Ah, very nice.  I like the haunting element of that particular version of "Jerusalem".  Well, I want to greet everybody here in Cincinnati AM and those of you who are on the webcast – I certainly want to greet you as well.  There is a lot happening here and I wanted to share one of the things that are happening. 

Vertical Thought has gone through some changes and I thought I would make this comment about Vertical Thought because I am the managing editor and I have a few paragraphs I want to read from the assistant managing editor, that is Dan Dowd – he pastors the Milwaukee Church. The last print-issue is a collector's item and this is it.  It is the one with the love sculpture on the front.  This is the one you just received if you subscribe to Vertical Thought and there aren't any more in the future coming, as far as the nice printed edition. 

We are going completely on-line, a complete digital publication after this, so we encourage you, if you have it, save this one.  It will be a memento of sorts and beautifully laid out by our layout director. That is Shaun Venish down in Texas.  He has always done a wonderful job on Vertical Thought and for those who know our cats, there is an add on the back telling everybody that Vertical Thought is – one cat says, "I love reading Vertical Thought."  The other kitten says, "Me too, but I heard it is going all digital" and then the details are at the bottom, how you can subscribe to the email updates that will come out for Vertical Thought. And I would encourage you to do that. 

Just out of curiosity here this morning, how many are subscribed to Vertical Thought, here in the room?  Okay, so we just have a few.  Even though it is written for our teens and young adults – that is the direct audience were aiming for – we found over the years that a lot of adults really like reading Vertical Thought.  There are little shorter articles.  We get to the point and try to maintain a snappy sort of writing style and since it is digital it won't cost anything extra if you sign up for it too, to get the email updates.  The email updates will simply tell you we have a new article or other contents that are new on the website and as we get it fully powered up we will actually be putting things up daily.  Within a month or a month and a half I hope that there will be a full – full speed. 

We are in the process of reactivating our Vertical Thought commentary volunteers that have written for four or five years and have had a hiatus for a couple of years, so we are in search of them.  If we can get back into a line of production, as well as the Vertical Thought staff and we will have about four times as much content as we have.  We are just putting out a magazine on a quarterly basis – at least four times as much – so again, I just thought that you'll think about that. 

I did want to share with you though some comments that Dan Dowd wrote.  He sends a little sort of editorial out to his congregations in Wisconsin every Sabbath so he calls it Sabbath Thoughts, so that is what I am taking this from.  This gives you a little bit of Vertical Thought's history, a little bit of appeal for the magazine.  "At the close of 2003 United launched a new magazine called Vertical Thought.  It was oriented to the youth in the Church and filled a niche that had been empty since 1995.  A lot of thought went into the new publication:  How it would look, what type of writing approach should we have and what would be the focus of the articles.  The name Vertical Thought was picked because we wanted to challenge the readers to think on things that come from above, that is from God.  Thinking vertically is the challenge God offers all of us and in Isaiah 55:9" - it is a famous scripture we often read – "God says: 

Isaiah 55:9 "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts (higher) than your thoughts".

"Even though we human beings are presently temporal flesh and blood beings as Christians we are expected to seek those things which are above where Christ is and set our mind on things above as is mentioned in Colossians 3:1-2.  The application of both of these verses requires change in us. 

"Over the last nine-and-a-half years of producing Vertical Thought a lot has changed in the world.  In the world of business the Internet has matured into a powerful tool to attract new customers and more easily disseminate information and conduct transactions and this has changed things as well.  The publishing industry" that he used to be part of; he spent a lot of years working in publishing before we hired him into the full time ministry some time ago.  "The publishing industry I was a part of is shrinking fast.  Print publications are becoming too expensive to produce and web content is becoming the preference for many.  This has forced a change in Vertical Thought so the last issue, the one with the love sculpture" that is this one here, "is the last print in the foreseeable future."

"In an effort to economize the operation of God's work Vertical Thought is now going all digital at: verticalthought.org."  That is the email address. "As it ceases to be a print magazine it will morph into a full feature online magazine.  As an online magazine, Vertical Thought will feature full length articles every week plus multiple commentaries, blogs and daily vertical news items that we used to call ‘In the News'." (In the magazine, for those of you who read it.)  "Change brings some new challenges and moving VT to the web the schedule accelerates.  Fresh new content is king on the Internet.  The lifespan of articles however changes.  Articles can remain forever on the Internet" (or relatively forever) "compared to a magazine that might not be saved.  To reach changes we can provide more content in areas that were too expensive to send out in the print magazine as well."

So he again just encouraged everybody in his congregations to go ahead and sign up for the Vertical Thought updates.  I certainly would encourage you here to do that as well. This will not be the last announcement.  You probably heard one last week.  We will have an announcement on this for probably six weeks until it sinks in. 

To give you an idea on what we are up against at the moment: It was a limited circulation magazine targeting our youth and then youth outside the Church, and we actually are doing a dual writing style where we are writing to the young public at the same time as we are writing to our own youth who have a lot more knowledge of the Bible.  There is a challenge in that.  We are not assuming that we can just do a Bible dump in every article and in that carries weight.  We edit out all sermonette type of language like: "it says in Colossians 3:1-2".  That carries weight with us in the church when you throw the scripture out in front.  Out in the society that is – what? They tune right out so we have a different style.

So we had approximately 18,000 readers for the print magazine and the last couple of print runs, so we have begun the announcements and we have the add in the back of the magazine.  We found that we had, two weeks ago, three hundred people signed up.  Three hundred signed up to receive the updates.  That is a fair draw, I would say.  But it improved.  We have more than doubled in the past week and as of yesterday, Aaron Booth informed me, we have 645.  Now if we can double next week and continue this doubling thing then we too will defy the laws of evolution or the supposed laws of evolution.  So I was thinking about that sermonette and I thought well, you know we will do a Vertical Thought article called:  Evolutionists don't do math.  Because they don't. 

