Heralding Christ's Return

Just like Pentecost, which has a number of themes associated with the Holy Day, we could go into a number of directions in explaining the Holy Day and even combining those themes. The Feast of Trumpets also has a number of themes, of which we can also speak of and even combine them together. It's an exciting day of observance because it foretells a future time. The Holy Days up to this point are the Passover, which is an event that occurred in Jesus Christ's life that's passed on to us. Very personal, very contemporary, and also very much past. Then we talk about the Days of Olive and Bread, which is a current process. It's a current process that we go through. The Day of Pentecost is the establishment of the New Testament Church, the giving of the Holy Spirit, a focus on the law of God, and it's a day that is for the here and now. But now we come to a transition point between the current and the future. We go into an entirely different world. It's interesting that Christendom oftentimes has a handle on, let's put it that way, of understanding some of the meaning of events in Christ's life, and even talking about those events. But very, very little is said, it understood, more importantly, about the future, about the second return of Christ, what it will be like, about the resurrection, about what it will be like and when it will be held, and who actually will be there. These are very, very exciting events. About the Day of the Lord, about a time when God's kingdom is coming to this earth, and we'll stay put here. It won't be something that will be just here for now, and it's still going to be up in question. The Feast of Trumpets pictures the Day of the Lord, as I have said many times in sermons here, the Day of the Lord is not one day, it's not one month, it's not one year. It's an age, it's the age of the kingdom of God. It's a long age. In fact, it's an age that will never end. And it will begin at the Feast of Trumpets in its fulfillment, when Jesus Christ returns to this earth, His second coming. That's what our hope is. As I've mentioned, the resurrection, the resurrection occurs, as it's explained in two places, accompanied by trumpets. In 1 Corinthians 52, the resurrection chapter, and 1 Thessalonians 4, also in talking about the resurrection, it's accompanied with trumpets. At a last trump, at a time when trumpets are blown, there will be a resurrection.

But when I went to Ambassador College back in 1966, in the fall, the main speaker that day for the Feast of Trumpets, I remember so well, because services were at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and there were a lot of people there. I was a freshman student who had hardly gone to any church services.

The main speaker that day, Mr. Armstrong, announced that today we'll talk about one more aspect of the Feast of Trumpets that we have not spoken of before. It was something that had not been preached before in connection with the Feast of Trumpets, that now we have taken as part of our staple outline for the keeping of the Feast of Trumpets. And that is the proclamation of the Word of God, the preaching of the Gospel, the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

And his whole sermon was about the work. He said, this day is a memorial to the work of God, a work of warning, the shofar that was blown here this morning before was not for music, very obviously. It was for warning. It was to heighten people's fear. It was an alarm. It was like, you know, your fire alarm going off. That's what shofars were for. The sound of those things carried for long distances, and they were symbolic of an approaching enemy, of something that's happening.

And the shofar was blown at the Feast of Trumpets. And so, I understand traditionally here in this church, the shofar was blown. You know, first of all, it came in here, and I don't know what in the world it was, but it came in this long blue thing. I said, is it a lawn chair that's all tied up, or what is it?

Then, all of a sudden, Meredith, I believe, you know, exposes this twisted shofar. And I said, oh, great, we'll have this thing. I didn't realize it sounded so loud. That thing was really blown real well. It had a kind of a rough start, but it just really took off. But it was very, very interesting to hear that. But what if you had a hundred of those things? Certainly, you know, something is up. But that's what the shofar was blown on on the Feast of Trumpets, symbolizing warning. The Feast of Trumpets in ancient times was, it's kind of strange, on the first day of the seventh month, was the first day of the civil year.

The calendar actually had two starting points. It had the beginning of the sacred year, and that's where the Holy Days began, in the first part of the year, starting with the month Abib or Nisan, as it was, the Babylonian language. And it continued on, and then we come into the seventh month, which is considered the New Year's Day for the Jews. It was a very special day in ancient Israel, from a civic standpoint, is that, first of all, it was January 1, you roll over your calendar, you get a new calendar.

And that happened on Tishri 1, on the first day of the seventh month. It's a day that's very highly regarded by the Jews. It's a day that the kings of Judah were crowned. It was a coronation day. And if a king came into power because of the death of the preceding king, three or four months before the Feast of Trumpets, the coronation wouldn't take place until the Feast of Trumpets. So he might have to wait up to a whole year for the coronation, depends upon when he actually ascended into office. But it was symbolic of king over a kingdom coming to rule, and is something which looks forward to our king of kings, Jesus Christ, coming to rule in this world.

