Citizenship

Well, good afternoon, everyone! What a wonderful day! Started off differently. Anyway, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be able to speak to you today. Well, first of all, I got a call from my son saying that Susan Durnell wasn't feeling well. She had the songs. Could I do the songs? He sent me a list of six songs, so I played them. But I really was kind of rusty on some of them. And I said, can you change them out? I said, oh no, we got it all set up for the songs and slides and everything.

So I did the first three and then the last three I gave up. And then as they were driving to church, on the way to church, and we drove with Michael because we needed to bring a ladder here for tomorrow's bulb ceremony. So he said, Josh Creech had car problems, no sermons. So what do we do about that? He says, Dad, could you give a sermon? So we could either have, we could either play a video or you could give a sermon.

I said, ah, I'd rather give it, time goes faster. So we weren't sure what to find. So anyway, so as we're driving through Whitestown, I'm going to my Google Drive to see what I could speak about. This does not really frighten me. I've had different experiences in the past. One of them was when I forgot my notes in Lafayette and had to go to Terre Haute. I had no notes. No, actually, Terre Haute, I gave the sermon, but I left the notes at the podium.

I got to Lafayette, I had nothing. So I had to kind of give it from my head, you know, wrote some things down. People said, usually I can give more sermons without notes. And the other time was when I had a medical emergency. I had a root canal and I had a bad infection on Holy Day in the morning. And so the doctor plugged me up with whatever drugs that Garrison does. It wasn't Dr.

Garrison's. But I was so loopy and I had the sermon that afternoon. I said, I've never given a sermon on drugs before, but here it goes. And people said that wasn't good, you know. So no notes and take drugs, you know.

And I've had other experiences, too, 53 years of them. So anyway, I thought that I would first, before I speak about my sermon, which is about citizenship. This is a good year for talking about citizenship as we are facing big decisions in our country affecting our leadership and our relationship to them. And so I thought that I would speak about that.

I modified that between Keystone and Allison for this. But anyway, before that, I had a telephone call this last week from the pastor of the church in Harsan, Ukraine. Harsan is one of the areas that was occupied by the Russians, and the Russians were driven out there, you know, a few months back. And that is where we have what were Sabbatarian churches. In fact, the story of that Sabbatarian church is interesting because the people here in this, in Indiana, helped with the resettlement of this church back from a civil war in Tajikistan. Now, let me just cover a lot of things here.

But these are people who had been in Central Asia. They were Ukrainians who were sent out there by Stalin, or at least their grandparents, their great-grandparents by Stalin, and they lived in Tajikistan, which is right north of Afghanistan. Any of the countries that end with a stan is a Muslim country.

Anyway, in 1991, these areas became liberated from the USSR. And then the Muslims arose in these areas. And then the first thing that happens with Muslim communities is that they start fighting each other, not others. They start fighting each other. And they had a civil war in progress. And one of the issues of the civil war was that some of the factions prayed four times a day, others prayed six times a day. And that's a good reason to kill each other. So anyway, they had that and other issues. And so the Sabbatarians, the Christians, were caught in the middle.

In fact, what happened is that the Muslims got along with each other. That meant they turned their attention to the Christians. And they had all kinds of horrible events that take place. And they realized that, we've got to get out of here. And there was a church of about 150 people, 120 to 150 people.

And they said, we have got to leave. And they tried to find asylum in Australia, Canada, other places who rejected them. But since they were Ukrainian by birth or by heritage, they were allowed to get back to Ukraine, of all places, to hear their song. And so they settled there. And we helped with some of our containers that left here from Indianapolis to help these people. Anyway, they settled in Fersan. And on one of my visits to Ukraine, I and Dr. Morris Frone, who I traveled with together, went and visited these people in Fersan, which was very interesting.

It's right at the mouth of the Dnieper River. And the pastor moved there. And all 120 people settled there. And he was the very last person to leave as the captain of a ship, the last person to leave Tajikistan. And he said that he was there. He had seven children. He had eight children, seven sons and one daughter.

And he was among the group. Bransclausen was his name. And he was the last person to get on the plane of the last flight out of Tajikistan. The flight went through Moscow, Moscow to Ukraine. And that's where they settled. Anyway, they formed a church, a very viable church, that's still 120, 150 members or so. And Fersan has been going through a lot of fighting. In fact, the dam that broke in Ukraine on June 6th, this year you probably heard it, the Kowka Dam, was just north, just upstream from where they lived.

