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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Is This the Time?

I pray, Lord, that You will bless the study, bless the decisions.

May we be able and willing, through your power, to follow your lead, to make the changes you're calling us to make.

When I was a young pastor, I picked up 1 of the Adventist reviews, and I saw a very interesting article.

Kind of an outline, had his staff in his hand, and the title got my attention.

It was entitled, Give Us Leaders, Not Managers.

Now, that would be an interesting article to read and there is a difference between management leadership although a good leader needs to be a good manager or should be especially if they work for the church because they have to wear many hats, but leading and managing are 2 different things.

But what intrigued me the most was who had written the article.

It was written by 2 Methodist professors.

Now, I'm not sure why this is, but on my computer right now, every time I open up my web browser, because I had done some research, and probably because it's trying to check back in to that same Gmail portal, I have the statistics of the Methodist Church over the last 100 years.

Now, our roots are out of Methodism, primarily.

And so many of the habits, the great awakening that swept across Europe and America in the early 1800s was a Methodist movement.

And the Methodist church and the Methodist experience broke off into lots of churches.

When you talk about the United Methodist Church, that's an organization that brings into it several Methodist movements, but I wanna tell you, if you wanted to graph the membership of the Methodist Church, all you need is a cliff.

It's just 1 more indication of the death of Protestant religion in America.

And you would say, oh, but pastor, the megachurches, yes, the megachurches.

You've heard me say as of late, if you get along well with people, that's good, you can follow.

If you help people get more done, that's good, you can manage.

And I'm paraphrasing from John Maxwell, but if you can help people grow, that's even better, you're a leader.

It's the hardest work to do, but it's the most important.

And as I've quoted from Edward Friedman in his book, Failure of Nerve, you know that what is most critical in the role of a leader is the emotional independence to make the difficult decisions and weather the ride through all the way to the other side of someone's maturation.

His phrase is from the parents to the presidents Jewish psychoanalysts deceased and yet his words speak on.

So this morning I want to look at the story of the golden calf, take out your bulletins.

I want to read the quote we have right there before we get going, because today I'm preaching for more leaders, not more managers.

The quote comes from manuscript released it's in a segment entitled reflecting Christ in your bulletin.

I want to thank Simon Arkosinski for his beautiful and intriguing photographs on the inside of this bulletin, 1 of our BES students.

It says, when Moses went up to the Mount of God to receive from Jehovah the tablets of stone, the children of Israel were for the time left under the leadership of Aaron.

But Aaron showed himself to be weak and yielding, ugly words for leaders, when he should have stood firm for principles.

These elements are critical for reflection.

They're worthy of some serious meditation today.

He should have stood firm for the principles of righteousness.

Yielding to the request of the people, he made the golden calf they demanded." And in her commentary on this story, she says, This is a time for decided action.

Those who stand in positions of responsibility must not follow the example of Aaron.

My sermon this morning is entitled, Is This the Time?

I wonder if we're not on our way out of spiritual Egypt, but we might be running into the same challenges that they had.

Indeed, I suspect we are, For whether it's the home or the school or the church or whether it's society at large, we have a very interesting phenomena going on.

Now, this sermon will be substantively the same but somewhat different than the last 1, and I'm gonna start it a little bit different.

Last week, I took home the people who drove the image out.

At least I drove them to the airport so they could go home.

And while I'm driving around to the airport, I'm having a good conversation with them, But when I turn around to come home, I decide I'll listen to the radio.

So I turn on a talk news station, and while I'm listening, they have an interview with Vincent Gill.

I don't know if he had won a recent award.

And I was intrigued by the conversation between the interviewer and the interviewee.

But pretty soon he started saying something that began to bother me.

He almost stumbled over himself with how many times he referred to somebody as a non-judgmental person.

And after a while it was like, and it got even worse, because it wasn't enough for him to laud the accolades of modern affirmation on this individual, he went a little bit farther and he said, and not like all those evangelicals.

Now, I don't want anybody here to be a judgmental person.

But I'm afraid modern society and the church have an unfortunate agreement on the idea that nothing should be judged.

Now when Jesus writes in the Sermon on the Mount, judge not that you be not judged, that word can be used for the word condemn.

Jesus was not saying take a mindless, numbing, relationship-destroying, dysfunctional absence of evaluation into your life and everything will be okay.

Nobody will say anything bad about you and you shouldn't say anything bad about anybody else.

As a matter of fact, Jesus would go on to say, be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves and if there was anybody who had iron sharpening iron moments with his constituents, the nation of Israel, it was Jesus.

And he is the active agent of the Godhead in the Old Testament.

The story we're going to read about today is Moses dealing with Jesus.

Now while we should not be condemnatory, there is a huge difference about the kind of affirmation that makes people feel good while they're practicing soul-destroying habits.

And I want you to understand that good judgment and much love are at the foundation of effective leadership.

But the idea that we go along with the world while they all want to feel good no matter what they do, and we plunge ourselves into these soul-destroying habits and vices is a stench in the nostril of God.

We are not to be negative, condemning people, but in the same breath we are to be loving, principled people.

The Bible says the righteous contend with the wicked.

And if we never have the ability, through lack of substance of character, to say, no, Under the influence of my stewardship of leadership, this will not happen.

Then we will find ourselves in the same place Aaron did and by the way Aaron's decision cost 3000 people their lives and if you read out of the book of Deuteronomy Chapter 9 you can see that God was so upset with his failure of leadership.

Moses says that he intended to execute him as well.

At the end of this day, after everybody has convinced the new leader to do it their way, 3000 people, their corpses are on the plains beneath Mount Sinai.

It's only been a few days since they all stood around the mountain and listened to the thunder and watched the lightning and heard the voice of God and said, all that you have said we will do.

And a few days later, they find themselves stressed out at the absence of Moses.

Take your Bibles and open them up to the book of Exodus, chapter 32.

I'd like to suggest to you today that if you're not careful, you will find yourself watching your children and your loved ones slip away, caught powerfully in the grip of this society's allure, and all the while acting like they are your children and your siblings, friends, or even your parents, if the roles are reversed, all the while wooing and beguiling and seducing the ones we love, when what this world needs right now, and our homes, and our schools, and our churches, is somebody to say, wait just a minute.

Exodus chapter 32, Moses is on the mountain.

The people are missing their visible manifestations of God.

The manifestation God has given them is the cloud by day and the pillar by night.

And by the way, this generation has received more manifestation of divine power than any generation in the history of man.

But there is 1 generation that will receive more.

We are not to fear as the signs multiply around us as the birth pangs for deliverance come upon this world.

Friends, God is gonna take us on a journey out of Egypt into that heavenly Canaan and he's going to manifest himself with greater power because this time he won't be saving only the literal sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

He's going to be saving all the faithful all around the world for the final time And when he manifests himself for the final global deliverance, it's going to be greater than the manifestation of the plagues and the Red Sea and the water and the food.

Nobody needs to be afraid unless they love the world.

And that makes me afraid every once in a while.

I don't expect the KJB to show up at my door tonight after the sun goes down.

I'm not afraid, like the pastors in El Salvador, that I might be stopped and held at gunpoint and extorted for money.

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Is This the Time?

Transcript

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