Anyway, please sign up for Vertical Thought and for those who are here and oh, I didn't get a show of hands from those on the webcast. How many of you subscribe presently to Vertical Thought?  Okay, that is what I thought!  Be sure you sign up for it.  No matter what age you are.  I think you'll find it interesting and it will also create traffic on the site, which is actually a benefit when we have people searching for it. It gradually improves it in the search engine rankings and for those of you who don't have computer access – we actually found that some of our Vertical Thought readers didn't.  We are sad about that but one thing that we will be doing:  every quarter we will produce a laid-out magazine in a file that you can easily print off your own.  Every quarter we will do that. 

It will be mostly all new content.  It will be deployed on the website afterwards but it will be new content.  Not stuff that you could have read on the Internet before and our plan is to also have it as a flip-magazine feature on the website for going through the issue, but we will be producing that because we actually have in Northern Zambia a group of our young people, young adults and teens, who have no Internet access up there in that part of Zambia.  So they specifically asked through their Pastor, could we please have something in print of Vertical Thought.  So we will make sure that has happened and then he will be able to print if off and distribute the copies.  That will be a lot cheaper.  You take the – they call them PDF-files and then you can print it off and staple it.  It is not quite as nice as the way our Printer does this but then again hardly anything is as nice as the way our Printers do this.  They do a great job.  Anyway, it will still be the magazine format for those who will need it and still be available every quarter.  We'll get optimistic maybe even more often. 

I would like to move a little bit from Vertical Thought although I will come back to a thought in Vertical Thought in a minute. 

I begin this sermon today with a little bit of a news commentary of what is going on.  You know, asking the question to start with:  How free will America be?  In the near future, how free will she be?  We have enjoyed freedoms as a nation that really are unprecedented in world history; remarkable freedoms.  And in some ways as we see tyranny heating up with the Muslim Spring and with the bellicose attitude of China, which undoubtedly got the Philippines and Japan very, very concerned, and then you see the other tendencies toward tyranny in different parts of Africa, some times in South America as well and you realize the freedoms we have just aren't shared. Even the freedoms we have now in the U.S. are not shared around the world.  There is a rising tide of tyranny. 

It happens that periodically you get a tide that rises.  That happened in the 30's and we ended up with WWll.  There was a rising tide 25, 28 years earlier in the 19's. Actually, the roots of it were in the odds about 100 years ago, well, 110 years ago with Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany.  That led to WWl.  It is always a bad thing when you see a rising tide of tyranny, dictatorship, totalitarian thinking.  It means the end of freedoms for those people who enjoyed at least some measure of freedom.  Maybe not as much as we've had, but some. 

You might ask well, why has America had the freedoms she's had and I think there is a number of reasons: 

Number 1: We are descended from the tribe of Manasseh, which is half the tribe of Joseph, and Joseph had great blessings that were pronounced upon him.  Now there is no two ways about it when you go back and read the blessings to Joseph in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33, and Joseph was of all the brothers, of all the sons of Jacob, the one that was fair minded and willing to allow freedom.  He brought his brothers to Egypt when he didn't really need too.

Remember how he got to Egypt in the story.  First they were going to kill him because they didn't like him.  It seemed like he was favored by Jacob and of course they were so remarkably fair minded that they didn't mind that. No, they hated it and so they decided they would kill him and fortunately, I think it was Reuben that intervened and kept him from being killed.  Then Judah came along and said, let's sell him.  Okay, not unexpected.  So they sold him as a slave to Ishmaelite's.  We would know the Ishmaelite's as being Arabs.  There was a caravan, traders, and their people routinely dealt in slavery so he became a slave in Egypt.  That's how he got there; sold there by his brothers.  Well, at least they didn't kill him so I guess there is a measure of freedom being around those guys.

Joseph brought them down and gave them their freedom in the land of Goshen, which was the Nile Delta up on the northern end of Egypt at the time.  Remarkable.  So Joseph had a sense of freedom.  His name: Manasseh, which means forgetful: Joseph said, I have a son.  Now I can forget the family that I lost.  I have a family now.  He is married; he has a son and so he named Manasseh as a version of the term forgetful, in a positive sense, and God was of course masterminding it and mainly because He tends to name His key individuals in the Bible for what they are or what they are going to be and ultimately the descendants of Joseph would also be forgetful.  Good and bad.  We have a tendency to as Hosea 4:6 says, forget God's law. 

On the positive side we tend to forget differences.  After a conflict Manasseh forgets.  Dan on the other hand – he doesn't forget so easy.  Irish – because much of Dan became known as Ireland later and some of the other tribes - don't quite forget so easy and there are other tribes that aren't Israelite and they don't forget at all.

There are battles being fought and in fact, in the 1990's in the battle in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there in the Balkan's, they were refighting a battle that took place in 1310.  They hadn't forgotten.  They were fighting a grudge match at that time and they can't just let it go.  It doesn't seem to be in their nature.  So they are converted and that is going to be in the World Tomorrow, so we have to put up with it.  Ireland, southern Ireland and the IRA which was part of southern Ireland, part of northern Ireland back in the heyday of their conflict which is heating up again, which is not a good thing. 

I was in England at Ambassador College in Bricketwood during the heyday of the early 70's and there were routine bombings almost every day, you would read it in the news, in Northern Ireland.  What they were fighting about is whether or not Northern Ireland was a part of Great Britain or a part of Ireland. In the Protestant Northern Ireland they are not Irish in the Irish sense.  They are far more united with England and Great Britain.  They are the Scotts-Irish that have bounced back and forth between Scotland and Ireland.  The rest of the Irish are different.  It is a tribal thing.  So they fought a battle and they were fighting in the 70's, refighting The Battle of Orange, which was fought 400 years before that.  They hadn't forgotten. 

Manasseh fights WWll, then crushes the great tyrannical powers of their day Germany and Japan, and then turns around and rebuilds them.  Now that's forgetful in a positive sense.  Okay, war's over.  Let me see what we can do to help you now.  Now, not to mention the fact that they went ahead and rebuild their Allies as well through the Marshall plan and other economic programs.  It really was an amazing piece of history and a positive testament.  You know there are some positive things about every nation and this is certainly one of the positive things about America.

