the city, God blessed.

I was on the local television all the time for different things, not just the big TV stations, but the local.

We have government channels in the states that just cover kind of the municipality itself.

And so I would give a lot of talks on health and public health and social justice and fairness and different issues, addiction.

And so I would be out and people would, you know, I'd be coming out of a restaurant, I'd say, hey, Dr.

And to be honest with you, that wasn't a good thing in hindsight, but God was blessing, and my career took off.

I'll give you a little bit of my background background.

My father left my mother when I was 2 years of age.

And I actually married her second cousin and had 2 more kids.

1 of my half-brothers is famous here in South Africa.

He's Courtney Walsh, the fast bowler for the West Indian cricket team.

He was the captain of the West Indian cricket team.

And, you know, so when I go to Jamaica, I visit him.

In fact, I would wear what we call hand-me-downs.

And, you know, it was bad because the generation gap between myself and my older brother was about 7 years.

So in a very fashion conscious place like the United States, to wear clothes that was 7 years old was troublesome.

You got teased pretty bad when you went to school and bell bottoms in the 1980s.

And my mother was a very devout Seventh-Day Adventist.

I mentioned last night that her grandmother, my great-grandmother, was converted in the early 1900s.

My grandmother says, at the time, Ellen White was still alive.

I've never been able to verify that, but early in the 1900s, our family was brought into the Adventist truth and remained in the Adventist truth and still, by God's grace, hope to always stay in this truth.

I'd actually interviewed at 2 Ivy League schools.

I'll talk about this in my talk on how to know God's will for your life.

And I always wanted to go to an Ivy League school, if you know anything about the higher education system in the United States.

America is a very divided country around things like education.

We have the best schools in the world and the worst schools in the world.

And the Ivy Leagues are among the best schools in the world.

My pastor dragged me onto a van, almost literally, and took me to a small black Seventh-day Adventist school in northern Alabama called Oakwood University.

Now, the school was set up that way because in 1896, When the school was founded, Ellen White sent her own son down the Mississippi River in a boat called the Morning Star Boat.

And he went to educate the recently freed black slaves in the South.

I'm getting off, but maybe all of this will help make everything make sense in the end.

But the people have charged that Ellen White was a racist in the United States.

And there's a book called The Southern Work.

If you've not read Ellen White's book, The Southern Work, you should really read it.

But she was saying things that wouldn't be said by people like Martin Luther King or Mandela for years about the importance of education for African Americans.

And so I went to Oakwood University, a school with a very rich preaching legacy, men like E.E.

Ward, Some of the greatest preachers the Adventist church has ever produced.

I'm a little biased, but I do believe that.

And so I got the bug to preach in college.

In fact, when I was in high school, to be a preacher, I would tell the pastor, he's like, you're going to be a preacher.

And I said, I'll never preach, because if you preach, you lose cool points.

So I finally went away to college, started preaching, but I remained pre-med.

I didn't ever really switch over to theology, although I took a few theology classes and religion classes.

And I went to medical school, continued to preach, left medical school, went into residency training, did 2 residencies, got a master's in public health after my medical doctor degree, a doctorate in public health, and was just preaching.

I became a lay pastor working for 2 different churches and 2 different conferences in Southern California.

And I landed this job in Pasadena, which was really like my dream job after that upbringing to get into a position like that in a very prestigious city like Pasadena.

When God Spared Not

This message was presented at the Amen Missions 2017 Bible Conference Shaken but Not Forsaken in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

For more resources like this visit us at www.amen-missions.co.za Amen.

And this is the scripture reading for the message this morning.

But there were also false prophets, there were false prophets also among the people.

Even as there shall be false teachers among you who privilege shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

And many shall follow their pernicious ways by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you, whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth.

For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into the chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly, and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemn them with an overthrow, making them an example unto those that after should live ungodly.

Our message this Sabbath is entitled, When God Spared Not.

We're going to go to Abraham, which we talked about in the Sabbath School lesson this morning.

I didn't say that then because I figured I could use it in my sermon, some of our comments this morning.

But in Genesis 18 and verse 16, the scripture says, And the men rose up from hence and looked toward Sodom.

And Abraham went with them to bring them on the way.

And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.

So God reiterates the covenant that we discussed in Sabbath School this morning.

And God has such a relationship with Abraham that He says, you know what, if I want to do something, I don't want to hide it from Abraham.

That Abraham may not have even known about himself, honestly.

That he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment, that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.

And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, And because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done all together according to the cry of it, which is come unto me.

And the men turned their faces from thence and went towards Sodom.

And this is the pre-incarnate Christ we're talking about here, and says, wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?

Peradventure there be 50 righteous within the city.

Wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the 50 righteous that are therein?

Now this is an important passage of scripture.

It says that you can negotiate for an entire community with just a few righteous souls.

I want to submit to you that the destruction of hurricanes and tornadoes, of earthquakes in the world might be much greater at times, except that there are a few righteous.

He says if there are just 50 righteous, who are the righteous?

So In Genesis 15 and verse 5, it says, and he brought to him forth abroad, and we talked about this this morning, and said, look now toward heaven and tell the stars if you be able to number them.

And he said unto him, so shall thy seed be.

Abraham believed when God said you're going to be a great nation.

Now we understand even from our Sabbath school study this morning, Abraham and Sarah together didn't really get the whole thing fully, or at least they didn't act on it fully.

But verse 6 says, Abraham believed in the Lord.

We're going to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation this year.

And I can tell you that the reason I'm a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, the reason I'm a Christian, is because of that first doctrine.

That first doctrine was that righteousness is by faith.

There's so many fancy doctrines we have and so many deep things we can study that sometimes we scale over that 1.

Series

Shaken but Not Forsaken

How to Know God’s Will for Your Life

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Shaken but Not Forsaken

What to do With Doubt

42m

The Cure For Selfishness

53m

Plenary

Amish/Adventist

1h 37m

Forgotten Rest

1h 2m

General Sessions

Grace at Work: How Faith Transforms Physicians, Patients, and Practice

1h 1m

Who is in Control of Your Life?

43m

Breakouts

God’s Call to the Jungle

1h 2m

Morning Devotional

Esau was a Seventh-day Adventist

1h 2m

Giftedness & Godliness: A Message to the Graduate

45m

Shaken but Not Forsaken

The Stress Equation

40m

Extracting the Hurt and Filling a Need

To Make Man Whole

41m

The Ten Commandments By Philip Mills

Remember the Sabbath Day

34m

Sound Doctrine