So there's a lot of beautiful and a lot of wonderful meaning associated with the keeping of the Feast of Trumpets. All the imagery, all the things that are taking place, and all the things that will take place. What I want to focus on today is the preaching of the gospel aspect. But before I get there, I want to explain a few things about the keeping of, again, the Feast of Trumpets. One wonderful thing about all the Holy Days of God, and when I go and explain them, especially to people overseas, and I've had experience in explaining them correctly, sometimes not totally correctly, but about four years ago, I happened to come to Ukraine the Sabbath after Pentecost.

And so what I did is I gave my sermon there that I had given on the day of Pentecost. And the sermon, well, I'm not sure exactly what the topic was, but the content inside referred to the fact that Jesus Christ is the center of Pentecost as he is of all the Holy Days. That Pentecost is not the Feast of Weeks is not what we observe.

We keep Pentecost. We keep the day that was established by the New Testament Church. The New Testament Church was started not on a Sabbath service, but on a very public day, the Feast of Weeks.

Actually, the Church started on a Sunday, unfortunately. But the Church did begin on the Feast of Pentecost, not on a regular weekly Sabbath day. Well, the people I had spoken to, I have already known them for nearly 15 years. We've had discussions about the Holy Days back and forth. And they had a lot of resistance to the Holy Days, which I understood after about 10 years. They were so fearful of going back into something Jewish. And they were so fearful of us asking the men to wear beards, and worse, to have circumcised them. That was something that was a horrible fear that people don't talk about, but they do eventually get out when you talk to them for hours and hours late into the night.

And it's just so happening in my sermon, I spoke about the fact that Christ was the center. Christ was the very, very reason for Pentecost. It's His Church that was established. It's Christianity began as a movement on this day.

We're not keeping the Feast of Weeks. We don't have any barley loaves up here. The shofar thing, believe me, that was symbolic. 99.5% of the churches that were on the world will not be doing the shofar, because that's not required.

But we do it here out of interest and a throwback, but it's not a requirement to do that. We keep the Feast of Trumpets as a Christian festival, not as a Jewish festival. And somehow this began to make sense. Sometimes things take a long time to be explained, and it takes years for an explanation to sink in. And even then, I felt like I wasn't teaching. I was basically reaping the discussion benefits of the past ten years.

And now the churches, many of them, are keeping the Holy Days, because now they see Christ in the center of the Holy Days. They see that it's not some Jewish festival. They're not going to be slaughtering animals. They're not going to be doing all the things that are described in the Pentateuch about the keeping of these days. They're talking about the return of Jesus Christ. They're talking about the Day of the Lord. They're talking about the resurrection. Wow! This all of a sudden opens up. It opens up a whole well of new things that are clearly, comprehensively revealed by the Holy Days. That's the wondrous thing about the Holy Days. New Testament trumpets is what we observe.

On this day, the trumpets were known as heralds. H-E-R-A-L-D-S.

And their purpose was to be a heralding type of device. The word herald, I actually looked it up in order to get the actual meaning of what the word means here. It means to publicize. It means to announce, to foretell, to introduce. It's those who make proclamations. It's those who carry state messages to other sovereigns, those who arrange ceremonies. In England, it was official in charge of genealogies and coats of arms.

And it's a person who proclaims or announces significant news. And it's a person or thing that comes before to announce or give indication of what follows. A forerunner and a harbinger. I thought, wow, this is just very interesting. You know, when you have a trumpet like that, or a horn, I'm not sure if you could call that a trumpet, I guess a shofar from a trumpet of sorts.

You know, it does these things. It kind of prepares you to hear what's up, what's the news, what's happening. And that is the work of the Church of God, is to announce, to proclaim, to herald. Jesus Christ began in very clear terms in Mark 1, which is the first address that he had made. It's his keynote address. Mark 1, verse 14. After John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. The language here is pure, direct, no questions. That this is the beginning of Jesus Christ's ministry, and the subject, and the theme, and in his keynote speech, is the kingdom of God.