Now saying that, why has America been like that and why we have the freedoms today? I think the main reason is because we have been as a Nation, this U.S., has been a springboard for the true gospel as we approach the end of the age.  You have to have considerable freedom to be able to preach the true gospel which runs against the current of traditional religion.  I think that is why the church is mostly here in America, because of that, and has been down through our about 80 years of experience in our modern era of the Church. 

Now, the news commentary - we next move to something else.  I think that the U.S. constitution stands between relative freedom for the whole world and tyranny. 
As far as a document, a human document, it has an incredibly powerful force and here's why:  If there are freedoms in America then there is hope for those who are burdened with tyranny.  Maybe they can get to America.  This is the one nation, well Britain a little bit shares this, but this is the one nation that people always want to come too.  They want to leave wherever they were and come here because of the freedoms.  So the constitution stands in a sense between relative freedom for the whole world and abject tyranny.

Now we come a debate that has been heated up since the awful tragedy that took place in Connecticut a few weeks ago there at Sandy Hills School, and it is a second amendment debate about whether or not regular citizens can own firearms. 

Historically the Church of God has operated and had to do the work under relative freedom and under very, very dangerous times of tyranny and dictatorship the first century itself. By the time that we get to the 60's AD Nero became the emperor and he persecuted the true Church because they were the only Christians.  He persecuted them tremendously.  Later we had two paths of Christianity.  One path went with the flow to a degree, although it took a couple of hundred years to work those wrinkles out, of the Roman Empire, and the other one continued on the course that we are a heritage to.  It is now our heritage.  It was the true Church. 

You have traditional Christianity as we might call it and then we are viewed because of our beliefs, as non-traditional Christianity.  We understand that we are the primitive Church as some historians refer to the early church; the early Church is another term; the Jewish church because of the Sabbath and the Holy Days – that is another term that the historians use to refer to the true Church back in the first century.  But we know that there was a division.  They don't necessarily know that although some have documented it.  So we know that we have to do the work under whatever times we face for as long as there is a work.  Eventually we know there is a prophecy about the famine of the Word that will come. 

U.S. freedom has enabled us to spread the gospel to all nations. The second amendment debate doesn't affect us in a sense that directly - we are not violent people.  Jesus was not a violent person. We follow His example and we have documented that right down through time and have articles that explain that and even now readily available to read. 

However, here is the deal.  It isn't so much the second amendment because some say, well, in fact some that I have conversed with in other nations say, what is America got with gun ownership? (What) they don't understand is that that is a basic freedom that in the world of humans, in the world of man, has held back tyranny in America.  Now, it is not the first time.

I will tell you another history.  This won't take very long but it gets into the subject that I like even more and that is: longbows.  The English longbow held back tyranny in England.  They were the only country that not only allowed their people to own heavy duty war bows that could shoot an arrow through the best armor the King of England could buy.  It could also shoot through the armor of other kings.  They were the only country that allowed their people to routinely, not only to own the longbows but they past laws and these are recorded, that required every abled bodied man and boy to shoot so many arrows at such and such a distance, every Sunday.  After church of course, because they were initially Catholic and later Anglican.

So they had to shoot their bows every week to develop the power to pull.  Those longbows were fierce.  We know what they were like because archeology raised some in the Mary Rose, which was a battle ship from the time of Queen Elizabeth 1, and they still used the war bows in the crows nests. When two battle ships in those days would shoot those canons back and forth at each other you couldn't - it was hard to sink a wooden ship because pieces of it floated all the time. 

So what they would do is they would battle each other with cannons.  You are trying to kill sailors, but you want to save the ship because that is part of how you pay your own men. The ship is a prize.  So the last thing they would do is they would run the ships alongside and throw grappling hooks across and then they would go from either from one deck to the other and they fight to the death.  As the grappling hooks were being thrown the English archers were in the tree stands shall we say, the crows nest on the mast, and they were killing everybody that was out on the other deck as fast as they could.  That way there was less for their sailors to have to battle and it worked.  Britannia rules the waves, became the summary of that era of history.   

Well, that ship went down and they raised it in the 1880's and they found out that those long bows, the weak ones, when they made exact replica's of the ones that had been sunk in the mud of the harbor, exact replicas, the weak ones pulled 90 pounds.  A few of us here in the room shoot bows; none of us pull 90 lb. bows.  I shoot a 68 pounder and it is heavy.  The heavy bows on the Mary Rose pulled at least 160 lbs.  Those were heavy duty fast bows and I've read studies of how fast could a yew-wood longbow shoot a big heavy arrow, one of those heavy bows, and they shoot faster than modern fiberglass laminated ones; by far faster. So the English required that freedom in a sense of their population.  America has it now. 

The bottom line: if the second amendment falls the rest of the bill of rights must follow some time after that.  And you may think, so what difference does that make?  Well, the rest of the bill of rights include several freedoms upon which the work of God is based:  Freedom of speech; freedom of association – that is why we're able just to be here without worrying about it or getting government permission on the Sabbath; freedom of religion.  Those are three critically important freedoms that the American constitution has had and made and now we see those freedoms really, really seriously threatened and that makes me feel sad, which brings me to the topic of the sermon.

It seems like a round about way but I think it will all come together for you though as we go.  I've wanted to share a few paragraphs out of another item of Vertical Thought as I mentioned.  This was the last editorial in the print magazine, that particular one that I showed you.  We called our editorial: Vantage point.  When you go vertical, get up on a mountain top, then you have a vantage point to view things so that is why we call the editorial "Vantage Point".  The title of it was:  How to feel sad.  That is the title of this sermon:  How to feel sad. 

"I woke up this morning feeling sad. In fact, I've been feeling sad for some time. Not so much personally sad, but sad for my country, America, which I love. Based on the cultural implications, the 2012 presidential campaign and election didn't help.

