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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

How to Save Your Children (and Yourself) from a Wicked World - Standards and Salvation

We are here because you've reached out to us and we've responded.

It could have been through a parent or a teacher.

It could have been through a stranger or a pamphlet.

Somehow Lord, you've reached out to us and we've responded to your wonderful invitation to be your friends, your children.

Now Lord, I pray bless us as we think about how to protect that relationship and how to advertise to the world that we belong to a different leader.

May Jesus be lifted up, I pray in Jesus name.

In April 26 of 1986, certain things were going terribly wrong in the Ukraine.

There was a nuclear reactor with 4 reactors under 4 different roofs.

It would come to be the worst nuclear accident in the history of man, Fukushima in Japan, not too far behind it.

This sermon will be a little bit different, maybe a lot different than the last sermon because I had so many people talk to me between first and second services.

What happened was, was that there was a delay in the enactment of a test in the reactor, reactor number 4 I believe it was, maybe it was number 3 I'm not sure, but as they waited 10 hours to power the reactor down a different crew came on board and unfortunately that crew was not as prepared for the practice session And when things got out of control, they got way out of control.

In the city surrounding Chernobyl, where you had a disproportionate level of well-educated and better funded families, the children were playing in what looked like snow falling from the sky.

The only problem was it was deadly radioactive ash from the reactor itself.

If you've seen the documentary on Chernobyl, you know that they sought to cover it up hour after hour after hour.

What I learned in between church services, 1 of our engineers who works in 1 of our local nuclear power plants told me, it was as if the illustration was more tailor-made for me than I knew.

And that is that there were standards in Chernobyl that none of the rest of the reactors in the Soviet Union were willing to go against.

But in Chernobyl, they abandoned the standards that would protect the testing they were doing.

And when they abandoned those standards, things got out of control.

It is a sad thing to think that not only did so many people lose their lives or their quality of life, As information was withheld from them, it's a phenomena in which we see a perfect spiritual shadow or window or metaphor, as Satan himself would seek to keep back from us the information that would protect our joy and our freedom.

And instead of our children playing in the nuclear reactive ash in their Ukraine, we find instead today our children living inside a culture in which an experiment has gone terribly wrong.

The standards have been abandoned and what we're seeing now is a meltdown and so many of our young people are being picked off as the information from this generation-long experiment is just slowly coming to the service, long after mental appetites have been calibrated for idol worship and social self-destruction.

This morning, friends, I wanna talk with you about how to save your children and yourself from a wicked world.

And along the way, we're gonna realize that salvation and standards are not opposites, they actually come together quite closely.

I wanna talk to you in the beginning about weddings.

I've had my chance to do a whole lot more weddings than most people.

I've done a lot of premarital counseling.

And there's 1 thing I want you to know, all of the people that I've had a chance to preside over and probably all of the people whose weddings I've gone to, I don't think there was 1 of them who actually intended to get a divorce.

But I want to tell you I've dealt with people through the years when something's gone wrong in the relationship.

Oh yes, some marriages come apart with no help from the outside, but there are so many for whom the outside has an alluring attraction.

And those 2 people could sit in my office and as they sat there, I would hear the most abominable lies.

And by the way, I had at least 2 people testify to this illustration between services.

I have my own history, my own experience of dealing with individuals.

But it's terrible when you get 2 people that have been married for a long time and the marriage is coming undone, but there's worse than that.

It's worse when these 2 people will sit there and 1 person who had no intention in the beginning of destroying the union, but has been allured into a relationship that started out so benign, A little extra time over a cup of water, a little extra time at that sales call, a little extra time before or after the job, just a little bit too much casual interrelating.

And slowly the human heart begins an attachment for that which is illicit, which by the way there is a natural bent for anyway.

And to see 2 people in that situation, it's bad enough to know that somebody's heart is being wrong on this side of the journey, but the lies go so much before that.

1 person in that situation will sit there and they will say these terrible words, I don't love you.

But you know the worst words they'll say?

These are some of the most painful words that can ever be said to somebody.

And as 1 person was sharing with me at the end of their Sabbath school class, and I with them, it's not just that a human heart can grow cold to another, it's that it gets colder and colder and colder until it's stone hard.

Friends, I don't know of anybody that's gone down into a watery grave who has said to themselves, this will be temporary, I'm only doing this for the moment, but I've known many who have slowly found themselves wandering away from their first love to Jesus.

So this morning, I want you to know something.

Christian, Christian congregations and societies have always done well with a culture as long as the culture was persecuting them.

But as soon as the culture becomes their friend and the culture begins to drift and the collective voice of the churches is no longer the conscience of the culture, the church itself starts cozying up with the world.

And when this happens We should not be surprised that affection for Christ, affection for the church, affection for Christian parents, it all withers on the vine and dies.

And it doesn't just happen without an understanding.

There are laws that govern these relationships and laws that govern our sense of oneness to Christ.

Now I don't want to go any farther than this message without saying this.

The highest standard of a Christian was enunciated by Jesus when he was asked what is the great standard, what is the great commandment, And Jesus was able to communicate that the highest standard is love.

You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

This is not a message for you to grab onto so that you can get ahold of somebody else and make sure they know they're outside the way.

If you don't understand your own depravity, if you've never come face to face with some of the dark dynamics of what's potentially inside of you and has worked its way out.

If you're not a humble person, this sermon is not for you.

But if along the way you've come face to face with the fact that you wonder how in the world Jesus could save me, how in the world could Jesus reach out to me and redeem me again and again, then this message is for you.

The devil wants to take away the ones you love and he wants to take away their love for Jesus.

And along the way, if their love for you can be kicked to the curb, that's just fine too.

It's hard to raise children to love Jesus in this society.

I visited with somebody this last week who basically said, you don't know how many people there are out there, mamas and papas whose hearts are hurting, they're breaking, because they spent so much time shaping the lives of their children and their children appear to not hardly care.

Writing from Grass River, New York in 1861, Ellen White wrote this, my dear children we your father and mother feel a deep interest for you.

You may sometimes think that your parents are too strict and that they watch you too closely, but dear boys, our love for you is great.

We've dedicated you to God, you're his, and we must keep you separate from the world that you may be the Lord's.

We want your lives to be right and pleasing in his sight.

Don't feel discouraged my children Satan's ready to lead your young minds, but go to God seek him for strength pray much and give him your heart's best affection I'm gonna skip 1 paragraph and go to the end.

We want you saved We want you to be just right and to live for God and to be an honor to His cause.

And my dear little Willie, may the Lord bless you.

Pray for yourselves, which I find to be a very interesting line from this prophetic voice.

And she signs it, your affectionate mother.

I found some interesting things in studying this topic of standards.

Let's talk about a few things that probably you're not familiar with.

1 of the first things that jumps out with me as I look at this message is that God has a standard for his people and how to relate to politics.

We are not to find ourselves engaging in political allegiances.

It's your right to exercise as a free citizen in a democratic country.

But at this point in time, should you declare so-and-so to be the savior or so-and-so to be the villain, at this point in time, you effectively cut half of your audience off from wanting to hear anything else you have to say.

But we are not to align ourselves politically.

This kind of tag and label gets in the way of a higher goal and a higher standard.

We are not to be known as this or that politically.

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How to Save Your Children (and Yourself) from a Wicked World - Standards and Salvation

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