And then he said, if you have in your red letters, that time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and believe in the gospel. Subsinctly, four elements involved in this proclamation. And that is actually the four steps, the four themes that we have for the kingdom of God Bible seminars, which truly, I feel, is something which is turning this Church around. From being a sleepy Church where we come to services, only expecting to see familiar faces, and only expecting to have our inspeak and discussion among ourselves, and perhaps even resisting, or maybe slightly even resenting, if there's somebody new around.

I don't think that really happens, but we've gotten too comfortable with ourselves. And just talking with our inspeak, we love it, it's wonderful, it's like a family. But, you know, that's not what we're about. That's not what the Church is for. That's not the mission of the Church. It's just to be a group of people that feel comfy with one another. The Church has a mission. And as I've explained to our ministers, you know, preaching the Gospel and preparing the people are not two commissions, two separate casts within the Church.

The preaching the Gospel and preparing a people is for everybody. Part of our job as Church members is to preach the Gospel. We had some opportunity here with this first wave of Kingdom of God Bible seminars. You know, before we had them, we did have some who were not comfortable with them.

Some felt, wow, are we really ready for this kind of thing? Especially with some old-timers that said, I don't know if we should be doing this kind of thing. They've never been really successful in the past. Let's just be comfortable. We're breaking out of our comfort zone. You know, we've had to really talk to a lot of people and explain to them that, you know, our job is not just to be comfortable. Our job is not just to talk to a shrinking Church. You know, our job is to preach the Gospel into all the world, to share the message of hope.

That's got to be part of our DNA. It's got to be part of just the way, you know, we were built. One thing I was just really surprised about Ukrainians, you know, when they became independent of Soviet repression in 1991 and 1992, the first thing they did was not to abandon the small little groups. Well, they did two things. They did build church buildings. Of course, that was something that was a lot cheaper than, you know, for us to do, and they needed to have them, and they could have all this free labor. But number two, it was essential. It was essential to preach the Gospel to the world, to those outside of them.

It was not something that, hey, let's put this in our strategic plan, let's work it into year three of our five-year plan, when we get to financing, when we get to budgeting, then we'll start thinking about going into all the world. No, their strategic plan is let's do it now, and then they figure out the details later. And the first thing they did was usually in their town, hold services in the morning, and then speak to the public in a city square in the afternoon.

That just became standard. Evangelism was something that wasn't just something that you plan or get around to doing. It was something that was a part of just how you, what you do. And I know that after this first round of seminars that we had, that there has been an excitement, an interest in, I can't wait till we do this again.

Why are we waiting till January 21st for the next round? You know, there has been overall a great, great awakening in our church. When we were projecting how many people might be interested in registering for the seminars, Peter Eddington and I said, well, if we get a thousand people to register, wow, that'd be nice. Four figures, you know, just get over 999. You know, just get a thousand people. That'd be great. Maybe half of them will show. Because we're so beaten down with our thinking that, you know, people don't come to our things. And then as the responses came in, we had just over 2,000 people that responded.

We figured, well, we know that not all of them are going to come. You know, who knows, maybe only 10% of them will come, whatever. Well, finally, the tabulation is about 1,500 people came to services as a result, or came to the seminars, as a result of our campaign. Many of these people have come back. Many of these people are still evaluating what they have seen. We've had people in Terre Haute who have, you know, come back, and we're so excited about that. And some of them, we're making them feel comfortable, we're making them feel welcome. And we want them to become sort of on the inside as well.

You know, before too long. We want to share what we have among ourselves with them. And I want to see us as a church seriously, not just be preparing a people, but also being part of preaching the Gospel. And what we did in preparing these Kingdom of God Bible seminars was do that first commission.

Whether it was getting flowers here, or whether it was preparing a literature table, or whatever it is that you did. Or whether you were preparing yourself to boning up on answers to common questions, so that in case somebody asked you something that perhaps you kind of knew, but weren't fully sure, you kind of get, well, I've got to get it shared. I have to understand what the resurrections are, you know, and how they follow, and so forth.

And it was something that was a very, very healthy experience. And we're looking forward to January 21st, which will be the second round, where we have a topic that is really to me a blockbuster section of this four-part Kingdom of God theme, which is the Kingdom of God is at hand.

In other words, it's within reach at hand. And so far, it's within the grasp of where your hand can reach it. And so much can be said about that. We want to re-invite the people that have come the first time, and also to reach out to more people.

