Coming Together Live 2023: Jesus and Wholistic Sexuality

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Coming Out Ministries

Eric Walsh

Tribulation’s Song, A Testimony

All right, I'm on a clock here, so we're gonna get right into this and get through it.

This is a, it's always difficult to talk about this, but God has shown me that it is necessary.

There are many lessons that need to be shared.

Our scripture reading will be taken from Matthew, chapter 5.

It says, Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

So our message tonight is entitled Tribulation Song and it's a testimony.

I'm not going to be able to give you all of the details of this testimony, but I'll jump right in to where I had received the job to be the director and the health officer for the city of Pasadena's health department.

We were able to pass some really good ordinances in the city.

This is a place that actually Ellen White did some work with people who worked against tobacco at the time when she was alive.

So there was a group that worked there and Ellen White had connections with them.

And so Pasadena obviously is famous for the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl, a very affluent city.

And we were on to pass ordinances banning cigarettes, smoking, or smoking at all in apartment buildings or condos because the smoke would wafe over.

I had The weight of big tobacco come after me for that 1.

And then we had ordinances around what the city could serve.

They had to meet certain nutritional standards.

The police department came after me for that 1.

And then Probably the biggest work we did, and I'm trying to cut this real, really get into this quick, was the work we did around HIV-infected individuals.

Interestingly, the year before I started medical school, I worked at a clinic on South Beach in Miami called PET, the PET clinic, the Prevention Education and Treatment Clinic on South Beach where there was a large gay community and HIV was really obviously exploding at that time.

It was, it had already exploded, but it was continuing on.

And so when I got to Pasadena, they had a very small program around HIV treatment for low-income people with HIV.

And what I found is that there was a lot of fracture in the gay community.

There's some very affluent people who go to private, high-end ID infectious people to get their treatment.

But there were a lot, many of them people of color or poor white people who had to come to places like ours to get their treatment.

While I was there, I brought in $7 to $8 million worth of programming, housing, mental health, expanded medical care.

A lot of things I learned at church, watching people do Dorcas Ministries, we literally brought into the health department and we had really good people that wanted to do it.

And many of my staff were from the LGBTQ community, as you would imagine.

And I wanna say we got along perfectly fine.

Many of them, and not all of them, knew I was a pastor.

In fact, I was the associate pastor at the Altadena Seventh-day Adventist Church, which was less than, you know, you could walk from the health department to the Altadena Church, and my name was on the on the board as the pastor.

So everybody knew I was a pastor, people knew I was a Christian, and it was not a problem.

I mean, all the time I did that work, I remember we got a grant from 1 of the county supervisors for 1 point, however many million dollars, and we built a dental clinic in the health department to serve this community.

Because there was a lot of discrimination against HIV positive people when it came to dentistry.

Some of You may remember that early on in that pandemic.

And I give you that background first to tell you that even when the fire came against me, no 1 ever said I was unkind to them.

No 1 ever said I didn't treat them fairly.

No 1 ever said I was bigoted or prejudiced.

My track record, in fact, even in some of the newspaper articles was, I don't know what he believes, but he was good and he brought services we needed.

And I say that because at the end of the day your first role in your job, whatever job you have, is your profession of faith.

So 1 of the things that happened with all of that was the great success that I was having at work is that it began to propel my career.

I was enjoying the testimony I just heard because she's 100% right.

If you begin to disconnect from God in any way, and I was pastoring and there was 6 months where as a medical doctor, I was the only pastor at the church and the church grew.

We were doing, God was blessing the church.

But having to go to certain parties to raise funds in the Hollywood Hills, you know, some of the celebrities I would run into in LA, these things began to affect me.

People began to really think highly of me.

I was on the local government TV channel all the time.

I'd walk out of a store and people would run up to, hey, Dr.

Walls, we were watching your talk last night on whatever, whatever, whatever.

And I tell you that because my testimony isn't a simple testimony of I was a something bad happened to me and God made it better or delivered me.

My testimony is 1 that God sends us trial to purify us.

And it began to go to my head because I wanted to be, you know, go further in public health.

There were a couple people that said they were gonna, I had already served George W.

Bush and Barack Obama on PACHA, the President's Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

The stuff I could tell you that the US government, I probably, if I tell you something, probably I'd probably disappear, but some of the stuff that happened around some of those programming that was really fascinating in the international realm.

But as these things went to my head, people started to say, you know, we're going to submit your name, 2 people, to Barack Obama to be the next Surgeon General of the United States.

And then the head of the LA County Health Department opened up and I wanted that and I don't have time to get into it but what begins to happen is that Satan doesn't just use success I mean let me rephrase that He doesn't use failure many times to bring about a disconnect from God.

It is shocking what Satan will give you if giving it to you means that you will be decoupled from your relationship with God.

I've seen this happen to pastors, their ministry goes really well and it goes to their head and they decouple from God.

I've seen it happen to all kinds of professions and it was happening to me in real time.

I was just not as good at anything I was supposed to be, not being the priest of the home I was supposed to be, not being any of the things God really called me to be.

I was still at church, still preaching, still doing well, but this thing was beginning to really affect me.

And so the first stanza of the song is that, that God saw where I was.

And 1 of the Bible verses that hit me was this 1, Revelation chapter 3, verse 19, is now 1 of my favorite Bible verses.

It says, as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten, be zealous therefore and repent.

I learned the hard way, 1 of the clearest signs that God loves you is that he allows you to go through difficulty.

In fact, if your life is too easy, you should be worried.

This answers the question, why is it that the wicked prosper?

The wicked prosper because they have no skin in the game to be purified.

So they, these trials, God would send trials to correct them, to develop them, to grow them, to purify them, but because they have determined to be wicked, those trials don't come.

And I would see that When I was going through the trial, I thought of some of my co-workers who were outwardly sinning and all kinds of crazy.

I said, Lord, why doesn't this happen to them?

If he loves you, he will rebuke and chasten you.

So all of this talk, the interesting discussion we just had about, you know, affirming and love and all these things, God does not pave a road for you that has no potholes.

If you're going to go down the path God has for you, you're going to hit trial.

So the idea that whoever or whatever you are should be painless and seamless is not a message that comes from the throne of God.

So why does God allow us to go through these things?

I put some good stuff first just to make sure I wouldn't run out of time, Pastor.

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Tribulation’s Song, A Testimony

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