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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

The Closet and the Prophet: Coming Out and Coming Home

Lord, I've come into your house where we want to receive the blessings that a kind and good Father gives.

We know also, Lord, that you want to be blessed, And since you've given your life for us, you're asking us to give our life to you again today as a living sacrifice.

I'm praying, Lord, that you would do that for us and that we would find joy being a child, a son or a daughter of God.

So now please bless us as we make this journey.

May our hearts be submissive to Your presence, Your Spirit, Your speaking to us individually, even though we've gathered as a group.

2 nights ago after eating my supper, I decided I was going to go for a walk.

Martin Luther said that his best Sermon preparation was on his knees.

Now, you need to know that this Sabbath marks the 500th anniversary of the day between when Martin Luther was told before the Diet of Worms to recant and he said, give me more time, give me more time.

500 years ago on this Sabbath Martin Luther was thinking about what the next day would hold and on tomorrow will mark the 500th anniversary when Martin Luther compelled by a love for Jesus and convicted by the power of his words, stood before the Diet of Worms and said, my conscience is bound by the word of God.

To go against conscience is neither safe nor prudent.

Therefore I cannot and I will not recant.

But I'm here to tell you for the last 4 years, from the time between Martin Luther's first coming out and Martin Luther's showdown with the authority of the age, many have questioned the power of the Protestant church to shape or reshape the culture.

Now this sermon is not the same as the first sermon.

That sermon is 1 that you might want to listen to yet today.

But there is a moment in everyone's history when they have to decide once to every man and nation comes that moment to decide.

And this morning, I want you to understand, you've come to a place of worship, understood by its congregants, to be an hour of divine worship, the divine worship hour, and whether it is divine or whether it is otherwise will be up to the prayers that preceded this moment and up to the condition of your heart.

Martin Luther found his best sermon time in prayer.

I find the same to be true, but often I'm walking and praying and thinking, and I have my phone in my hand and I am talking into it.

I had made it about 3 quarters of a mile from my house when I could look down the road on Jones Road and I saw something in the road.

I was about 500 feet away and I thought to myself is it dead or is it alive?

It didn't move much But it did move a little that was maybe more troubling to me than the first of the 2 categories, because if it's alive, hopefully it can wander off.

But if it's still alive and wounded, the trauma may become mine, because I find it hard to pass by something that's suffering without suffering with it.

I had my Rottweiler dog with me, put her on the leash.

As I got nearer and nearer, I could see the long scaly tail and the halfway wet gray hair, the white snout.

The problem was it appeared that the possum had just woken up.

And he climbed down out of some tree, crossed the water-filled ditch, and was a bit incoherent.

I was hoping, since he was in the middle of the road, that my approach would motivate him such to move out of the middle of the road, but no such thing happened.

He was not playing dead like possums do, he just wasn't fully conscious and alive.

And so I began looking around for something to poke the animal with.

I walked a little farther down the street and found a five-foot log with a 2 inch diameter that had enough stiffness in it to potentially do the job.

As I came to the possum, I thought I'll nudge it.

I thought, well I'm gonna start to slide it along.

Not only did the possum not want to move, but it took its claws and dug them into the pavement.

All the while I'm thinking to myself, this possum does not know that in its current stupor, it is likely to have permanent unconsciousness unless I help it.

I stood there trying to hold my dog back with 1 hand and move the possum off the road with the other, all the while him taking his long white pointy snout, opening his mouth and looking back at me like I was his worst enemy.

Some of you may have come to this service in just such a state as that marsupial.

You don't know you're sitting in the middle of the road.

And that unbeknownst to your current purview, danger is around the corner.

And of course, for some, the danger doesn't show up right away.

When I came back on my walk, he must have come sufficiently alive, for he was nowhere around to be seen and I was thankful that the Lord had spared me the trauma of seeing an unnecessary wound on the face of his creation.

This morning, everyone in this room needs to ask themselves, how do you define yourself?

And does anybody else desire or have a right to define you?

In visiting with some of our guest speakers, even last night, as we had broke bread together, before we started this journey, And by the way, the spirit and the tone of this journey is to bring to a sin sick, sin diseased world the same message Jesus brought, which John says in John 1 verse 14, is Jesus came full of what, friends?

Some of you think He came full of truth first.

The Bible says it a certain way for a very certain reason.

He came full of grace so that you could see the truth.

And if you don't understand that, or you've come here today having been mistreated, maybe even properly engaged, but unappreciating it, I want you to understand that Jesus desires to define you and so does your archenemy, Lucifer.

Jesus says, Genesis 1, 27, so God created mankind in his image.

Now in 1 short verse, 3 times, it says, he created, he created, He created.

What I want you to understand is that when David could write in Psalm 139, You created my inmost being, You knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made Your works are wonderful, and I know that full well all throughout the creation story and the story of salvation every single person with spiritual awareness Recognizes the authorship the ownership and the great glory of this amazing thing He's done to make beings in His image.

Take your Bibles and turn to 1 Corinthians 6.

It's not just that He had intentions higher than the highest human thought could reach.

It's the fact that He has paid the price to save you from your own wrongly chosen natural identity.

First Corinthians chapter 6, I'll begin with verse 15.

In First Corinthians chapter 5, you have 1 of the most immoral stories told in the Bible.

It is someone who under the false auspices of New Testament grace is living an incestual relationship with a mother or stepmother.

They're rejoicing in the largeness of their heart to welcome them into their fellowship, and Paul says, what's wrong with you?

Don't you understand how to relate to someone who's close to you, who gets this far off the mark.

I've made a decision about them in my absence.

Why can't you make a decision about them being present?

And it's not a decision of rejecting the person, but it is a decision of rejecting their soul-destroying choices.

In 1 Corinthians 6, he continues dealing with poor decision-making that involves not letting the church work things out, but putting them out to judges.

But he comes back to the dynamics of human sexuality in verse 15 and he says, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

Now this Terminology will show up in other places.

I mean Jesus is the head and whether you're a hand or a foot or a mouth or an elbow I don't know where you are in the body of Christ, but it's very clear in Paul's mind you have been Joined to Jesus in a powerful powerful way stronger than the original bond between Adam and Eve.

Don't you know that the 1 who joins himself to a prostitute, verse 16, is 1 body with her?

And he says, the 2 shall become 1 flesh, But the 1 who joins himself to the Lord is 1 spirit with him and Paul kind of writing Not so much between the lines says you've got something going on.

That won't work Your new identity is in Christ and That somehow his identity is supposed to be in you and you're combining things that will not only wound your person But it wounds everything about your walk with Christ and it creates a spiritual Impossibility The Christ would be joined to that.

Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.

Now let's think about that for just a minute.

I did talk about this in the first sermon, and I need to talk about it with all of you.

Jesus was out plucking grain with his disciples and they were eating it on the Sabbath and Jesus had interactions with the mob, the Pharisees felt, the prostitutes and the sinners and the tax collectors and and Jesus had to tell him Don't you know that what you eat does not defile the body.

It's eliminated So I want to know what Paul's talking about here Because there are 2 appetites in life 1 is for food and 1 is for physical intimacy Both of them were conquered on our behalf in Jesus Christ, and if he lives in us we can be conquerors too amen But when it comes to immorality that appetite is different than eating while eating matters every other sin that a man commits is outside the body.

The Closet and the Prophet: Coming Out and Coming Home

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