"America has been bent for decades on infusing her culture with sinful values (as clearly defined in the Bible). That cultural change initially gained momentum in the institutions of higher learning (universities and colleges) and gave rise to the student unrest of the late 1960's. The immoral sexual and "recreational" drug revolutions of that era did frightening damage to the morals—and spiritual condition—of the country. Come to think of it, I've been feeling sad about this for quite a long time.

"Many of the radical college students from back then—and their successors—became the educational and political leaders of later decades. In the 21st century, their value system has increasingly settled down to secondary and even primary school levels. Sadly, the lax morals of the older generation have negatively permeated the younger generation. As a result, today we see a lack of moral strength—from the vantage point of God's definition of morality.

"With respect to our international readers," (and we do have quite a lot of those in Vertical Thought, so this is another paragraph from the editorial) "this accelerating, sinful, culture trend knows no national borders. As vertical thinkers, you can certainly see the ungodly reasoning, speaking and behavior in the culture of your own country. I imagine it makes you sad too.

"But sadness also comes from life's other problems—unhappy families, bullying at school or in the neighborhood, the mentally depressing effects of drug or alcohol abuse, and other kinds of abuse. These tend to not only trigger anger, but a profound personal sadness. Add to that anger-sadness connection; the sometimes unintended consequence of an angry spirit and dark mood expressed in much of today's (and yesterday's) youth-targeted music and entertainment. Very gloomy.

"There's a time to feel properly sad." That is the point that we want to make today.

There is a time to feel sad and frankly we live in a time where we should have a note of sadness and we will argue in a minute to the value of sadness. But here is an example; this is an incredible story.  Ezekiel had more visions as far as we can tell, than anybody else.  More than Jeremiah (Jeremiah had some), more than Isaiah and Isaiah had some really amazing ones.  He got to see the third heaven and so did Ezekiel and John in the book of Revelation. You could say, well, how could Ezekiel beat that?  Well, he couldn't necessarily beat that in the scope and magnitude; it is just that he saw more visions than John.  John saw the vision of the transfiguration and he saw Revelation.  Maybe he saw something else. 

Paul saw the vision of the third heaven.  That is in 2 Corinthians 12, I think it is, but Ezekiel saw lots of them.  In fact, God took him one time, He said in Ezekiel: I want to show you a vision. And He grabs him, and in this vision this is what Ezekiel is experiencing, by a lock of his hair and lifts him up.  Now, how would he know it is a lock of his hair and not just levitating him unless he could, in the vision feel that it is a lock of his hair?  And then you have to wonder: was it a little lock that would really make it hurt or was it a bigger lock, a fistful of his hair.  "Come on, I want to go and show you something.  Look at that.  There is Jerusalem over there."

And that did happen.  He went to Jerusalem and remember it was always a big deal. He was Ezekiel.  He was a priest.  Ezekiel was in captivity at the time; he was hundreds, thousands of miles away from Jerusalem, so he was carried to Jerusalem and God had him by a fistful of hair.   He said, well, there is Jerusalem.  There is the temple.  See the temple down there?  I want you to look at the north gate; look at the east gate; now come around back here; so He would swing him around and Ezekiel had no choice but to look where ever God was sort of directing his attention.  Now that was just one of the times.  He had other visions too. 

He had to do the most odd things.  All of the prophets had to do odd things that would teach object lessons - object prophecies in that sense.  Ezekiel had more than any. Remember he had to lie on the side thing for 390 days and you think well, you couldn't do that for 390 days.  You could use your workday.  Yes, you could get up and you say oh, well, I'm done lying on my side for today.  I am going to go home and then you go home and in the morning he'd get up and come to the city gate – it was right by the city gate – he lay on his side. On one elbow, always the same elbow, for 390 days.  You would think: wouldn't that hurt?  Yeah, but that is okay because after that God made him lay on the other elbow for 40 days. 

And he had to play; a grown man in front of everybody had to play with a little clay model of Jerusalem, etched into clay and dried, and he had to set up little tiny siege engines and if you wonder well, what kind of siege engines are we talking about here? Well, you have to watch the movie, Kingdom of Heaven.  It is a war movie so don't watch it if you don't like war movies.  They show what kind of siege engines were used throughout the ancient world.  So he would set those up and dig little ramps. That was one of the other things he had to do.  He had to get the little siege engine up the height of the wall and all of those things that he had to do.  But this particular one is a different vision than that and not as odd.  It was just odd what he saw.

Ezekiel 9:1 Then He called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, "Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a deadly weapon in his hand."

By this time Ezekiel is used to things being bigger than life.

V.2 – And suddenly (Ezekiel says) six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his battle-ax in his hand. 

A battle-ax?  I thought only Vikings used battle-axes.  No, battle-axes were used by different cultures.  I am really interested to see what these looked like because the battle-axes that Vikings had had a heritage.  It came from traditional battle-axes and they were some of the most advanced of battle-axes when the Viking era started in the 800's.  That is an aside.  So they each had his battle-ax in his hand but,

V.2 – One man among them was clothed with linen and had a writer's inkhorn at his side.  They went in and stood beside the bronze altar.

Well, if he was clothed in linen and it is mentioned specifically then that means the other guys had on a different uniform.  They weren't clothed in linen.  Bingo! Paying attention?  Who wore linen exclusively at certain times?  The priest did.  Exactly right.  When they did their service in the Temple they had to have on a linen uniform and it is all described in detail in the books of Moses and the millennial priesthood that will exist is all described in the latter part of Ezekiel.

They all wear linen because you don't sweat so much with linen on and you are not supposed to wear things that cause you to sweat when you are working in and out of the Temple.  When they came out, when they were to go to serve the people and in some other way, then they had a changing room in a side-chamber off to the outside of the Temple and they would go in and change back into their other clothes.  They had another uniforms.  Even the priest did and those could include wool. But wool – it will be warm and will tend to make you sweat but the linen didn't.  So this guy had a linen uniform on which would seem to denote a priest.  Also, he was a Scribe, which also would go along with the priesthood. They had to learn to read and write.