And we are just praying that God will bless us with over 2,000 new people coming. And eventually, this is going to translate into people who say, I want to come to the point of repentance, which is actually the third module in this four-part series, and then become a believer, which means one who lives that way. Believe, obey, have very similar meanings. That's what we want.

That's where we want to go. The one minister who suggested this topic to me absolutely dreamed up or absolutely came up with the most brilliant subject. I'm glad it's that and nothing else. Because it's a topic that I feel we have unique understanding of in a very special way.

Because how many people really understand the kingdom of God as we do? And that's actually section one. The first session was to dispel some of the false understandings of what the kingdom is. Something within you, church, millennium, whatever. But, no, not the millennium. That's what it is. But, I mean, it's the various things that people think the kingdom of God is versus what it really is. And then we get down to the positive way of explaining it.

Now, when you go to Google, because of the work that we had done and because of our website, KOG seminars, and other factors, if you type in in Google, kingdom of God, generically, or organically, that means without having to pay for those words, kingdom of God, typing those words in, the United Church of God will be number four on the first page. That is an absolutely fantastic rise in awareness of our churches' presence on the web about this very, very important subject.

Now, before last year, I typed in kingdom of God, you know. I don't know. We weren't even there. If you had to go to page two and three, forget it. You're not going to be saying, we were on page 16 of Google. Praise the Lord. No, that's absolutely useless. But we're number four. Number one is Wikipedia, which is always number one. They're always right there. Number two is the Catholic Church. Bless them. Number three is some kind of a picture site that has all these pictures about the kingdom of God, always art.

And I'm not sure if it's part of number two or what it is. It's kind of hard to understand. But we're there, nestled in number four, United Church of God, about the kingdom of God. I just feel very, very happy about that. We see when the church started on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, verse 38. There was no namby-pamby message about a new movement starting up. We'd like to get followers. There's a very straightforward and very powerful message that was preached by Peter. I can add a better person than Peter, who was so impulsive, and God used his impulsiveness to preach this message on the Day of Pentecost.

Acts 2, verse 38, Peter said to a crowd that was looking for answers after he had pretty much castigated them for killing Christ. And this stuck through what he said the first part, to the point of this, he said, you know, we didn't realize what we did. What do we do now? And he said, Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This is how the Church began with this type of preaching. Action steps immediately. It wasn't come back, we'll see you later, you know, sin for this. I know we have to do that now. But when we see how it was preached back then, we'll get to our point, we'll get to this repent stage soon. And perhaps we'll learn from perhaps being too slow, too fast, whatever, in some of the exposition of this material. But we'll get there. Overall, we can't say enough about how excited the Church overall is.

We had a meeting two days ago to discuss the surveys of ministers regarding the Kingdom of God seminar. I'm always afraid of surveys, I'm afraid some things, you know, people can always say bad things, and we didn't have their names on there, so we thought, uh-oh, we're going to get all kinds of, you know, comments about, it didn't work in my area or whatever.

We had 98% who thought it was an extremely positive experience. 98% was very, very high, who felt it was either very positive or extremely positive when I think of this next step down. But almost everybody said, it's a great, the rest were neutral. Nobody said that it was something that they didn't want to do. We were so happy to say this is an anonymous survey from our ministers.

And we're just very, very happy to see us be able to have that type of support for something that is so biblical and so right, so mission-oriented, so that when we look at our symbol, do we have the seal up here? Okay. You know, we actually do those things that the seal says, you know, preach the gospel. It isn't for, you know, Aaron Booth to do that in Cincinnati.

You know, it is something for you to do as well, and to get your fingers and to get your hands in it, and whatever you contribute towards that process. I have, in the last several months, in my personal study, have just become almost to the point sometimes of obsessed with the life of the Apostle Paul.

And maybe because I've been hearing about, you know, hearing the Bible studies at Cincinnati Wednesday, which I normally don't go to, but I hear them, and actually heard one all the way through very, very interesting about the life of Paul, have become very, very fascinated with the work that he did, and not just historically, but the things he said, you know, how he did it, and the challenges that he had in doing his work.

And his work was to preach the gospel. His whole life was to be the fulfillment of the Feast of Trumpets, be the herald of God's kingdom. He went right away and started preaching Christ, preaching him crucified, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, which is mentioned many, many times in the Book of Acts. Actually, I wanted to, you know, try to find some good reading material on the subject. I still find that our textbook that we had at Ambassador College, Coney Baron Housen's The Life and Epistles of St.

