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Restoration International

Norman McNulty

Liberty Unshaken

Well good afternoon and happy Sabbath to each 1 of you.

You know, last night was interesting trying to speak through that driving rain and hailstorm.

It's not the only time I've had some interesting speaking experiences.

My friends the Sandoval's may remember the time when we were in Trinidad together and we were at a GYC type meeting and I was speaking and the electricity went out and I spake to a room that was in darkness.

I've also spoken where unfortunately a gentleman passed out during the middle of the 11 o'clock service and we had to call the ambulance and wait.

So you know sometimes things happen but I anticipate that This afternoon we're going to have a clear starting point and ending point without any interruptions and the Lord is going to bless our time together.

Before I get into the message for this afternoon, I did want to mention for those of you who are still here after sundown and you're interested in a copy of my book on Daniel, I will be at my table in the back there.

I have a few copies left and we can talk about that after sundown, but I also have a book on revelation that's coming out this summer that Remnant Publications will be putting out there.

I'm just gonna ask the Lord to be with us as well and then we will start this message.

Father, we thank you for this Sabbath day.

We thank you for the blessings that we've been experiencing here at National Family Retreat, the messages on family, on parenting, on marriage, and on going beyond believing a truth and living by God's grace in that truth.

And I pray that you would speak through me now as I speak about the liberty that you have given to us for the time that we are living in.

May the message be clear and may we be prepared for what is coming upon this world.

The title for my message this afternoon is Liberty Unshaken.

And you know Tom Waters asked me to give a presentation that addresses liberty within the context of prophecy.

So while I realize that we are here at a family retreat, this will be especially addressing how each 1 of us as individuals and as families should be living at this time of Earth's history.

And it's going to address how we understand what our God-given liberties are and how we should use these liberties in this time.

And so this is what we will be looking at.

And I'll start off with some of the basic prophetic understanding of who we are as a people, but I will end with some practical applications.

And so it's not simply going to be a talk on theory, It's going to paint a picture of where we are and it's going to take us to how we should respond on a practical level as God's people.

You know, as Seventh-day Adventists, we are a prophetic people, amen?

And God has given us prophecy for a reason.

The books of Daniel and Revelation are there to be studied and to be understood, and when they are rightly studied and when they are rightly understood, we gain a completely new experience.

Ellen White tells us in Testimonies to Ministers, page 114 through 116, that when the books of Daniel and Revelation are studied as they should be, the believers will have an entirely different experience.

We will move beyond belief to an experience.

And so, you know, sometimes when we study prophecy, we can identify the 7 heads and the 10 horns and the 2 beasts of Revelation 13 which I'm going to talk about a little bit today but then we forget that for example the book of Revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ and Revelation 13 is 1 chapter identifying Antichrist So we identify Antichrist and then we ignore the rest of the prophecies that identify Christ.

You know I've also heard people say, I'm not worried about what is coming, I just need to know who is coming." But there's a fallacy in that statement.

Because if you don't know what is coming, you are setting yourself up to be deceived by the false Christ and the false prophets who do come.

And so prophecy isn't just some abstract theory that some people find to be interesting.

Well I enjoy studying economics or I enjoy studying this part of Scripture, or whatever it is.

No, prophecy is a vital aspect to who we are as Seventh-day Adventists, because the truth is connected to Jesus, who is the truth, And every aspect of scripture is connected to Jesus who is the way, the truth, and the life.

And the reason why he has given us prophecy is so as we get to know Jesus, we come to understand who he is, and we understand the purpose of his kingdom and the manner and the nature of his coming so that we can share that with as many other people as we can.

1 of the reasons why these family retreats are so important is because we're not simply coming here to be better Christians, and that's obviously profoundly important, but we're coming here to become better families and better Christians, consecrated and surrendered to the Lord, because we're preparing our families for the final crisis of Earth's history.

You know, Noah preached for 120 years that a flood was coming and most people yawned through most of his sermons and laughed at him, but a day came when the flood came.

And a day is coming when the end of the world will hit and the messages that you've heard at these retreats will then have so much more meaning and value than you might even think right now.

And so it's so important for us that when we come to these meetings, that we're not just learning about how to become better families and to become more closely connected to the Lord, it's a given that as you become more closely connected to the Lord as a Seventh-day Adventist family, that you are becoming connected to the Lord to prepare your family for the soon return of Jesus.

And so we're not simply coming to these retreats to cloister ourselves away from the world and avoid sharing the 3 angels' messages and only come up, so to speak, when we come to these meetings.

And I know most of you don't do that, but I'm just saying the purpose for coming to these meetings is so that we can be strengthened and so that we can do the part that God has called us to do in sharing the closing work that God has given to us as this earth is coming to an end.

Now you know I happen to be here for the Oklahoma National Family Retreat last year when nobody was here other than the Waters and the important support staff and so forth.

But this is the first family retreat here in Oklahoma since the world changed.

Now you may have a variety of different perspectives about the pandemic and I'm not going to get into that, but here's something that you cannot deny.

The world is a different place since COVID-19 hit.

And so we are living in a different world.

And the messages that we have been giving that identify the fact that a day is coming when this world will come to an end, certainly seems much more relevant now in the year 2021 than when we gathered as a national family retreat here in Oklahoma 2 years ago.

We've always believed in these messages, but certainly this message is more relevant even today than it was 2 years ago.

So what I'm going to do in the next few minutes, I'm going to hit a few highlights of things that should be well understood by Seventh-day Adventists.

However, I will say that prophetic literacy among Seventh-day Adventists is not exactly at an all-time high.

And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad, I'm just saying that if you haven't been studying prophecy recently, now would be a good time to get back up to speed on the prophetic messages that God has given to us.

