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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Give Unto Caesar: Fear, Respect, and Love in the Age of Covid

I pray may we do it in a way that pleases You and respects all men and women.

If you challenge us, may we let you challenge us.

If you change us, may we rejoice in your changing.

If you comfort, may we take comfort in it.

But whatever you want to do today, I pray, please do it and bless us as we reflect on some exceptionally important themes that are the intersection of common society and prophetic movement.

This morning I am here before you—afternoon now, it looks like.

I'm here before you presenting a message I did not want to present this morning.

God laid this message on my mind, and yesterday I tried to deviate from His direction.

But I'm compelled this morning to talk to you about the hinge point of the great controversy.

It is this intersection that must be defined and understood in our own hearts.

I've entitled my message, Give Unto Caesar, fear, respect, and love in the age of COVID-19.

Now, I'm gonna tell you 1 of the reasons I'm preaching this is because my job, my calling is to keep things going.

And do you know how hard it is to keep something good going.

Those of you that are in a married situation, you know if your marriage has any measure of vitality, how much work it has taken to keep that relationship vitalized.

It's so difficult today to train up a child in the way he should go because the whole world is trying to get access to their mind to point them to the way they shouldn't go.

When it comes to our institutions, our churches, and our schools, I've said through the years nothing is harder than keeping a church school going.

It takes all kinds of faith and dialogue and encouragement and financing and extra work.

And This morning I want to assure you that our churches and our schools, along with the institution of the home, is not a commodity of convenience.

It takes a lot of work to make these things work.

And when we don't recognize that and when we don't protect those institutions, we can find ourselves inadvertently sliding into a pit from which it won't be quite so easy to climb out.

So with that backdrop this morning, let's take a moment and think about who we are as a people and what it takes to go forward to the kingdom.

When Jesus was a young boy, 12 years of age, becoming a man, he made a journey to Jerusalem.

But his parents left Jerusalem without him.

Somehow they assumed that he'd be in the caravan, But they get a day away and he's not there.

When they come back to Jerusalem, they go into the temple precinct and there's all kinds of people gathered around Jesus listening to him talk.

And when the crowd is gone and Mom's actually able to say, why did you treat me like this?

Jesus asks her a question and he says, didn't you know that I needed to be about my father's what?

Now I want to ask you how important is the business of the gospel and how important is the mandate of this church and this school?

And is it perhaps worthy of stressing a few relationships for the growth of all and eventual comfort of all that we resolve again that we must be about our Father's business?

Now as I was praying in the back hallway before I came out here, I felt a distinct understanding of something very new.

In every church I have received, there has always been a very risk-averse posture to doing anything where we can't connect all the dots.

And the first thing people will say when you get into an experience, you know, I was trained in the Sol Wing Institute, which I very much appreciate.

And Russell Burrell taught us, you know, that first sermon, I've talked to you about this before, the I Have a Dream sermon.

And you know, my dream was, you know, we'd have enough people in and out of the parking lots of those little churches to where they wouldn't be full of weeds.

And that we'd actually have a vibrant church.

But I would say this, in the beginning of my tenure as a pastor, the very first question and sitting on some other boards is, how are we going to pay for it?

And the not so subtle message was, is if the money wasn't on the books and it wasn't a priority, how dare you suggest it?

Step out beyond sight into the arena of faith.

Why that would be, what friends, Some of you say faith, some of you say presumption.

Why, some of you have every penny of your paycheck delegated and slotted before it's ever in your hands, and after it is in your hands, there's never a deviation.

And so, for those that live and move according to that mentality, why yes, it might look a bit presumptuous to plan to do something you don't have money for.

When you belong to a congregation, or you're leading a home, and you never are moved by the Spirit of God to do something where you can't see the end from the beginning, you never do that.

You're going to find yourself in a position just like this whole country finds itself in, where we have grown to be so risk-averse that the slightest little risk appears to be presumption.

If you can't see the end from the beginning, who do you think you are to suggest that we ought to do different than the well-traveled paths of the masses or what's convenient.

God's church has sat on its laurels in too many ways.

And I'm not here to rebuke this village church.

This village church has in so many ways embraced things where they couldn't see the end from the beginning.

And it's part of the reason that today, with properly social distance pews, we have a number of people that are here to worship.

But the fact of the matter is, we have lived always being able to completely and solely provide for ourselves and in so many religious places not take any risk so that when we come up to a place where there's a risk, well, we're not going to take it.

Now that's a sad and sobering fact, but it's a fact.

And by God's grace, it's not a fact for many here.

But this is how we got to where we are, to where we have a whole nation that is being fear-mongered into the path of least resistance without any risk-taking, and what's on the line is not only religious liberty, but in some sense you could say even a measure of civic liberty is on the line.

Most of you have not looked at a Constitution or a Bill of Rights in a long time, you don't know what it says and you don't understand the price paid to keep it in place.

I've got a copy of the Bill of Rights here with me this morning.

I asked the First Service to raise their hands.

I'm not going to do that in this service.

How many of you even know what the first is?

What's your first right according to this seminal document from the origins of our civic being?

And it would be good for all of you, get a copy of the Constitution.

There are places that prepare pocket copies of the Constitution.

And think about what it costs to have it.

And the lives and the blood that was shed to enshrine it and make it law.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

That's the first part of the First Amendment.

In other words, when this country came into being, it designated that Caesar had prerogatives in some places and no prerogatives in some others.

This morning I want to assure you that the great controversy hinges on an understanding of where Caesar has prerogative and where Caesar does not.

And I'm not here to do it in a flippant, rebellious way.

I'm here to do it outside the context of political mandarin to the viewpoint of left and right.

In other words, there's got to be a place where there's still honest speech that is respectful, iron sharpens iron, and we're able to have dialogues that actually go down to the issues, and we're all honest enough in heart and soul and mind to say, well, maybe I need to think about that different.

There are some listening to me here today for whom I fear the spirit of rebellion is, as it were, running around your feet.

And it's not so much an intelligent principled understanding of what the scriptures say about where those lines are drawn.

It might be tainted with the miasma of nobody is going to tell me what to do.

That spirit doesn't belong in a heart, in a home, in a church, in a society.

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Give Unto Caesar: Fear, Respect, and Love in the Age of Covid

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