Paul, almost as good as anything, anything that has come, because it gives a history, historical background and so forth. But I got a number of videos from Netflix. I looked up—there were three of them available. So I got the first one, and I thought, well, you know, it was okay.

You know, I kind of talked about his trips and did a little dramatization. It showed him in Barnabas or him in Sylvanas with poles kind of just walking through, you know, Greece. And I don't know how accurate that was if there were more people with them, but it kind of made them look a little bit, you know— I didn't know if that's the way it really was. So I got another one this week. And it was awful.

It was terrible. I mean, it said nothing, absolutely nothing. It was inaccurate. And didn't even follow the book of Acts. I don't even know if I want to get the third one. But what I'm doing is just rereading the book of Acts in different translations, and I'm finding I get more out of that than from any Hollywoodized depiction of the Apostle Paul, usually looking like, you know, somebody going to a NASCAR race, you know, the beard and redneck type of a person. You know, they just look very, very harsh.

But the Apostle Paul was a person that God used in a very, very special way. To me, one of the very top workers of all time, and that he had new territory to plow, brand new territory. This was breaking out of the Israelite, Judo area of the Scriptures being available to, and relevant to, to going into all the world.

He was very specially chosen for this job. While God allowed for Gentiles to come in, sort of as they kind of fell into the cracks, there was never any kind of special work to them. The Apostle Paul was just always going into this direction. And partially it was because he was so rejected by Jews that he finally said, okay, that does it. I'm going to the work of the Gentiles. He went on to Europe and preached the Gospel, the Macedonian call. And I have just absolutely been just transfixed by what he had to go through, and how he endured it, and how he lived with it. Now, people don't realize that the Apostle Paul, after his road to Damascus experience, wasn't immediately commissioned and set off with a big expense account to head for Cyprus and head for the cities of southern Asia Minor and preaching the Gospel.

First of all, Christ took him into the desert for three years, for some type of personal training with Jesus Christ. So, you know, when you think of the Apostles who spent three years with Christ, there were twelve of them, and they did all kinds of things together. This was personal tutoring, personal mentor, that Paul went someplace in Arabia and spent three years with Jesus Christ for the training that he needed. Also, the Apostle Paul had a vision that he spoke of. This vision kept him going. It was a vision of actually where he was going to end up. And perhaps it would be nice for us to have that kind of vision, because I think we'd try harder. If you said, here's what you're going to get, here's how it's going to end up. Okay, enough of that, back to earth. You have to live your life here, but you have a very clear, vivid impression of what's there. That's one reason why he kept going, because he knew what the end was. He knew that no matter what happened to him, whether he got beaten, or if he was even killed, the next moment was to be with Jesus Christ. And he said, too, that, look, I like being with you, folks.

I'd rather be here than not to be here. But, you know, if I die, I'm with Christ.

Just reminds me of that one little bumper sticker I saw. Honk if you love Jesus. Text if you want to meet him now. So Paul knew that if he died, that his next moment would be with Jesus Christ and be able to be with him. But the Apostle Paul's life was not easy. And this is one thing that I want to state in connection with what we have to go through. I look at my 42, now going to 42 and a half year career in the ministry, which has been a wonderful ride. I'll know that when I finally can't do this anymore, I'll say, it's been wonderful. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed every aspect of it. Everything from people, congregations, administration, to everything. All except filling out monthly church reports. But other than that, I have really enjoyed the work of the ministry deeply.

The Apostle Paul, although I do know that there have been many trying times in the ministry. Many trying times. Not just a few, not just something that's going to come up here. From the first year in 1969 when I graduated, there was a crisis. There was another crisis two years later. Yet another crisis in 74. Even a bigger one in 78. And it kind of went one after another. Each one we would become distressed, discouraged, people would leave. Here we are trying to do a work. We have a TV program, we have a magazine, we have all kinds of things. And yet, something kind of gets stuck in the machinery that causes a lot of distress.

Many ministers have fallen by the wayside. You know, I cannot look at an old envoy. I really can't. It's very hard for me to look at old envoys because they're almost all gone, my class. People who are the most likely to succeed. Fortunately, all gone. It's just a handful of us from that particular class that are still involved.

