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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Ron Kelly Weekend

Ron Kelly

Spiritual Integrity in an Age of Pragmatism and Partisanship

Father, thank You for the privilege of gathering in Your name in freedom with beautiful songs, words of encouragement, challenge to mission.

Now Lord, I pray, anoint our hearts so that we can be sensitive to the divine impress as we Look deeper into the word.

Pray set a watch before my lips and a guard before the door of my mouth and I pray also for a holy boldness.

May we all draw near to you and near to each other.

Now bless us I pray with your presence and may the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart be acceptable in your sight.

It's a great privilege to be with you here.

And I didn't anticipate that within a few people of starting to meet people, I'd make so many connections.

But it is a wonderful thing to be a part of this Adventist faith.

And I just want to encourage you this morning to live out in a beautiful simplicity and sincerity your walk with Jesus.

I appeal to you with all my heart that you take your wonderful blessed opportunities, many of you having been schooled right here in this pleasant place, and you attach yourself powerfully to the mission of this church for very few other things, maybe nothing will carry you along to the gates of heaven like that attachment.

So I pray, please, don't go out and live the great American dream.

Live a dream for heaven and a dream for Bangladesh and other places in the world, and may God help you.

I hate to say it, I've been a pastor for about 30 years, and in so many places, especially away from our Meccas, the fight for the existence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is brutal.

And I'm asking you, if God calls you away from here, don't look at it and say, well, there's no ocean, there's no mountains, you know.

There also is no smog most of the rest of America, too.

But I am appealing to you to let the Lord be the Lord of your life in all things because your sweet Christian experience combined with your professionality can lift so powerfully.

So when I started my ministry, there were 4 people in attendance at my smallest church, and it was, and is, and remains a real journey of faith to go forward in the name of Jesus.

So please live way beneath your means, finance the cause of God, pray the cause of God into strength and existence.

Your dollar that you saved here is more money than we heard so many millions of people are living on in Bangladesh.

So I want to encourage the brother here, Brother Toledo there, And please, please, please, our church will only come back to life as we believe that this 3 angels' message to all the world in this generation.

The other thing is I want to encourage you, there's a lot of doctrines or methods, And of course this morning part of my sermon includes the title, pragmatism.

But there are a lot of things out there appealing to us.

And we often hear James as the definition of true religion.

Oh, true religion is take care of the widows and the orphans in their distress.

But the rest of it goes on to say, keep oneself unspotted from the world.

And nobody's really talking about that today.

Now, we're not to focus on our own journey and turn our focus inward.

Our focus is to be Christ's word with an honest relationship with Him where He can talk to us.

And perhaps that's a good launching point this morning for the message which I've entitled, "'Spiritual Integrity in an Age of Pragmatism "'and Partisanship.'" You know, we are living in a very strange age in which it appears that the busyness and the opportunity of life is dragging us away from some of the simplest things and the simplest being our time with Jesus.

My experience as a young man is maybe like some of yours here, but probably very different than many.

I'm not a first, fourth, fifth, sixth generation Adventist.

I'm a first generation Adventist, and all of us need to be first generation Christians because we all have to be born again, right?

It doesn't matter where your heritage comes from.

It's a rich blessing to grow up in a Christian home, an Adventist home.

The home I grew up in, there was a lot of smoking, cussing, rock and roll music, financial duress.

And you would not expect in that home that my mother, backslidden, Seventh-day Adventist, would say to her husband, when these kids get to be a certain age, they're all going to church school.

My dad, a little taller than me, a sizable man, told her no.

Of course, my mother, much smaller than he, a sizable woman, especially on the inside, said, oh, yes, they are.

When I was in the seventh grade or about to go in, my mother pulled me aside on the porch of my dentist uncle.

And she told me on an August afternoon that I would not be going back to the school that I was anticipating attending.

I would be going to Peoria Junior Academy.

Of course, by this age, I was much taller than her, looking down on her.

