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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

That Woman: Resurrecting the Three Angels

Father, we're thankful for your provision in our lives.

And we thank you, Lord, for all those that have leaned into this problem, put their shoulders into the harness, and made this ministry ready or facilitated its readiness to do a greater work.

For those, Lord, that find themselves up against addiction and poverty and a variety of other evils, I pray, Lord, bless this ministry and bless us today.

This morning I've entitled my message, That Woman, Resurrecting the 3 Angels.

I wasn't going to be here this weekend, but I feel like the Lord rearranged things for me and provided some solutions where I was not needed somewhere else.

And I've chosen this message specifically because I'm absolutely convinced that we are in a situation where if we don't have a change in our homes, if we don't have a change in the culture of our lives in private, we will never have a Renaissance in public.

We will never be able to fulfill Revelation 18, where this fourth angel's message, this great light that lightens the world.

So this morning, I'm going to do something just a little bit unique.

I'm going to speak specifically to half of the congregation.

Obviously, it's applicable to all in some way, but this morning I'm speaking and appealing specifically to the women that are listening online or in this auditorium this morning.

Now, this sermon will not meet with the approval of anyone that comes with a feministic mindset according to the modern humanistic secular world viewpoint.

So if you come this morning and you embrace the world's definition of the new woman, this message cannot affirm or encourage you.

You'll go out of here angry and upset with me.

However, if you come to this message ready to embrace the Bible's understanding of uniqueness in gender and the power of true femininity, you could go from this place this morning, and you could be a part of a mighty movement to resurrect the 3 angels' messages, which I'd like to suggest to you are flying pretty low.

I'm not going to say they're grounded, but I'm going to suggest to you that the 3 angels' messages are no longer enunciating with a megaphone in many places, a loud voice.

As a matter of fact, the 3 angels, I suspect, are hardly understood by many who find themselves under a certain threshold of age.

But if we care this morning to embrace uniqueness without pigeonholing and limiting opportunity, for this is not a message on women's ordination or anything else, but it is certainly a message on the power of a true mother in Israel.

So I'm appealing to you today to come humbly and to listen and make sure you've built your mindset on the solid Word of God.

To go along with that I would suggest this, that I understand that the world is all about polarity.

1 of the reasons this morning is so beautiful here is that nature is in a harmony close to a beautiful balance.

In Michigan this morning, we can walk out into a cool morning.

When that balance is lost, whether it be in nature or business or the home, or in our understanding of true womanhood, we will find ourselves without the magnetism, the fragrance, the fruitfulness, the power that makes our lives an incontrovertible witness.

So this morning, I want to acknowledge a couple things.

I acknowledge that womanhood has to put up with a lot of foolishness at the hands of men, and that foolishness is too nice of a euphemism or a kind word for a bad problem.

There are women who have been abused, women who have been denied, women who have lost the joy of living beautiful lives all because of the management of evil, bad, immature, selfish men.

It's not the plan or the walk or the way of Christ.

I also get that in reaction to this, without the true presence of Christianity, womanhood has found itself morphing into something that is less beautiful than God intended to be.

Where the mantra in the modern secular realm is that whatever a man can do, a woman can not only do, but can do better.

And both of these polarities create a tremendous robbery to society, to home, to church, to all of the cultures that are to be brought together by the beautiful blending of differentness.

I mean for nothing in this message today to limit a woman from accomplishing anything God destines her to be—anything God destines her to do.

But I am going to touch on what I will call the elemental dynamics of femininity from a biblical model.

And if that troubles you, be troubled with God.

Please don't write me letters because I don't have time to answer them.

But I'd be glad to visit with you because verbal dialogue still remains the very best form of communication in person with all the nuances of tone and body language etc.

So I'm trying to create a format at the beginning of this message that says, could we come back to the power that makes a woman uniquely powerful?

This is what I'm after this morning, because if this role is unfulfilled, If this journey is not accomplished, society will find itself, and the society of our homes and churches, in a very disadvantaged position.

Take your Bibles this morning and open up to the Gospel of John, John 11.

I'm going to be talking with you about a woman named Mary of Magdala.

She is hardly mentioned until the end of the story in most Gospels.

But at the end of this story, we find out she's been in the mix all along the way.

It turns out that this woman is anonymous for most of the first 100 years of Bible history, New Testament Bible history, that is, And then when we get to the Gospel of John, written at the end of his life, we discover her identity.

She's a Mary that's not always Magdala in the New Testament.

She's left behind something that has marked her.

In John chapter 11, we read about a certain man, verse 1, who was sick.

Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.

Now, verse 2 is where I grabbed the first part of my sermon title from.

It says, "'It was the Mary, ' it was that woman, who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick." So let's just make sure we get an understanding now that when we read about Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, we are on the road to a discovery about who that Mary is.

That Mary is the Mary who anoints the feet of Jesus in the very last little bit of his life.

John chapter 12, it says, Jesus therefore, verse 1, 6 days before the Passover, came to Bethany where Lazarus was, whom Jesus has raised from the dead.

So they made him a supper there, and Martha was serving, but Lazarus was 1 of those reclining at the table with him.

Mary then took a pound of very costly perfume of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair, and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume." I want to point out as I deal with the message entitled, That Woman, Resurrecting the 3 Angels, I want to point out the timing of Mary in the story of salvation history.

Mary is in all likelihood, it appears to me, probably the Mary of John chapter 8, unnamed but probably Mary, who's caught in adultery, whom the spirit of prophecy and the desire of ages will suggest that from that moment forward, she devotes herself to a life of love to Christ and to purity.

I'm quite convinced they're the same, but not willing to make it a major point this morning since it can't be proved.

But 1 thing that's absolutely clear is that Mary's prominence comes at the end, and I don't want anybody to miss the timing.

Mary rises to prominence when Mary, this new mother in Israel with a very sordid past needs to rise up.

It's 6 days before Jesus will be on the cross.

Here we are approaching the coming of Christ, the first act of deliverance, or perhaps we should say the major act of deliverance.

For indeed, when Jesus shows up in the garden to protect the new human family that has sinned, there's true deliverance there.

But when we come to this moment of deliverance, just before the cross, Mary is in the moment.

We are living now close to the end of time, and if ever we needed a righteous generation of women to rise up, it's now.

The second thing that I think we should notice about Mary in this story is that she seeks to avoid observation.

There's nothing about Mary's role here that's about the promoting of self.

Mary is more than willing to stay, as it were, out of view.

If she could have stayed out of the olfactory senses or the ability to smell, she would have been A-okay.

There's nothing about Mary that's pointed to prominence.

Mary is actually on a journey of acknowledging her personal gratitude to Jesus and the whole story goes awry.

Writing in Desire of Ages, the author says she had sought to avoid observation.

And her movements might have passed unnoticed, but the ointment filled the room with its fragrance and published her act to all who were present.

You could say, bad combination of hopes, Mary.

You can't come into a room and run under the view of everybody else at the feet of Jesus and not recognize that there's 5 senses, 1 of which will be overwhelmed with what you're doing.

When a person comes to a task, male or female, and their only goal is to glorify Christ, Christ does with it what He wants.

If He wants you to be affirmed, as in this story, He obviously does, because we come to the end of it and after he's done teaching Simon, done teaching Jesus, done teaching the disciples, he says, listen, wherever this story is told, her name will be immortalized.

It's important for us to start with the right motives and if Christ wants to do something else with what we're doing, He can do it.

It's not that she needed to remain anonymous.

It's not that she needed to remain out of the highlight.

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That Woman: Resurrecting the Three Angels

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