And I just think of all the attrition that has taken place. But when I read the book of Acts, I'm not bothered by it. In fact, I'm encouraged by what the Apostle Paul went through.

He had so many things go right with him as far as the mission, the people, the support from Jesus Christ, and so forth. And I say, I've got all those things. I have no less than anybody. God is always awake. God is even awake at 2-3 o'clock in the morning. I know I can talk to him then, too, because he's awake. He's always listening to me. Also, I know that God always knows what's going on and what's happening.

But I think of the Apostle Paul. When the Macedonian call came, he was in Asia Minor. Basically, when he had no intention of going to Greece or Macedonia. But he has this Macedonian call, this vision of this Macedonian. He says, come, come, help us. He says, well, okay. And he was prevented from doing things in Asia Minor, in Turkey. And so he and Silas, it sounds like there's two of them, headed off for Greece. How they communicated and how they had all these connections, I don't know. Because they couldn't do it on Facebook, they couldn't Twitter, they couldn't text, they couldn't do any of these things. All they could do is just walk, you know, and I don't know how in the world they'd get a message to somebody. Even then, the message would have to go by horse or by foot, you know, to wherever they went. But nonetheless, he comes to the household of Lydia, an entrepreneurial woman who sold purple cloth. He baptizes her to her household. Fantastic start! But right away, he's thrown to prison. And I can see him saying, God, look, you asked me to come here. You asked me to preach the gospel now in this part of the world, and here I am in prison. That's not fair. I'm going to resent that.

Well, in prison, you know, there's an earthquake, and Paul got freed. The jailer was baptized. But Paul heads down, down, instead of feeling discouraged, he goes on, instead of saying, let's get out of here, let's go back to Asia Minor. We kind of know that territory. I'm not sure about this new territory. No, he continued on south to Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia. And people who were against him and people who rioted followed him down there and did the same thing. And Paul had to again go on to Berea, where he had the first place where there was no evidence of anybody who was really working against him. In fact, they were a good church. Good things were said about the Bereans. They studied the Scriptures daily to prove that these things were so. But they had converts. They had a lot of women converts, you know, in the church there, Thessalonica. He goes on down all the way to Corinth. God opens big doors for him.

But, you know, every place he went to, there was some type of crisis and some type of horrible activity that would take place. Well, then he came on back from that journey after he established the church in Corinth when God said to him in a vision, Paul is going to be a lot of people there, as a contrast to Athens. And Corinth is the port city for Athens. And Athens didn't seem like there was even a church or a group or anything. All they had was people who wanted to argue philosophy. So he went on to Corinth, established probably one of the most influential churches in the New Testament. It sounded like a church of a sizable number. A lot of gifted people in Corinth. Then he went back to Ephesus, which was kind of a home base for him. But oftentimes the Apostle Paul would be taken in and beaten and suffer for preaching the gospel. And sometimes when I go through things and when I hear things that are very distressing, including this past year, I took it much more in stride for two reasons. One is that I've been there before and know it's going to turn out okay. I know that God is with me, God is with us, God is with his church, that I won't be forsaken or left behind, and still will be able to do the mission that I have. And number two is precedent for it. There's been no televangelist, nothing can go wrong type minister ever in the Bible. You look at the prophets, whether it be Isaiah or Jeremiah, or whether it be Hosea who had to go through a lot of indignity for what they did, or Jonah who had to be swallowed up by a fish. No, I don't have to go through that. I wouldn't want to do that. But the Apostle Paul, I'd like you to turn to 2 Corinthians.

I had it written down. I don't see it. Let's see if maybe you can remember where it is. All the sufferings that the Apostle Paul went through. I'm not talking just about sufferings that we have to go through personally, but what the Church has to go through. If you understand that these things have been prophesied, there's a precedent for it, that when Jesus Christ in Matthew 24 said, He that endures to the end will be saved. It begins to make sense. I look at so many people that can only suffer this much, can only suffer that much and say, That's it! I'm out of here. There's no God. God, I'm mad. Whatever. And go on. 2 Corinthians 11, verse 22. Verse 23, Are they ministers of Christ? I speak as a fool. I am more in labors, more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often.