And I have not talked to him since. I knew him back a long time ago in the fact that I had met him on one of my visits to Ukraine. But he said that what's happening now, we talked on the telephone for quite a while yesterday, and then he sent me a sermon that he gave.

He's in Germany right now. He's in Germany visiting other cemeterias. But he said that it's been just horrible what's happening there. But not one Sabbatarian has been injured or killed. He said, when the dam broke upstream, there's a lot of flooding, and we helped with flooding. Not one single member's home was flooded. Some of the homes, he said, there were 20 homes in this flood area. Not one home did water enter into the home. One home, the water came up to the front door, just about to enter into the house. But all the other homes, some of them were like islands in the lake. You know, they were protected.

There he is. Okay, yeah, I asked him this. That's his name, Franz Klaasen and his wife, Anya. So we talked. This was 28 years ago that we relocated these people from the Civil War.

And his sermon, I started listening to it today, it was in Russian, I've got it transcribed, translated into English because it really is a story. Because he said, here we started with a civil war in Tajikistan 20 years ago, and now we're in Harsan, and here with a war with a Russian invasion. He says, how do we feel? He said, we feel thankful. We were prepared for this.

But, you know, how good do we have it here in this country? He says, we were prepared for what was happening because our people remember what happened with the Muslims in Harsan. In fact, that was the first time that I heard the word Taliban. This was in 1997. You know, we heard everybody going, Taliban is the bad people there in that area. And he said that Taliban, he said, they're not religious at all. He says, they're just ramble students.

They really aren't. There's no religion or God, you know, with the Taliban. But it's just amazing. In fact, Franz Kossen then was elected as the head of 30 different Sabbath-keeping groups around the world, which actually extended into Canada, that we were working with in Ukraine. The work that we've done in Ukraine was only one of 30 different groups of that sort, with whom we've had a very brotherly relationship. It was amazing being able to go to Ukraine and to be able to be in services and have the same values that we do. They don't have a cross. They said, if Christ was killed with a gun, would we have a gun upon the law? It was just very interesting how they put it.

Their view of the law of God, their view of life after death, their view of God's kingdom, their food laws, the same, just straight down the line as we believe. And some of them now have adopted the keeping of the Holy Days. That was the biggest difference between us and in the very beginning. But one year, about 15 years ago, I went over there just a week after Pentecost and gave my Pentecost sermon there about how Christ was the center of the observance of Pentecost.

For that matter, the rest of the Holy Days. And they said, oh, we're beginning to get this.

So we didn't want to take on the Holy Days because they made us look Jewish. I said, you're already looking Jewish by giving the Sabbath. So anyway, we had a very good dialogue going on this. And some of them came to our feast, Tabernacles in Estonia, just a couple.

But anyway, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background. But this is Franz Klaasen and his wife Anja in Germany. And they're headed for Portland, Oregon, this coming week. Probably the most dangerous place that they've come to be. But anyway, that's where they will be this week. So anyway, that's my introduction, just to give you a little bit of background. We work very actively in Ukraine with LifeNets. And we work through a lot of very, very responsible people and have been doing a lot of good. He just thanked me up and down. In fact, not me, but LifeNets, so much for the help that we've given. Sometimes I don't know where exactly the help goes. But he says, you don't realize you're buying coal and wood for us last winter.

Just what a big help it was to our brethren there. And I thought to myself, they're thanking us for coal and wood. He said, we were sitting there without water, electricity, gas for a whole month in that particular church. And they have a lot of young people in that church. They sent us pictures. So if you go to the LifeNets website, go under War Blog, you can see a lot of pictures from the different areas where we have been working. Okay, what I want to talk to you about today, though, is citizenship. I was told not to go overtime, so what time is church over?

Okay, they said tell a story, but just don't tell too many. Okay, just wanted to make sure. I want to talk about citizenship. Most of you are American citizens. Don't give thought to citizenship. If you were to prove your citizenship, what would you do?

Yeah, I don't know. I must have some paper. Well, one of the most prized documents that I have are my citizenship papers when I became a U.S. naturalized citizen in second grade.

We are endowed with the rights of American citizenship, but also with certain responsibilities.

Believe me, there are many people who would like to come to the U.S., who already are coming to the U.S., who would like to be U.S. citizens. In fact, that's the greatest sham to us, because we came in the way we did after living in a refugee camp, United Nations refugee camp in Hanover, Germany. I was born there. My parents had to wait and wait, almost got repatriated back to the U.S.S.R., very, very close to being sent back, but they finally found a sponsor, Dr. Grunowski, a professor at the University of Minnesota, who provided the sponsorship to come to the U.S.R. I was two years old, and that's where I grew up. My parents were what are called DPs, displaced persons, and when they were put into those refugee camps, they had no citizenship. They had no papers to say that they were anything. They weren't Soviet citizens to the British. We were in the British zone in Hanover. We were nothing. We were just displaced persons.