So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to give you kind of a big picture idea of Revelation and then some of the key elements in Revelation 13 and Revelation 11 and then we're going to make some practical applications from the life of Daniel as it relates to the type of liberty that God has given us and how we should be living in this time.

Now when you look at the book of Revelation it's basically broken and up into 2 halves with Revelation 12 right in the middle, but in the first half of the book of Revelation, you have the 7 churches, the 7 seals and the 7 trumpets.

We're not gonna go through all of that, but simply put, the 7 churches, the 7 seals and the 7 trumpets start with Christ's work in the holy place and they conclude with Christ moving into the most holy place.

So for example, when you come to the 7 churches, Christ is standing in the midst of the candlesticks, but then when you come to the seventh church, it's the Laodicean church.

Laodicea means a judged people, that's what the word means.

So now we've moved into the Judgment Hour message.

So the message to the Laodicean church is a prophetic message for the Judgment Hour church that lives from 1844 to the Second Coming and that's why the message of creation is part of Christ's title in that message.

Then when you go to the 7 seals it starts with God on the throne and the throne is across from the 7 lamps burning with fire which are again the 7 candlesticks in the holy place.

And by the time you get to the end of the seals, you see that the 4 winds are being held until the sermons of God are sealed in their foreheads, and the work of sealing takes place in the most Holy Place during the Judgment Hour message.

Then you go to the 7 trumpets and you see an angel with a censer in his hand, but he's standing before the altar of incense, that's again in the Holy Place, but by the time you come to the end of the trumpets in Revelation 10 and Revelation 11, you have a mighty angel coming down from heaven and he's moving from the most holy, or excuse me, from the holy place to the most holy place to raise up the second advent movement of people that he is raising up for the mystery of God to be finished and the mystery of God in Colossians 1 27 is Christ in you the hope of glory.

Now that's very practical because Christ didn't raise up a prophetic people just to raise up a prophetic people.

He raised up a prophetic people who would be like him in character.

So by the time you look at the 7 churches, the 7 seals, and the 7 trumpets, what you see is God's master strategy of how he's going to defeat Satan and the great controversy and how he's going to prepare a people who will be like him in character.

You have the 7 churches, the 7 seals, and the 7 trumpets.

And interestingly when you come to the end of the Laodicean church, it's a lukewarm church and Christ is knocking at the door saying, let me come in.

It's a lukewarm church that he says, if you don't change I will vomit you out of my mouth.

So you're like, is that how God's last day church is going to end?

But then you come to the end of the 7 seals and you say, wow, from God's last day church that was lukewarm and Laodicean, God finds the 144, 000 upon whom he places the seal of the living God.

And then you come to the end of the 7 trumpets, you say, wow, from that lukewarm church that receives the seal of the living God, it's from that movement, the second advent movement, where the mystery of God is finished, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So now Christ has revealed what he's going to do from the most holy place to produce a people who are like him in character that are the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Now when you study the book of Revelation like that prophecy becomes so much more powerful.

And look I like to identify the 7 heads and the 10 horns and 5 are fallen and 1 is.

That's a nice exercise, but the deeper value is seeing what Christ plans on doing in producing a people like him.

Going from just a theory of saying, hey, we're the second Advent movement, to allowing Christ, as he knocks on the door of your heart, to actually let him come in so that he can clean up the sin problem in our hearts and lives.

And so when you get to Revelation 12, you see that Satan doesn't go down without a fight.

You see the whole great controversy where Christ was born of a woman and he was caught up to God and to his throne, and then the great controversy goes into the wilderness for 1260 years and you come to the end of chapter 12 and the dragon targets the remnant who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ which is the spirit of prophecy.

And it's not a coincidence that in the Seventh Theodonist Church today there are Seventh Theodonists who are embarrassed by the concept of obedience and the spirit of prophecy because those are the 2 identifying characteristics that Satan hates the most about God's remnant church.

And so then Revelation 13 is when Satan says, hey God, you think you're gonna develop a remnant that's like you in character?

A beast that comes up from the sea and a beast that comes up from the earth and while the second beast starts off with Christian-like principles, eventually they speak like a dragon as well.

And through those 2 powers, Satan is contesting the Great Controversy and he says, I'm going to keep Christ from producing the people that he says he will produce from the most holy place by the work that I do through the first beast which is the Roman Catholic Church state power and the second beast which is apostate Protestant America.

And this is where things become interesting because you know growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist I've always understood that the first beast of Revelation 13 it's very clearly connected to Daniel 7 and you have the 4 beasts of Daniel 7 that are a composite of the beast of Revelation 13 and then you have the little horn of Daniel 7 that has a mouth speaking great things 4 different times and Daniel 7 and then the beast of Revelation 13 has a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies and we know the little horn of Daniel 7 is the papacy and we know the first beast of Revelation 13 is the papacy.

And then we understand very clearly that after the 1260 years, just as the first beast came up out of the sea, the second beast comes out of the earth, so the first beast came out of the populated areas of the world, the second beast comes up out of the earth just at the time that the papacy received the deadly wound in 1798, and there's no other power on earth that could fit that description other than the United States of America.

Furthermore, the United States of America is described as having 2 horns like a lamb and the lamb is mentioned repeatedly throughout the book of Revelation as describing Christ.

So the United States of America is a nation based on Christian principles.

Now some people have a problem with saying that, but that's what the Bible says.

And whereas the first beast has 7 heads and 10 horns and 10 crowns upon the 10 horns, meaning that church and state are united and the monarchy and the kings of the earth were under the power of the church.

The United States is a little bit different.

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Liberty Unshaken

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