He goes into detail. From the Jews, five times I received forty stripes, minus one. Five times he was hauled in for a beating. Thirty-nine lashes or thirty-nine slugs. Can you imagine what that is? You to be hit thirty-nine times, over and over again, probably ending up with a cracked rib, and who knows where they hit you on the face? To go through that one time would be humility. He went through that five times. But he had the vision of the kingdom of God, and about the work of the church and the return of Jesus Christ so much on him, that he was able to endure it and say, God, He never said, God, I quit. That's it. Going back to my Pharisee friends, they're close enough.

Three times I was beaten with rods.

Once I was stoned, and actually was taken for dead, and maybe had died and was resurrected in Asia Minor. People did not typically survive stonings. People were intended to bring a person down. They didn't just throw a bunch of rocks at people and walk away. They covered them up in stones. Stoning meant death.

Three times I was shipwrecked.

If you read the story about his last journey, the fourth journey, to go to court in Rome to appeal to Caesar, being shipwrecked on a ship with two hundred and seventy-five people, then being thrown out of this island, it's really a story of a great deal of suffering.

In journeys often, he was a traveler, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, the Jews, what they did to him, in perils of the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and toil and sleeplessness often, in hunger and thirst and fastings often, and cold and nakedness. How's that for some little extra points added to your job description of some things that you may have to go through? True Christians have had to go through a great deal of suffering and endurance in doing the work of God.

Now, while we sit here, in peace in the United States, and believe me, we have it extremely well, this is not the case in some places in the world. It talks about false brethren.

In the Zambia, for example, where we've had a wonderful church, Bevan and I were there for the Feast of Tabernacles last year, with 280 people.

The breakaway minister and the breakaway people that have left with him, a minority, have caused a great deal of devastation to our brethren and a great deal of grief. They haven't given us our property back. They've claimed it for themselves. They're squatting. We can't even keep the Feast on our property this year. And these people are enabled by the church that has supported their leaving.

LifeNets has given these people many, many head of cattle.

We have worked to bring up their standard of living. I was there in the year 2000 and saw how poor our brethren were. And we set up a program called Pass on the Gift, following Heifer Project Internationals, where we were able to provide families with a team of heifers, a pair of heifers, after educating them on how to take care of them. And we built up to over 124 head of cattle.

Now, this past week, these people who profess to be Christians have gone in and taken them away from our brethren. They've gone and forcefully removed cattle from our people.

And I hear reports, and I hear our minister there telling me that women are sobbing and crying as these people, enabled by their minister, from this breakaway group, have come in and taken away their bulls, taken away their oxen, I should say. And planting time is right after the feast. It's like having your tractor taken away. It's like having somebody come into your garage and having a former church member just take your car away from you. You can't do much about it, although I think that God is going to respond. I'm going to ask all of you to pray for our brethren in Zambia. To seriously pray for God to deliver them. Realizing that we've had to go through struggles and trials like this in times past, the church has always had to suffer a great deal. Just give them the courage to continue and to go on. We're keeping the feast there with more than 160 people. There's actually more that we could come, but that's all that really can come. There's only 10 that we got for 160 of them. We're keeping it on a seven-day Adventist property that they allowed us to use. But certainly not something that we desired. But we do have false brethren, and we have people that have acted so ugly to hurt and to defame and to cause a great deal of consternation to our people. But this is something that does happen. These types of things do happen. And trials do come. And under the best of intentions, and with the best of intentions, with the love that the church and with an organization like Life-ness, we've been able to accomplish and help. We still have those people crop up that are described here that Paul had to deal with.

In Galatia, where Paul went to preach the gospel, he had to come back because they were already preaching another Christ. He had to go to areas where there was contention in the churches and divisions.

People say, how can this be God's church with all the troubles that it has? It is God's church. There's somebody who doesn't like it.

One thing we did at the home office this past week, we have... we proclaim a day of fasting every so often, once a month, for a particular cause or for a particular reason. And this is before I told Mr. Luecker about the cattle that was being forcibly stripped away from our brethren.

The decision was to pray that Satan's hand be stayed. Because I've never seen the hand of Satan more active than I have this past year. And we're fasting, and we're declaring a day of fasting. Actually, this month our day of fasting will be the Day of Atonement. I'm kind of doing double duty on that one. We're going to ask for the hand of Satan to be stayed and protection for our people. Again, we live in the United States. We have free reign. This is a Cadillac opportunity to preach the gospel, to do what we did, of something that cannot be done in countries like Zambia, Malawi, and even South Africa, and other very, very poor countries, Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, that really do need our friendship, do need our help, and do need for us to be with them.