My mother was from Kharkiv, Ukraine, actually probably 50 miles out of Kharkiv, but I say it's Kharkiv. The city that was greatly bombed in this war, in fact, my second cousin was killed in an apartment building that he was in at that time, and she was, when the Germans invaded in 1941, our Barbarossa, she was 15 years old. She still remembers the German attack. In one day, 700 people around her were killed, and she was just a little girl, 15 years old, hurting the cows out of the field into the barn, and she remembers that she saw the bombs exploding around her, and she hid under the cows, she says, for protection. Well, the Germans, a year later, took a teenager out of every family to send them to Germany to work. My mother was the one picked from our family, and so she was 16 years old. They were told it was going to be for six months, and to the teenagers, it was like a Y-O-U trip, you know. It was this, hey, we're going to Germany to work, and we'll be back in six months. What an opportunity! What a learning opportunity! Well, it was 27 years before she got to see her parents again.

My father was from western Ukraine. He was 18 years old, and he was also shipped to Germany, and they both worked in slave camps, slave labor camps. My mother worked at a shoe factory, making boots for German soldiers, and my father worked in a food factory of some sort. They made jams and conservation, things like that.

They wanted to return home, like anybody would after five years after the war, but they found out that they were treated like collaborators. They were treated very badly by the Russians who had come in, and so they thought, we better not. And I have a whole story, a whole sermon, that I've actually given here in this church on the holiday, but I won't get into that at this point.

They made it to the United States, and they tried for a long time to find a place, to find a country who would take them in. They tried Canada, they tried Australia, nobody would take them in, but through a professor at the University of Minnesota, who was an acquaintance of my grandfather's family, he was able to take us in. He was a great Ukrainian nationalist who sponsored about 200 families, professor in the University of Minnesota.

During, they finally settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, and they prepared for citizenship.

It was a lengthy process. They knew no English, but they had to learn basic English language. As I was growing up, I remember being three, four, five years old, my parents drilling each other on English words. They had to know the three branches of U.S. government. That's where I learned my first civics lesson was my parents studying for their citizenship. They had to learn about the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and when I was five years old, five, six years old, this was my first civic lesson as they were explaining it to each other because the naturalization officer would be asking them all these questions and also making sure that they knew basic English. They had to know who the president of the country was. Of course, it was Eisenhower, the great hero of that time.

Made my parents lifetime Republicans.

They also had to know who the congressman was for our district. They had to know who the two senators were, and I was proudly knowing in 5-8-5 or 6, you know, who the two senators were from the state of Minnesota. One of them, but again Hubert Humphrey, I believe, just shortly after that time, I remember these things, and they had to apply then for citizenship. They had to be at least 18 years old, and they have had to be a permanent resident and have a green card for five years before they could become a citizen. That's what they were wanting to have, the citizenship papers. They had to demonstrate continuous residency in the U.S. for at least five years after filing the M-400 form. It is just to us, just absolutely unbelievable, to people who have come in the way my family did and others. What's happening on a southern border?

It's not just a bad dream or a bad story or just bad politics. It is just compared to what we had to go through to become U.S. citizens and to see people by droves coming in and how easy it is.

Believe me, even with life nets, I am getting people who contact me at least three.

Would you please get us into the U.S. through Mexico? I said, please don't even think of asking me that question. I've got three kids. I said, no.

You have to read, write, and speak basic English. What's wrong with that?

Now you don't have to speak English. I am proud that I don't speak English. I'm being amazed. I speak Spanish only. I are a translator for me.

You have to have an understanding of U.S. history and government. This is also where I learned about Abraham Lincoln in George Washington.

My parents were preparing for citizenship. Also, deeper as you were drilled by the naturalization officer, you have to demonstrate an attachment to the principles and ideals of the U.S. Constitution.

Believe me, the Russian Constitution is quite different.

Also, of all things, you have to be a person of good moral character.

I'm not sure exactly how they defined it, but you have to be basically a person of integrity and honesty. You cannot be a felon.

Before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, immigrants had to take this oath.

I hereby declare that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have either hitherto been subject or a citizen. Basically, goodbye, Russia. Goodbye, Poland.

