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New Albany SDA Church

Joe Russell

Don’t Miss Your Flight

Now, I don't know if you've been enjoying the leaves outside.

You know, it's always disappointing to me this time of year when you get these leaves and then you get 1 big storm and it just knocks them all down.

But looking at the leaves, I'm reminded that summer is gone, not just on the calendar, but it's becoming a reality outside as well.

And so let me ask you, how many of you guys so far this year, or maybe you plan to, How many of you have been able to sneak out for a vacation?

There's still opportunity, but it can be difficult to get out for a vacation, of course.

There's the first type of vacation where it's more relaxing and peaceful.

You go there and your brain heals, right?

And then there's the other type of vacation where you go and you have a lot of activities to do, it's more adventure based.

How many of you guys prefer to do the relaxing vacation?

How many of you prefer to do the adventure-based vacations?

Okay, well I remember about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were going to take a vacation, and it was going to be an activity-based, adventure type of vacation.

We were gonna go to Dubai, and that's further west than we had ever been at that point.

You can see it's quite a bit, it's 8 time zones away.

We had all kinds of activities lined up, looking at the calendar, getting things booked, and as it got closer, we were checking our itineraries, making sure we had our confirmation numbers, making sure we had our things lined up, we didn't double-book anything, making sure we had our COVID arrangements correctly.

We were making sure everything was right, our IDs we had, our clothes were right for our trip and we were excited and The day finally came we had everything packed up.

We went to the airport We went up to the check-in counter and we gave them our passports and they asked that question.

We probably said Dubai's where we're going.

We're excited and we waited for them to give us our tickets.

Well, they all of a sudden stopped and looked up and said, there seems to be a discrepancy.

Now, 2 hours before your big trip is not the time you wanna hear about discrepancies, right?

I said, okay, well, what's the discrepancy?

They said, well, on your reservation it says Joe Russell, but your passport says Joseph Russell.

They said my name was Joseph Russell, and you can imagine me trying to explain to them it's not that big a deal, right?

Well, You see, my name's Joseph, but I go by Joe, and I've flown many times, including internationally.

I've always put in Joe, but as you can see, the address there is the same as in your system, and the birth date's the same, and the face is the same as on that passport.

And they told me that I was going to have to check with whomever I bought those tickets with and get it fixed.

Now, I don't know if you know this or not, but Expedia does not have a 911 number.

That means that when you have a problem, you get in the same queue as the guy who's trying to check hotel reservations for the year 2028.

So I got on the phone and I'm on hold for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, hoping that somebody picks up who can call the airline and fix this.

And the people at the counter, I don't think it was their best day.

They weren't having a very helpful attitude with me.

I have now an hour to my flight and I'm still on hold and it keeps going.

Now finally at about the 45 minute mark, they started to crack a little bit.

They saw that it looks like I'm actually potentially gonna miss my flight.

And they finally picked up the phone and I was very thankful that they did.

And they started calling their contacts to help me out, but it turns out, can you hear me?

That was not the flight that I wanted to miss.

In fact, here is me about an hour later eating dinner in Louisville, not somewhere between here and Dubai.

You can't hear it, she's asking me what my name is.

I was very disappointed to miss that flight that day.

I had days, weeks, I had literally months to fix that problem.

The problem is I didn't know there was a problem.

And so by the time I realized there was a problem, it was too late to fix it.

Well, you know, there's another flight that I'm excited for.

A flight that you and I have all signed up for together.

1 Thessalonians 4 says, For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and the trumpet guide, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

But then we which are alive and remain, and I hope that's all of us here today, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.

How many of you guys have booked your tickets amen well you know that day is getting a little closer maybe than what we sometimes realize And this morning I'd like to take a look together at the GPS, take a look at the timeline of history, the events that have to happen before Christ comes back and see where do we stand today.

But before we do, let's say a word of prayer together and ask the Lord to lead us.

Father, you have given us warnings in your word.

Not just for the present day, but warnings for the future, warnings of things that are to come.

And you've told us that we are not children of darkness, that the things that are coming upon this earth and may be an overwhelming surprise for others should not surprise us.

I pray that today as we look at the timeline that you have set forward that you will be in our midst guiding our minds and our thoughts.

Now when we think of signs of Christ's coming, typically our minds go to some passage like Matthew 24, right?

Wars and rumors of wars, nation will rise against nation, famines and earthquakes and pestilences in diverse areas.

We typically, at every evangelistic series, we start off on either night 1 or 2 with a graph like this.

How many of you have seen a graph like this before?

Showing the rise in natural disasters over the last 100 years.

And we can see they are rising exponentially.

And these are signs that we were told would happen before Christ comes back.

I've noticed that either because these things happen, but they rarely affect us directly, or because maybe many of us were born sometime in the curve here of this graph and we haven't really lived at a time without natural disasters, or maybe because we're just sometimes too distracted, I've noticed that the effect of these disasters, which is supposed to turn our minds to Christ coming, oftentimes seems to wear off.

Not that the signs aren't valid, but they tend to lose their potency over time.

But recently there's been a couple of things that I've seen, a couple of things I've read in the news that have kind of made me stand up.

Things I can't get out of my mind because I know I've seen them before.

And where I've seen them before is I've seen them on the timeline before Christ comes back.

Signs that aren't so commonplace, but we're told are coming.

And I wanted to talk specifically about 2 of those signs that I've seen today.

The first 1 is a more public debate over the value of separation of church and state.

Now our nation was built on the separation of church and state.

There's no question about that if you look at it historically.

But this is becoming more and more, as a public debate, is there value in it?

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Don’t Miss Your Flight

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