And she looked up at me with those eyes that were determined, and she said, oh yes, you're going.

And I had learned at a young age to obey my mother, but I wasn't wanting to obey this.

And the reason being that as a little boy, all my engagements with the church had been poor ones.

As a third grader, I had gone to the primary class and they had, I came in late which is always awkward, they sat me down in the circle with everybody and they were going through the books of the Bible and I was a good phoneticist if there's such a word.

I knew how phonics worked, and they gave me the easiest book in the Bible.

And when they came around, I wondered why everyone reacted the way they did when I said, I had the book of Job.

And they all laughed at me, and I knew I was not where I wanted to be.

My mom tried to get me in Pathfinders, didn't work.

Finally, she took the big plunge, stuck me in the church school.

And I had a Christian teacher who had a sense of humor and a very strong commitment to Christ, a very practical Christian.

I truly believe he protected his spiritual integrity and that made his witness irrefutable.

Now listen, there are lots of polarizations going on in Adventism today.

You can polarize to the left, you can polarize to the right, they're both sideshows.

There is a Christian integrity that we must maintain if the world is gonna pay attention to us.

It's an integrity that can't be naysayed or gainsayed.

It's a little bit like having a good marriage because indeed the intimacy we share with Christ is much deeper than the intimacy we can share with another person.

And Jesus is not willing, having given the purchase price of His own blood, to have us wander off the road of life.

So He engages us in this inconvenient way, you know, conscience that speaks to us or voices that prompt us to do things we don't really want to do.

He also speaks with a beautiful assurance as we go about the doing of them.

And he speaks peace to us in our moments of heartache and duress.

A couple of years ago, there was an integrity issue in the metallurgic world in Japan.

Kobe steel was found out, and aluminum and copper was found out to be forging its documentations on its metals.

And you say to yourself, well, no big deal.

I've been traveling a little more lately.

And I love to sit by the window if I don't get to sit by the aisle.

And I always am paying attention to these beautiful aluminum birds I'm in.

Some of them are composite even, these 787s.

But if you've ever sat by the window of an airplane, you need to notice something.

Now I flew out here on an Airbus A320 from Denver to Ontario yesterday and I noticed it wasn't quite the same.

It's an older airplane and I don't know how this element of aeronautical engineering plays into it, but especially on a number of these newer airplanes, and I've noticed on the Boeing airplanes, you look out at the wings.

And when those airplanes take off, the wings, they look like they've got all the integrity they need, but there's a moment in time when you watch those wings and they do this.

Now this Airbus A320 seemed to have a little stiffer composition to its wings.

But you know, the idea that there would be an absence of integrity in the aluminum that Boeing is using in Seattle to build my 737 is a great trauma to me, to think that somehow That aluminum is not meeting the standards that it was supposed to meet.

Now, I checked the air quality for Loma Linda on my way over here today.

And I didn't really need to check it because I could tell as I flew over the Grand Canyon yesterday and got a little closer to California, I was getting here because the air got dirty.

Now, if the way you calibrate things is off, then the product's going to be off.

And I'm afraid right now that Christianity is under great duress, that it should lose a measure of its true integrity, and that I might look faithful if I attend Advent Hope or Village or wherever it might be, but maybe there's a dynamic of my walk that needs to come into a full surrender and a trueness with Jesus.

And every year she has to give something called the Iowa Basic Skills Test.

Well, they give them for a lot of reasons, but the more ideal reason they give those tests is to see if indeed there's actual learning going on.

Now, the problem is that we've gotten to a place where we have turned the Adventist Church into somewhat of an inward and then a resistory focus towards its previous identity.

Now I want to tell you the old conservative nitpicking Seventh-day Adventist I believe is is almost an extinct species and the the old lady that comes in and runs the young people off, I'm not saying they don't exist, all right?

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Series

Ron Kelly Weekend

Spiritual Integrity in an Age of Pragmatism and Partisanship

Transcript

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