I renounce you as my king, as my president. I now accept the government and the governing leaders and the laws of this country as a citizen. I was in second grade. I was with my parents as we walked into the officers. I know that each one of us was drilled questions separately.

I remember being told that I'm now an American citizen. I'm signing my name on my photograph that was attached to the form. My second grade class had a party for me saying, here's little Victor. Victor, he's the citizen of the United States. Exciting. And I was no longer an alien. That was the way that people were called who were not citizens. They were aliens.

When I first gave the sermon, my son Michael was five years old. He was sitting there in the audience, and I said that I was no longer an alien. And after services, he said, Daddy, what planet did you come from?

He was serious. I thought, wow, are my ears funny?

With the Soviet government, they would not let go of their subjects. Once a Soviet citizen, always a Soviet citizen, that's why you couldn't go back to visit. Because if you went back to visit, after any specified time, you could be detained. And said, you're not an American citizen. We don't recognize that. You are a citizen of the USSR. So when my mother went back after 27 years to see her mother, that still was an issue. That still was an issue. My mom missed, of course, her parents.

And she took along my 11-year-old sister as kind of insurance.

She said, well, we'll certainly keep all of us back here. And she had no problem. But nonetheless, that was something that was there. I remember when my mother died, I was an executor for our property or for my mom's estate. One of the first letters that I got was from an attorney in New York City representing the Soviet government, the USSR, who laid claim on our estate.

So you are citizens of the Soviet government. And I know that there were families that had no family in the United States where their estate would go over to Moscow. That's how they had a grip on their people. We basically ignored the letter from some law firm in New York City.

Citizenship is a big deal. The Apostle Paul really proclaimed his citizenship.

He was a citizen of the Roman Empire. That was a very special status. He came from the city of Tarsus, which was a colony, actually, relatively new colony of the Roman government. His parents were the tribe of Benjamin who had settled up there before. And when Rome colonized that area, anybody who already was living there was by default became a Roman citizen. And so that's how his family was. But that was only a small percentage of the people. The majority population of Rome, the Roman Empire, was slave, even in the city of Rome. If you're a slave, you were not a citizen. In fact, a big chunk of the church in Rome and other places with indications were slaves.

They were indentured servants. You know, they weren't rowing galleys or anything, but they were slaves. That was their status. They were owned by somebody for a specified period of time, or maybe for an unspecified period of time. But these are people who came into the face and became part of the body of Jesus Christ. But they were still not citizens of the government that they're in. And so when the Apostle Paul speaks about our citizenship, you know, isn't heaven, or you know, he's talking about the kingdom of God, to these slave people, this was a big statement. Now, you're no longer a nothing. You're no longer without identity. You've got identity. You are a citizen of the kingdom of God. Philippians chapter 3 and verse 20. Philippians chapter 3.

Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In a new living translation, but we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and we are eagerly waiting for Him to return as Savior. I hope that we can have that feeling.

Believe me, I have that feeling with a great deal of emotion, especially when I see what people over there have to live through and what they've had to go through to become citizens of this country, the last bastion of any sanity in this entire planet that is being threatened right now, horribly being threatened. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 11. The apostle Paul spoke to classes of people. He talked to Jews, Gentiles, citizens, non-citizens, and slaves throughout his addresses. Verse 11. Now remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called the uncircumcision by that which is the circumcision made by the hands of flesh. For that time you were without Christ being aliens from the Commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. That's what we all were. That's what these masses of people that were throughout Europe, World War II, that's what these masses of people are in the conflicts in Venezuela, whether it be Venezuela or whether it be the Middle East or Syria.

People who are nothing, people who are taken and abused. Slavery now is at its very peak in the history of the world. Pray for the Lord Jesus Christ to come, the remedy of this situation.

All the horrible things that are happening to individuals, and how happy and thankful that we should feel for who we are, where we are. But now in Christ Jesus, he says, you have a higher level of citizenship who once were afar off, have been brought near by the blood of Christ. He compares becoming a Christian, becoming part of this family of God, the Church of God, as citizenship, as our citizenship in heaven, part of this body.

I'd like to say up front here, does that mean we renounce our citizenship of this world?

Absolutely not. The Apostle Paul used his citizenship, believe me. He whipped out his citizenship documentation whenever he needed to, for legal purposes, for financial purposes, for travel purposes. He couldn't just travel by boat from country to country in the Roman Empire without being a citizen, nobody. I'm just a hitchhiker. No, he had to have documentation.

