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Eden Valley SDA Church

Frank Fournier

Make It Plain

It's amazing to be welcomed into your own home, but I haven't been here very much since February.

I'm happy to see also how many of you are here this morning.

It's wonderful to see all the faces, everyone looking so good, feeling that you're all interested in the Gospel.

Otherwise, you wouldn't be here, would you?

Have you felt also that you have a need, that you have a problem?

And sin, I don't know, there's no doubt in my mind, you've boiled this down sometime in your experience, but sin is really the problem in my life.

In Revelation 21 verse 27 it says, There shall in no wise enter into it, enter into heaven anything that defile it.

Not only have I sinned, but I am by nature sinful, full of it, full of defilement.

Now, I don't know if you can think in those terms, but it happens to be the truth.

Left to yourself, just as you are now, and I don't care how long you've been a Seventh-day Adventist, how long you've been a Christian, when it was that you gave your heart to the Lord, and any of it left to yourself, you are so defiling, you are so contaminating, you are so corrupting, that you are not fit to be in the kingdom of heaven.

This is just a plain truth that everyone needs to know.

Now my problem of course is especially egregious because there's not a thing humanly speaking that I can do about this.

There isn't anything I can do about this.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have felt yourself totally helpless?

I mean, think of some of these superhumans.

But there are people who think in terms that, or think like they are.

There are people who are big and strong and good looking and very intelligent and have a lot of money.

And everything seems to be going very very well for them and then sometime in their experience their little family runs into a huge problem.

The little girl in the family has cancer and no matter how strong you are, no matter how intelligent you are, no matter how much education you have, no matter how much money you have, there isn't a thing you can do.

That is really our bottom line condition.

Whether you've thought it through or you haven't thought it through, it happens to be so.

And sometimes the Lord has to go out of His way to bring that to you.

Sometimes the Lord has to go out of His way by way of providence, by way of circumstances, so that you can come to the place where you feel at 1 point, at least at 1 point in your life, you are absolutely helpless to do something about the situation you are in.

And then when you're absolutely helpless, at this point, you've got to begin to look outside of yourself, don't you?

If you've never been there, you don't have the basis for wanting salvation right from the get-go.

God, on the other hand, could say, hey, you've made your bed, you sleep in it.

But he can't say that because of 1 thing.

His problem is, how can I bring you to heaven and keep sin out of it?

Or, on the other hand, how do I destroy sin without destroying the 1 I love?

So everyone has a problem, including God.

And God, when He saw the way, had to invest everything that He is and everything that He has into it.

And then He turns around, and forgive me for going all the way to the end of the sermon right from the get-go here, but he turns around and he says, Listen, if salvation is worth anything to you, if you can grasp the value of what I am offering you, I want you to know that it's going to take everything you are and everything you've got.

I mean, are you able to watch Christians sometime in their Christianity, investing very little into it?

Their Christianity is ritualistic, it's ceremonial.

They come to church, they dress up on that day, potluck afterwards and then after that is whatever we do.

And it seems to be that all of Christianity is encapsulated in that few hours during 1 day of the week.

And after that we are nothing more than what are other people in the world, just about on the same level.

Well, let me tell you, it's going to take everything.

It took everything from God, and we could go into that, I don't have time this morning.

And it's going to take everything we've got.

The only difference is, of course, is God's everything and my everything is quite different.

You couldn't see the 1 for the size of the other.

Oh, but we could analyze it by contrast, for sure.

I didn't have you turn to Habakkuk chapter 2, so I'll have you turn there now.

Habakkuk, not easy to find Among the minor prophets of the Old Testament, towards the end of the Old Testament, we're in Habakkuk chapter 2.

And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision, make it plain upon tables that they may run that read it.

Now, what does it mean to make something plain?

The first thing I said was clear and the Next word I wrote was understandable.

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Make It Plain

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