V.2- … (he) had a writer's inkhorn at his side.  They went in and stood beside the bronze altar.

V.3 – Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, (this is a part of the vision he is seeing) to the threshold of the temple.  And he called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side:

V.4 - And the LORD said unto him, (Now, He called to him, so He is not just speaking to him) "Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof."

At the end of the age we know there is the mark of the beast you don't want.  Here is the mark you do want.  You want to be one who sighs and cries for the abominations that are done in the modern nations descended from the ancient tribes of Israel and all the other nations too.  To sigh and cry because we know what God's truth is, we know what His way is and we see them completely abandoning it and heading further and further away.  And we sigh and cry at the abominations.

Child sacrifice was one of the very common abominations done in Judah.  It was done in a place called Tophet.  Tophet seems like a funny word but it isn't.  It means a big drum like a kettledrum that echo's in a valley, because it was a valley.  It was where the Kidron valley is which comes down the east side of Jerusalem, and then the valley of the children of Hinnom or Gehenna. It was really near the south end of David's Jerusalem and there is a little valley that comes down from the other side of the temple mount called the Tyropoeon.  They all merge right there, right there at the bottom of the valley of Gehenna and is called Tophet because there they worshipped the God Moloch.  Ezekiel reported this; so did Jeremiah; so did Isaiah. 

Moloch was a woodstove of a God.  He was made out of bronze and so you would stoke a huge fire in his back side or maybe his belly, I don't know where they had the fire box, but it would heat this bronze statue until it was just fiercely hot, red-hot I suppose, or nearly so. You don't want to melt it but you want it really hot and then they would put the baby in the arms of the statue and he would scream to death. They didn't like the screaming part.  That is why they beat the drums and that is why they called the place Tophet. 

So what does America do?  We just maxed out at 56 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade.  We don't have drums beside the hospital incinerators but they make a lot of noise on their own I guess.  Maybe the air conditioning motors kind of drown out the screams that aren't able to happen by that time.  We're not so far removed from (these days) the abominations that are done in the land.  That is only one.  There are so many others. 

V.5 - And to the others he said in my hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and kill: let not your eye spare, nor have any pity:
V.6 – Utterly slay old and young men, maidens and little children and women; but do not come near anyone on whom is the mark; and begin (right here) at My sanctuary."

That's where the priests were.  You mean the priests were corrupt?  Yes.  They were; many of them.

V.6 - …so they began with the elders who were before the temple.

V.7 – Then He said to them, "Defile the temple, and fill the courts with the slain. (That is what God told him) Go out!" And they went out and killed in the city.

V.8 – So it was, that while they were killing them, I was left alone;

You know, Ezekiel is seeing this in a vision and it is larger than life and he is seeing what is going to happen in the future and typified what he is seeing right there in front of him and when you read the prophets you find that they were, well, you know how sometimes you can get emotionally involved in just a movie you are watching?  This is way more than a movie.  This is super intense.  So he was left alone, on purpose, of course.  God doesn't do things without a purpose. 

V.8 - …and I fell on my face and cried out, and said, "Ah, Lord God!  Will You destroy all the remnant of Israel (the few; the last vestiges; those who may be trying to hold things together) in pouring out Your fury on Jerusalem?"

V.9 – Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed, and the city full or perversity; for they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!'

How do they say today the Lord does not see?  Well, they say there is no God.  You have illusionary atheism and that is exactly what its bottom line is.  There is no God.  He doesn't see.  You have a God?  Look at this land.  There couldn't be a God because evil happens.  Wrong.  Evil happens because people choose to. 

V.10 – And as for Me also, My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head."

V.11 – Just then, (as God spoke to Ezekiel and Ezekiel poured out his heart to God) the man clothed with linen, who had the inkhorn at this side, reported back and said, "I have done as You commanded me."

Mission accomplished.  The mark is on the heads.  Those people will be spared. 

We ought to be wanting to be among them but you know to be among them, those with that mark on their heads brethren, means we have to be sad.  We cry and sigh for the abomination.  That doesn't mean that you will be sad 24/7.  You don't want to do that but sadness is a virtue at certain times. 

So the question really gets down to this: There is a time to feel properly sad but how can it feel good to be sad? You feel good when you do what God wants you to do but how do you feel good by being sad?  Well, I have three points:

1. Grant sadness some self-respect.

We live in the age of party-animals.  They don't want to be sad.  That's why they take the uppers and other drugs and then alcohol.  They want to drown their miseries.  They don't want to feel sad. They want to avoid it.  Sadness is bad in their thinking.  Wrong!  It is good at the right time.  Grant sadness some self-respect.  It is okay to feel sad just not too sad for too long.  I am going to give you an example, a personal example of Christ, in Matthew 23.

If we had time we would do a study on Matthew 23 but just to give you this: We're about a week before the Passover when Matthew 23 takes place. It is a confrontation between Christ and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and it is time to precipitate action.  They are the ones who will be responsible directly for His death and crucifixion by insisting that the Romans carry it out and it is time to push their buttons.  Up to that time He could disappear into the crowd; He would confront and then draw back but this was a time where you confront and He hit them hard.  Sarcasm, Biblical sarcasm, divine sarcasm was His main tool. 

It is quite funny, quite scary funny in that sense, when you read the book and realize He is insulting the authorities of the time because they are in violation of God's laws constantly and then when He is done, and there is a certain element of humor that is used here, humor and sadness, laughing and crying are about a half-a-second apart from each other emotionally.  You can switch from one to the other.  You don't normally think of that but it is possible to do and some speakers are very good at that.  They can make their audience laugh and then instantly have them cry by a determinable line in the story.  I am not trying to do that - just warning you.  Christ displays the sadness in verse 37.

Matthew 23:37 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," Maybe that is why the song started with, the special music with, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem".  It reminded me of the haunting sad note that sometimes is written into music that has some Jewish background and that one does.

V.37 – "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!