I do too. I am very proud to be an American citizen. I'm very proud to salute the flag of the United States. I'm very proud to pledge my allegiance to the flag. Some who don't, I do.

I have good reason to. I'm very thankful for that. But I'm also very grateful to be part of the spiritual body of Jesus Christ, who came to this earth and made me part of the citizenship that I am trying to spread to other people because this is what the entire world will become. This is the kingdom of God, the citizenship, the country, the nation, the kingdom of God, where everybody will become a member of that. Ephesians 2.19, therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners.

This is not just platitude talk, but he wrote to the Ephesians a major city in Rome, which had a lot of slaves, had a lot of stuff that was happening, a lot of class distinction. And so he's writing to them and encouraging them, saying, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Having been built on the land of God, been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. This is the way we need to take a look at really our membership in the United Church of God, membership in the greater body of Christ, membership in the kingdom of God, citizenship in the kingdom, in whom the whole building being fitted together, verse 21, Ephesians 2, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom also you were built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Take a look at it and have that swirl in our minds about who we really are. The apostle Paul tells us that if we're called by God, and if we have elected to respond to that calling with repentance and obedience to God, we have citizenship in heaven. We're no longer aliens, foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints. Paul's words reflect the world conditions at the time. When a Roman citizenship made a person a member of the elite on the earth, regardless of how pathetic their individual circumstances would have been if they achieved that status.

We've become members of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth at that time, and the apostle Paul is brilliant, and last night as a family we watched the short 30-minute documentary about Paul, which was one of the finest I've seen, not only because it was short, but it was very concise and explained exactly Paul's status in his citizenship and also his travels and what he did in the Roman Empire. Instead of having a long documentary, it was a short one that really summarized it very, very well.

But God chose Israel in the Old Testament to be his chosen people. They were citizens of a very special nature. And in Old Testament, Israel is generally referred to as the people of God, as a community. The point of this is that the Old Testament concept of election is not simply a matter of God arbitrarily picking out one nation from the rest. Rather, he called into being a community of people who would live among the nations to serve his purpose. So I'm just lucky speaking out here. You have a special status. You have a green card. You're a spiritual citizen.

No, you have a job to do, picking out this nation of Israel because they had a very, very important commission. In the New Testament, the Greek word translated church is ekklesia. In its original context, it is meant that they were who were called out. Citizens required for the business of a city for a community. Word ekklesia sounds very spiritual, but it wasn't. It was just a community of people, oftentimes a business community called out to do for a particular purpose.

At first, it seems to have meant particularly citizens called out to do battle for the protection of the community. It had a certain military overtones. And from that, it was also used to mean the assembly of citizens chosen to transact the affairs of the community, not just a nice church where you go to meet your friends and hear a sermon. You really had a purpose. You really had a driving purpose. You were chosen for this when we overlay these concepts, both in Old Testament and New Testament. What the Apostle Paul said and how he was the bridge between Israel and the Gentile world, we are chosen. We're to be a light to the world. Jesus Christ made this very, very clear to be a light among the people. We're unique by our calling out, separated into a distinct community as the church. And ethically, we're bound to the covenants made and entered into voluntarily with our sovereign Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We have a covenant. We have an agreement. We live by his constitution that has priority over any other constitution in this life. But this does not mean that we renounce this country, that we go off to ourselves as our own community. We are called out of the world, but to live in the world. We're to be light to this world. We're to show God's grandeur and God's greatness. Now, do we get everything we need to get as far as our citizenship with God? Citizens of heaven are Eclusea. Okay, they had to understand how the government was run. Do we have an understanding of the government of God? When we talk to people about baptism, we tell them about here's what's required for baptism. This, this, and this. Do you understand our constitution?

Do you understand about how the government of God the Father Jesus Christ is set up?

Do you understand his legislation, his laws that you are bound to keep? Any other covenants with him? That's all part of this whole thing of citizenship.

Become a citizen of the United States. Still, it's valid that you have to know these things, even though we have millions of people streaming into this country that will never even get close to understanding any of this. Those things are important, not just to come in here as a mob and then choose a leader. That is anarchy. But here, we come in to the household of faith. We become citizens. We are no longer aliens. We understand who our leaders are. We understand who the president is, you know, just like we had to know that when we became U.S. citizen. We have to understand the governance, how it works. We have to understand the role of Jesus Christ in our lives. We have to understand the laws of his government and kingdom, just like we have to understand the laws of this nation. We have to know who and what is God.

