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Newport SDA Church

Ron Kelly

What to Do When the Mark of the Beast is Enforced

Lord, we are in your house on a Sabbath afternoon.

We truly do want to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

We're here before you now, and we're asking that our hearts would be sensitive to your impress.

Mine as the prompter, the Holy Spirit as the ultimate prompter, all of us, Lord, as actors on this divine stage where the battle is being played out.

Please set a watch before my lips and a guard before my mouth, and I pray also for the holy boldness I am going to preach about.

In the end, Lord, may we all wrestle with You and take comfort in You, whichever the situation is at the end of this message.

May we be that living sacrifice, and may the world take note that we have been with Jesus, in whose name we pray, amen.

You should probably get a little contextualization on me before I start to preach.

My grandmother prayed for me and my 3 siblings.

My mother was expelled from 1 of our institutions about 6 weeks before she graduated.

You could pray for her because she's got a major medical dynamic in front of her.

She was a fighter, but she had her own system of right and wrong, which was quasi what Jetty wanted.

That was her name and quasi what she was taught.

But she knew at some point in time that I wasn't going to the public school, so she started telling my dad, who was raised a nominal Catholic, very, very nominal, that when...

When Ronnie gets to going into seventh grade, they're all going to the church school.

But this is 1 of those moments when the strength of my mother's personality kicked in.

And in that seventh grade year, I met Jesus, praise the Lord, for church school teachers, Pathfinder leaders, adventure leaders.

What my mother did not know is that she had a young pastor in her house now.

But I had seen the dysfunction of the world and I had seen the beautiful functionality of true Christianity.

And I'm sure in that church in Peoria, Illinois, there were people that were less true than others but Christ gave me eyes to see the beauty of who he was.

I gave my life to Christ and then I found myself contending with my mother, telling her, no, I'm not going to go to the store and buy you cigarettes anymore, and things along that line.

What I didn't realize is that not having a mentor, no parents to guide me, would turn out to be 1 of the best things for me.

Now my teacher became a mentor showing me a principled Seventh-day Adventist Christianity.

If there's anything I'm going to talk to you about today it's principled Seventh-day Adventist Christianity.

Now some of what I say you'll like, some of what I say you probably won't like, because I'm sure with the message God has given me, I'm going to cut across the grain of some bad Seventh-day Adventist habits before we're all said and done.

But I love you, and as far as you know me, and I know you, you can love me in Christ too.

And I went off to Andrews University, but I spent a year at home.

I went to church school, I went to Broadview Academy, then I stayed home for a year.

The only reason I didn't go to church was I didn't want to tell my mom that my walk with Christ had about died.

But I decided in the spring of the year, probably about this time, late winter, early spring, that I was going to Andrews.

I went, I tried to do everything but ministry.

My church school teachers had put a mantle for ministry on me.

I had done a little sermonette up front, and clearly God had gifted me to communicate.

He was giving me an experience out of which to communicate.

You know a gift is 1 thing but you have to have an experience and that experience was coming in my home as I was really feeding in the Word of God and discovering a very real Jesus.

You have to have a very real Jesus to face the coming trouble.

And I tried medicine, I tried engineering, and all these things, and finally I said, Lord, I'm gonna quit trying to run away.

I went to Johnson Gym, and it was, They were on the quarter system then.

I sat down and I told 1 of the professors, you know, I'm going to go into the ministry.

You know, I had wrestled it out with Jesus, rededicated my heart, and my life was his.

Now, in the midst of that journey, I only went a couple quarters before I was asked to leave school because I didn't have enough money.

But you know, all of these things were preparing me for the journey that I would face in dealing with Adventist congregations.

I haven't started out loving all my churches and they haven't started out loving me.

But as we've been committed to Christ and to each other, we've had a very deep, deep bond which has allowed us to do more than some people are able to do because of the level of principled Christianity that's underneath our ministries.

So, I never left Andrews University because of money.

You can't take a course that you think is going to work out right.

You have to take the course that God is showing you to take.

So this morning, or this afternoon, I'm used to preaching in the morning typically.

This morning, I want to talk with you about holy boldness, credibility, and influence in the time of the end.

So, I want to start by saying that holy boldness is something that God wants each of us to have, but it's not going to look like the world.

Now, if you've been following the news, you saw on the news recently that our president said, I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.

When I heard those words, I felt like I was staring down a gun barrel.

Because at some point in time, those who are true to conscience and will be as true as the needle to the pole, they are going to look like they are using their religion for a type of independence that's hurtful to the larger whole.

And so when we look at holy boldness, it's very important that we look at it through the eye lens of faith, not through the eye lens of the world.

And so I want to go through 5 significant points that I think will allow us to get the attention of the world.

Because listen, friends, we're not here just to hold church.

And there's too many Adventist churches that are conveniently plotting their way towards the future.

They do wanna be in the boat, but it would appear that some don't care how many other people get in the boat.

That is not a principled approach to the sacred treasure of knowledge that we have.

We are actually supposed to give them a Savior who when He's in the vessel, we can smile at the storm.

So let's look at 5 things that I think are exceptionally important to having this holy boldness and the credibility and influence that we're going to need at the time of the end.

So the first thing you need to know if you're going to have holy boldness is you need to know you are in God's will.

You need the presence of God right by your side.

I think about 2 people in the scriptures, well, Saul and Jonathan.

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What to Do When the Mark of the Beast is Enforced

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