I don't know how many of you grew up around chickens.  We had 500 or 600 of them running around.  They were Banties.  So, you say they don't count.  Yes, they do count.  They were the original chickens.  Those big, fat, stumbily ones, they came along later through specialized breeding.  The originals were Banties and they were the best shedding hens I ever saw.  They would gather - any stray chicks got gathered in to their brood.  They left no chicks unwatched. 
We had one little Bantie hen that would hatch two batches of eggs a summer. We had a Shetland sheepdog, one of our watchdogs, and he slept at the same corner of the house all the time.  When he wasn't patrolling he was asleep at that corner of the house.  She hated him.  He had never done any thing except possibly when she was a young chick, you know, half grown, teenage chicken, he might have chased her out of the garden because that was the only time he was allowed to chase chickens.  He knew it and he would chase them out of the garden every day.  That was his exercise and his fun.  So maybe it was a vendetta at times. 

She would come round the corner of the house - she always hatched her chickens by the house – and she spotted Shad asleep and she would attack him.  She was a chicken, attacking a dog.  She would land on the back of his neck and get her claws, her toes, into his long fur and then she would peck him on the head.  He wouldn't try to fight; he would jump and run as hard he could.  He would run 100 yards and when he got to about 80 or so yards, her squawking and pecking and balancing with her wings like this, she would let go of her feet and then lift off from the back him like taking off from a aircraft carrier and fly back to her chicks.

So when Christ said He would gather his children together it is because He loves them.  He loves His chicks.  He would protect them with his life and He did. 

V.37 - … but you were not willing!  Jerusalem wouldn't come under His wings.

V.38 – See! Your house is left to you desolate;

V.39 – for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!'"

And they didn't. They didn't see Him anymore and they won't until His return. So, grant sadness some self-respect.  There is a time to be sad. Ecclesiastes 7 also clarifies this detail.

Ecclesiastes 7:1 A good name is better than precious ointment, (reputation, but it is the last part of that proverb that seems to be out of place) and the day of death than the day of one's birth;

How can the day of your death be better than the day of your birth?  That just seems so sad.  Okay, we have just introduced the topic.  I won't explain that verse; I will explain the others.

V.2 – Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men (the house of mourning); and the living will take it to heart.

I have come to learn over the years of pastoring for 35, 37 years or so, at first doing funerals was one of the most stressful and difficult assignments.  I thought, Oh no, I've got to do a funeral now; somebody died and how am I going to do that? I go back and I read the outline that we were given in our ceremony book and sort of go through it but it was intensely stressful.  Then later, after doing it a few times, I began to realize this is one of the greatest honors I have as a pastor – to officiate at the death of one who has died in the faith.  It is a great honor.  And then looking at it that way I realized this is a precious time to be able to do someone's funeral. 
I don't like the fact that people have to die so that you can do it, but you know it is the greatest honor and it is their last chance in this life to promote the preaching of the gospel because what do you think we do in a funeral sermon?  We talk all about the Kingdom of God and people who have come to pay their last respects are intellectually and emotionally a little bit vulnerable to thinking about something they may not have known anything about before, or maybe they did know something about, it but were resistant.  So then I came to see the wonderful value when you go through and explain what the person's life was all about. 

One of my favorite funerals of all time was years ago in the State of Oregon.  We had a member who was a recovered alcoholic or recovering, and drug abuser.  He was addicted to heroin by the time he was 10 years old.  His parents didn't pay attention to what he was doing and at the time he came into the Church he'd just gotten dry through a 12-step program, and clean.  He remained so for the rest of his life but his health was wrecked.  He couldn't do anything. 

He had been a functioning addict and alcoholic because he could do mental math for years and years and years.  He would bid building maintenance jobs where he walked through and looked at all the windows for the window cleaning; look at the floors for the cleaning; all the cleaning that needed to be done in a building, and he added it up in his head as he walked through with the building manager.  At the end he would tell them, well, this is what I can do it for.  All of it added up and he could sit down and it would be exactly right.  He could do that math all in his head. 

Then he had a stroke right about that time he was coming into the Church and the stroke knocked out his math ability.  So he would take classes to try and get it back, you know, in his spare time.  He wrecked his health but even though his health was pretty weak he had moved up to our area (before I got there) because his kids lived near there.  He volunteered in 12-step programs, at least 4 or 5 in a little town, as well as in the county jail, as well as doing adolescent counseling at the hospital whenever his health was good enough.  He was active in all those.

We would go for a walk. Jack was his name, I won't tell you his last name because of alcoholics anonymous and places like that – they just talk about the first name.  We would go for a walk after having a cup of coffee at the coffee house and we couldn't go a block without somebody walking out of some of the buildings and say: Ah, Jack!  And they would come up and give him a hug and tell him how well he looked and how well they were doing and how long they have been dry or clean, to the day.  And he would give them a slap on the shoulder and encourage them and he'd go on.  And he would say, Yes, I worked with him up there at the Presbyterian Church; he has been doing really well these 5 years.  It was just a huge testament. Eventually he got sick and died, Jack did. 

I knew that we were going to have a lot of people at his funeral.  Our members at the time were not too familiar with this side of his life so we ended up renting, or his family ended up renting a large auditorium at one of the churches in the community. I got up and did an eulogy about him because I'd come to know him well and his kids had something they wanted me to read and I did, and then I said, now before I get to the funeral sermon, before I tell you what really drove Jack, what was his hope, what was his deep desire, I know a lot of you have things you would like to say, so who is going to start? 

Everything got quiet.  I just waited for about 20 seconds and finally a hand goes up and I said, go ahead.  He stood up and said, "Hi, I am Bob and I am an alcoholic and let me tell you how Jack helped me".  Then we went for a solid hour, just like popcorn; as soon as one was done I would point to another and they would get up and give their testimony of how they had been helped by this member. That was my most memorable and joyful funeral in that sense and Jack will be proud when he hears the details of it. 