We have to understand what is man and the role that Jesus Christ plays in our lives.

We will be having a Passover service here, what is it, seven weeks or so from now?

Might be good preparation for us to kind of understand it, but a little bit more about our citizenship because we're going to have a citizenship lesson at the Passover service.

As John 14, 15, 16, 17 will be read to us. Matthew 15, John chapter 15. A couple inklings here into citizenship, spiritual citizenship. If the world hates you, verse 18, John 15, 18, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you're not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. So understand a little bit about the relationship that you might have with other people of the world, of perhaps not being totally accepted.

But you know, I have found, to be very honest, when it says we're not of the world, but we live in the world, that I have not tried to separate myself from the world. I honestly haven't. I have been a member of Rotary Club. I have got to know my neighbors. I've gotten to talk to people about what they think, and I have earned the right because of what I do and the way I respect them to tell them what I think. I think our church ought to be more that way. We don't give up anything.

But if we're just cloistered off to ourselves with people who don't have the slightest idea of what we think and do, we get a reputation of being weird or strange or whatever. I don't want to be that way. I don't. I really don't want to be that way at all.

I went here to hear Victoria Sparz. She's the congresswoman for District 5 here. I went to hear her in Tipton and speak to her. She's Ukrainian. She was born in Chernigy of Ukraine nearby, where we worked with a center for us. I talked to her very, very openly about who I was. I'm a minister for many, many years, but I work in Chernigyev. I've spoken in our Rotary Club. I was president-elect of our Rotary Club before I moved here. I couldn't take that position. But after 20 years, they know what I believe and what I think. I told them I can't do certain things on the Sabbath and Holy Days, and I can't do certain things. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. We know you. That's how people need to know us because of what we do and how we act, our morals. Be a person of good moral character. That is one of the requirements of becoming a citizen of this country. How much more is the requirement of being a citizen of the kingdom of God? John 17. Has it entered the minds that what Jesus is telling us?

Well, if you read the whole chapter... Pardon me. John 17, I'll just let you read that. It's a prayer that Jesus Christ had with his eye. Let's see here. Well, time-wise, I don't want to go one second after 3.30.

And I want to start a new tradition here. Let me just read here. John 17.

Why did Jesus Christ refer to his citizens?

Jesus spoke these words where he read the first part, but I'll go down here.

Verse 18 is what I believe that I read. As he sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.

And for their sakes, I sanctify myself that they may be sanctified by the truth.

If you see what Jesus Christ did with his disciples, go!

Preach the gospel into all the worlds. Make disciples. Repent. He also prays for us, do not pray for these alone, but also for those who believe on me through their word, through these citizens, that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you. A unified relationship with our God. He's our president. He's our king. That the world may believe that you sent me, and the glory which you gave me, I have given them that you may be one, that they may be one, as we are one. We have a responsibility of working together in a unified way to teach a unified doctrine to the world.

I in them and you in me, that they may be perfect and one, that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them, as you have sent, as you have loved me. Father, I desert that they also whom you gave me may also be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which you have given me, for you have loved me before the foundation of the world. God had a plan with Jesus Christ, both of God, before the foundation of the world, to do the work that they're doing, to create a kingdom, the kingdom of God, of which we are a part of. So anyway, John chapter 17 will be read. We have freedom, we have also subjection. I'll write these verses on Romans, the whole chapter 13 of Romans, of how we subject ourselves to the governments of this country. And also Romans 13 was that way. And also Hebrews chapter 11, the parade of the faithful, all these famous citizens who worked in their areas. So anyway, I just wanted to point out more than anything else what it is that our citizenship ought to be. It's a parallel to what we see, what ought to be the citizenship of this country. I value my American citizenship. I hope we value our spiritual citizenship, which is the same thing, basically, except on a much higher plane. With our knowledge, with our obedience, with our allegiance more than anything else. And in becoming a Christian, we renounce all allegiance to any other spiritual connection that we have had in the past. So it's been great.

I am thankful that I am an American citizen. I'm even more grateful, just as the Apostle Paul said, that he was a citizenship kingdom of heaven. And made that very, very clear to the people in his time as he spoke to the people of Philippi, Colossae, Ephesus, and Rome.

So anyway, it's been just wonderful to be able to talk to you today. Sort of impromptu, but it worked. And we will have this, I guess I've been called in for the discussion, for grilling from you afterwards. So if you have any questions there, I'll be glad to talk to you. So anyway, may God bless you. Have a wonderful remainder of this episode.