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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

The World is Asking

How do you try to get somebody's attention?

Especially if it's the type of a situation where you're supposed to be quiet, you're supposed to be low key.

Sometimes Depending on the situation and the nature of things though, these subtleties don't necessarily work.

Sometimes you have to be quite vocal about it.

This morning, the title of my message is The World is Asking.

And to begin this morning, I want us to turn to Luke chapter 19, and we're gonna look at a passage of scripture, 1 that you have seen before, but there's an element of this that I just want to look at here.

And there in your Bibles you will read, now as he, Jesus, was drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with what kind of a voice?

A loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen.

Saying, verse 38, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.

Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.

Now you might recall from this picture and from reading this story before that Jesus does something quite interesting.

He sends for a donkey to come and he mounts onto this animal and he rides.

Do we ever have any instance anywhere else in scripture where Jesus is riding from 1 place to another?

Is this typically the nature of how Jesus works throughout the gospels?

Or is it something a little bit different?

You may recall when Peter's mother-in-law was healed and there's a big commotion and a big revival that takes place.

But we see Jesus steal away early in the morning and the disciples finally find him and they say the whole town is looking for you.

And Jesus says yes, let's depart, let's go to Galilee.

You may recall another time Jesus heals a leper and he tells him shh, be quiet, don't tell anyone.

But the leper leaves and tells everybody, far and wide.

So Jesus has to leave that place, according to the account.

Or you might recall, after feeding the 5, 000, What did the crowd and the multitudes want to do then?

Crown him king and the disciples are saying, yes, this is what we've been waiting and hoping for.

And Jesus compels them to get into the boat, sends them away and he goes up onto the mountain to pray.

Over and over and over we see Jesus constantly on the move.

And I think it's because he knew that his ministry otherwise could very well be cut short.

Yet here in these few passages, we see Jesus not only allowing, but doing things to somewhat orchestrate this, what we call triumphal entry.

And the question I want to ask is how come and why now?

Desire of Ages says this, spectators were constantly mingling with the throng and asking, who is this?

They had all heard of Jesus, expected him to go to Jerusalem, but they knew that he had herefore to discourage all effort to place him on the throne, and they were greatly astonished to learn that this was in fact he.

They wondered what could have wrought this change in him who had declared that his kingdom was not of this world.

From the multitudes gathered to attend the Passover, thousands go forth to welcome Jesus.

This is not a small crowd, we're talking lots, many, many people, and they greet him with the waving of palm branches and bursts of sacred song.

Never before in his earthly life had Jesus, what?

It would bring him to the cross, but it was his purpose, thus publicly, to present himself as the Redeemer.

He desired to call attention to the sacrifice that was to crown his mission to a fallen world, end quote.

Here he does something out of the ordinary, something he has not done before to draw attention to his crowning work, his sacrifice on Calvary for people to take notice.

And so we continue on verse 39 in our story and some of the Pharisees called to him from the crowd.

This is too big of a commotion, too big of a stir.

And they try and do everything in their power to hush the crowd, but the crowd ignores these Pharisees, and finally they just yell out, Jesus, rebuke your disciples, do something.

But he answered and said to them, I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.

When a major thing is about to happen in prophecy, I think there's a time to speak with a loud voice as it says earlier in this passage, Verse 37.

In fact, in Revelation 14, with a loud voice, megalophone, we have the 3 angels' messages, not to be whispered, not to pass notes, but to say and to proclaim with a loud voice.

So I'm asking the question this morning, is it time to speak?

Because it seems like God is doing things to push his message of his remnant church to the front.

Here's something that was relatively new to me.

I don't subscribe to this magazine, but the Smithsonian, spring of this year, has an article, the hundred most significant Americans of all time.

Who made the cut of 100 of the most interesting Americans of all time?

Some of the ones here, we have Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Henry Ford, you see the list as it goes on there.

Oprah Winfrey, Billy Graham, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates.

Kind of surprising that Ellen White would make the cut, or is it?

You know, it's interesting how he talks about his decision to run, and you probably heard that as well.

In fact, in 1 interview, this one's taken from Time, why Ben Carson is running for president.

It certainly was not my intention to go into the political field, but after the prayer breakfast in 2013, there were so many people clamoring for me to do it and I kind of ignored it and figured it would all go away but it didn't and it just kept building and building and building.

In fact, as a result of him running, the Seventh-day Adventist Church set up, just recently, it was launched October 29, not even quite a month ago, Adventist Beliefs.

And you can type in whoareadventists.com or .org, who are Adventists?

And the whole purpose of that was to set it up so people would have a place to go to find out who are we?

I mean, doesn't it sound kind of strange to hear Donald Trump make these statements?

I'm Presbyterian, I'm middle of the road.

But Adventists, who are these Adventists?

Does that not sound strange to anybody else?

But all of these nations have looked up this website in just the last 3 weeks.

You can see down here in the bottom corner, it spiked at the end of October when it first came out.

Another thing interesting is that most went directly to the site, but then the second and fourth 1 down here, Facebook was the next place that people saw it and went to whoareavenus.com.

Then you have this, Glenn Beck on his show interviewed Alexander Bryant.

He's at the North American Division, he's the secretary there.

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The World is Asking

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