Then they all heard the gospel of the Kingdom of God because of the resurrection and the plan of God.  You go through the synopsis of it and so you think well, how could it be better to go to the house of mourning?  Well, there is a time when sadness serves a great purpose and that is one of them.

V.3 – Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better.

It is okay to feel sad; it is good to feel sad periodically.

V.4 – The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

Don't be a party animal.  Party animals are trying to run away from the sadness they need to give some self-respect to and to learn from. 

That is point number one. 

2.  Sing a sad song.

Sing me a sad song.  I don't want to hear sad songs; I want to hear sweetness and light, fluffy songs; I just want joyful songs.  Okay, joyful songs are really good.  I like them too.  Sometimes you need to hear a sad song. 

King David in the book of Psalms wrote and sang a lot of sad songs.  Sometimes to mourn and sometimes to heal from the hurt, which was another type of mourning.  He was constantly being dogged by King Saul in his younger years.  When the King, who was his father-in-law of all things, decided that he needed the head of David on a stake, then David had to run and to run and to run and to run.  Let's look at Psalm 3 briefly to get an inkling there.  Some of the early Psalms were this.  All of his Psalms ended up with a positive note.  Sadness doesn't last always.  It leads to positive thinking but it leads to better thinking too. 

Psalm 3:1 Lord, how they have increased who trouble me!  Many are they who rise up against me.

V.2 – Many are they who say of me, "There is no help for him in God."
So he is lamenting; he is sad.

V.3 – But (You come to a conclusion when you are thinking through the sadness) You, O Lord, are a shield for me.

Psalm 4:1 Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness!  You have relieved me in my distress; Have mercy on me, and hear my prayer.

V.2 – How long, O you sons of men, will you turn my glory to shame?  And so on and so on. 

Another sad one – Psalm 12. You can just go through them and you can pick them out.  We sing some of these.

Psalm 12:1 Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases!  For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.

V.2 – They speak idly everyone with his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.

Hello, 21st century!

V.3 – May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaks proud things,

V.4 – Who have said, "With our tongue we will prevail; Our lips are our own; Who is lord over us?"

We will use our campaign tactics to destroy you, they said in their opposition.  Well, David came under that kind of a gun too and it was a sad thing.

One of my favorite sad Psalms though is Psalm 137 and there was, I noticed, in the special music a line right out of this one.  You know it actually quite well.  We call it in the hymnal:  By the waters of Babylon.  Technically in the New King James it says by the rivers of Babylon but rivers are waters so it works.

Psalm 137:1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down.

David didn't write this because as far as we know he never went over to the Euphrates or over to that part of the Euphrates.  This is what is called an exilic hymn, in other words one of the priests probably, or one of the musicians of the house of Judah wrote this as they were going into exile after Jerusalem fell.  Or maybe there were smaller exiles. Daniel was involved in those and so was Ezekiel. Before Jerusalem fell they were taken into captivity and hauled off to Babylon.  Maybe it was one of those.  Probably it actually was one of the earlier ones, 605 BC was one of those.  Jerusalem didn't fall till 586 BC.

V.1 – By the rivers of Babylon, There we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. 
How did they feel when they were crying?  Lets get up and party!  No, they didn't feel like idiots.  They felt sad, horrendously sad.

V.2 – We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it.

We don't feel like playing our instruments; we hang them here on the trees

V.3 – For there those who carried us away captive asked of us a song, and those who plundered us requested mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

Sing slaves, sing!

V.4 – How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

V.5 – If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! 

V.6 – If I do not remember you, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth – If I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy. 

And then there is a little bit of what they call an imprecatory prayer that follows.  You never want to be the object of an imprecatory prayer if it is prayed by a righteous person.  Imprecatory prayers – you can look it up but some other time I might talk about imprecatory prayers.  All right, I will tell you.  Imprecatory prayers are prayers where there is denouncement involved. Where somebody is being prayed against. Every Atonement we have imprecatory prayers; frankly every day we pray against the god of this world who is trying to destroy mankind and we pray that God will foil his attempts to attack and destroy the church. That is an imprecatory prayer; that is what the last part of Psalm 137 is but it is a sad song as well. 

Jeremiah was God's writer of the book of Lamentations and I want to make a note of this but please turn to the book of Lamentations.  We don't often do that.  Who likes to preach out of sad songs?  Well, sometimes we need to but I want to make a note of this though.  I want to read a verse I have in my notes here, from Jeremiah 9:1.  Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet because he cried a lot; literally, he cried a lot and this was one of the verses that makes that point so clear.  He said:

Jeremiah 9:1 Oh, that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!

That is how Jeremiah felt.  He was so sad sometimes but it was a sadness that was needed and that was how he processed things.  He faced an awful lot of opposition and trouble in his time. 

Lamentations – this is again Jeremiah's writing and each of these chapters is a song, a lamentation.

Lamentations 1:1 How lonely sits the city that was full of people!  How like a widow is she, who was great among nations! The princess among the provinces has become a slave!

V.2 – She weeps bitterly in the night, her tears are on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her.  All her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies.

V.3 – Judah has gone into captivity,  - and I may add here, it isn't just Judah.  The principle applies to all of Israel because they had already gone into captivity before this was written.  So the principle applies all of the tribes of Israel grown in the nations and even today now, grown into nations.

V.3 – Judah has gone into captivity, under affliction and hard servitude; she dwells among the nations, she finds no rest; all her persecutors overtake her in dire straits.

V.4 – The roads to Zion mourn because no one comes to the set feasts.  (Nobody goes to the Feast of Tabernacles during the captivity of Jerusalem) all her gates are desolate; her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.

V.5 – Her adversaries have become the master, her enemies prosper; for the Lord has afflicted her because of the multitude of her transgressions.  Her children have gone into captivity before the enemy.

V.8 – Jerusalem has sinned gravely, therefore she has become vile.  All who honored her despise her because they have seen her nakedness; yes, she sighs and turns away.