God continually tries His people to see what they're made of. One final point of order to make about the preparation of any person. If you wonder why maybe where God is, do you know that when God spoke to Abraham and promised him a son and promised a great nation and a group of nations, and promised a very special blessing through lineage? And He said that to Abraham when he was 75 and Sarah when she was pretty old too. And, you know, they just didn't have children. Kind of an absurd type of promise to him. Kind of an absurd type of promise to make.

Had to wait 24 years.

Had to wait 24 years that God was doing something with His mind in preparing Him.

There was something that God was doing in preparing Him for the work that He had to do. I think of Moses, also a great spiritual leader in preaching the Gospel, so to speak, to the world. He was specially chosen.

He knew he was specially chosen by God, and even kind of knew that he was in line here for something great to be done. And then God had 40 years of him in the wilderness. He had to actually go out there, start a family, see these kids grow up and everything. And don't think that he didn't wonder, when is this going to happen?

But God did use him. But during that time, Moses had a chance to think, to wonder, to be humbled. He realized that it wasn't of him, but of God. The same was true of the Apostle Paul. Do you know that after the horse incident, or after he was struck down on the road to Damascus? Yes, he did spend three years with Christ, but do you know that it was actually 12 years before he started his first journey? You know, he probably sat there and said, you know, I've had this training, and you've worked with me. Now what? A year goes by, another year goes by, another year goes by, another year goes by. But God was preparing him in his mind. Sometimes we have to wait. Wait a long time. And there are people who fall off, who cannot endure. But God is always the one who will bring to pass what he promises.

Sometimes I have felt that maybe our church isn't going to be doing the work that it should, because of the traumas that we go through, the setbacks, the diversions, all that kind of thing. But you know, I have hope now, more than ever. I see us having gone through a cleansing this past year of proportions that I cannot even describe. The spirit with which we work with at the home office is pure and progressive, positive. We get an amazing amount of work done with the people that we have. Even having God back in our finances down about a third or so, we're making it work. We're so thankful that God now is seeing us and honoring our prayers. And if it's going to wait another year or two, I'll wait. But I know that God is going to be doing something through this church, something to do with preaching the gospel into all the world and preparing a people.

That maybe we've given up too early, or maybe we've kind of lost heart.

But Abraham had to go through that too. Moses, Paul, and maybe all of us who said, well, it's time to retire, time to kind of give it up, let somebody else do it. No, I'm excited. I'm actually very excited about doing the work and preaching the gospel and heralding the return of Christ. And doing our part through media, through our congregations, through personally talking with people, to setting an example of righteousness, and knowing that God will build. In the hard time of finding the scriptures that I wanted to hear...

Well, I'll just refer to it. I know I had it written down. Paul said he had a work to do, and he realized that he had things that he had to accomplish.

That he planted other people in the church, watered, and did things. All of us do it. But God ultimately is the one that gives the increase. And the increase in the result of doing God's work is going to be exactly what that phrase actually means. When we say we're doing God's work, we're not doing our work, we're doing his work. We're doing our part in the work of God, where he uses us. He doesn't need us at all. He uses us to do something almost token-like, and yet we have to go full bore in doing what we're doing. But ultimately, it's God who grants the increase. 1 Corinthians 6, I believe. Where it says that this is the work of God. So this day of trumpets, this feast of trumpets, we celebrate the return of Christ, a resurrection. But also, it's a day that we celebrate the work that God is doing. Not a work that he stopped doing. Neither is it a work that's been somehow unimportant, and the gospel's already been preached, and some people even have doctrines that kind of speak along those lines, that the work is all done, and all we are doing is preparing a people. No, no, no, no, no! We have a big work in going into all the world.

And I'm looking forward to great results here in the years ahead. God has not abandoned us, as he didn't abandon Paul, or Moses, or Abraham. Had them wait. I do believe that before the return of Christ, we're going to see some very, very moving things. And we'll see some very important things happen. So, my wife and I have to leave for Terre Haute a little after 1 o'clock, but we have a chance to fellowship with you a little bit. We have to absolutely no later than 10 after 1, because service is there on 2.30. So, have a chance to talk to you afterwards.