V.9 – Her uncleanness is in her skirts; she did not consider her destiny; (she didn't think about who she was and what she stood for and where she should be going) therefore her collapse was awesome;  (not awesome in an awesome sense, but awesome in a gruesome sense) She had no comforter.  "O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy is exalted!"'

And that seems to be Jeremiah speaking then from the middle of verse 9 but then you drop you down and it takes a slightly different tone beginning in the middle of verse 11. Notice the blend.

V.11 – All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their valuables for food to restore life (and then it says) "See, O lord and consider, for I am scorned."

That wasn't Jeremiah directly.  He was scorned indeed but it seems that now he is shifting in his voice of the song; it is now Judah speaking or Israel in that sense. 

V.12 – "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?  Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the Lord has inflicted in the day of His fierce anger.

And what is the ultimate day of His fierce anger? 586 BC or 587 BC, depending on which year it was that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem?  No.  It is the great tribulation.  The day of God's fierce anger is in the Day of the Lord.  Of course part of His anger is expressed by holding back the stops on Satan's anger in the Great Tribulation.  The day of the Lord is when God takes over.  That's the real time of His fierce anger.

V.13 – "From above He has sent fire into my bones, and it overpowered them; He has spread a net for my feet and turned me back; He has made me desolate and faint all the day.

V.14 – "The yoke of my transgressions was bound; they were woven together by His hands, and thrust upon my neck.  He made my strength fail; The Lord delivered me into the hands of those whom I am not able to withstand.

V.16 – "For these things I weep; My eye, my eye overflows with water; because the comforter, who should restore my life, is far from me.  My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed."

Is that where we just leave it?  Just that sadness and feeling terrible?  No.  Sadness is good if you are not too sad for too long and David did this and so does Jeremiah.  A change takes place in the language in verse 18.

V.18 – "The Lord is righteous, for I rebelled against His commandment.  (Ah, now we are starting to see repentance.  Repentance is a positive change). Hear now, all peoples, and behold my sorrow; my virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.

V.19 – "I called for my lovers, but they deceived me;

V.20 – "See, O Lord that I am in distress; My soul is troubled; My heart is overturned within me. 

He is starting to call out and pray for God's intervention.

So there is a classic example of singing a sad song.  And you would think who would sing Lamentations?  Well, the Jews do.  They have The Book of Lamentations and they go to all the holy sites on the 9th of Av.  The 9th of Av is going to be the end of July or early August.  That is the time frame.  It is one of the names of one of the months and that is their "holiday", if you want to put it in quotations, that commemorates the destruction of Solomon's temple (that is the first temple), and then the second temple that had been redone by Herod the Great in 70 AD.  587 BC, 586 BC - 587 BC and then 70 AD were the two destructions of the temple.  On the 9th Av, as a nation Israel and the nation of Israel, mourns for the destruction of the Temple. 

In 1973 my wife and I were there while we were still Ambassador students and on the eve of the 9th Av a group of us walked the two miles from our hotel over to the Wailing Wall.  And it wasn't just the Wailing Wall, it was the parking lot of the Wailing Wall where we watched the religious Jews and there is some of each in Israel, some religious and some not. The religious Jews dancing; dances of sadness; mourning the destruction of the Temple; People down at the Wailing Wall praying and chanting.  It was a louder chant than normal.

The next day, on the 9th Av is the national holiday there. We went to the traditional burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah. As we were walking in the doorway and in the hall leading to the viewing area of this (it is a cavern) there were typically young men and some young women that are obviously orthodox Jews, down on their heels, rocking slightly and reading a little book and chanting in Hebrew.  I thought, I wonder what that is?  I hadn't looked it up; didn't have Internet in those days, you know.  I found out later what it was.  It was the book of Lamentations.  They really have a little book of Lamentations, a copy of Lamentations, and they chant those songs.  That is the way they sing.  They chant more than singing songs but all the same it is a type of singing, the chanting is.  So they were singing their hearts out and some times when we are sad we need to sing our hearts out.  Sing a sad song. Soothe the sadness. Heal the hurt. 

3. Just like in Lamentations 1, the third point is:  Then think vertically – look to God.

God has planned an incredible future for all of us; a happier, better day ahead.  There is trouble now but there will be a happier, better day ahead.  Jesus called it "the age to come" in Mark 10:30.  Let's read that.  He referred to the time of the Kingdom of God on earth when everything will be turned over and the world will enjoy true peace.  Not just a rest bit between battles and wars but actual peace. 

The disciples had gone to Christ and they said you know we've given up everything to follow you.  What will we have?  That is what the question is.  Peter is the one who voiced it for them. 

Mark 10:29 So Jesus answered and said, "Assuredly, I say to you, (Peter and all the rest of you) there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel's,

And you know we've had people in the Church in our era that when they begin to believe God's way and practice it, they had parts of their family and sometimes all of their family just abandon them.  Sometimes later they relented a little but some were just completely abandoned.  They lost family.  Now what did they get back?  A bigger family.  What they didn't have in flesh and blood they had in the spirit – the spiritual family. 

That is what Christ is talking about.  Those who will loose family like that or lands, for My sake and the gospel's,

V.30 – who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life.

So the Kingdom of God that He referred to is the age to come; the better day that is ahead.  So when you are feeling sad you always bring yourself around and you start to think about the Kingdom of God.

I've just enough time to tell you about one of the splinter groups.  They didn't really splinter off; they just were a splinter.  We called it the OGCG.  This was years ago in Eugene, Oregon.  Now in Eugene you have some members who had been living God's way since they were young in the 1930's.  Most of them had been buried since but it was the Old Guys Coffee Group – OGCG. 

So we'd go to this really good coffee house and if I say it is really good, it is really good.  I like coffee, good coffee.  We'd all get a cup of coffee and they had really good pie too so we had pie and coffee.  We pushed all the tables together and there were several younger fellows.  Some of them that could break away from work would come to these afternoon meetings every three or four weeks.  We pushed the tables together because some of the guys were hard of hearing and they start talking. They started drinking coffee and talking, eating pie and they almost always started off with WWll and then moved on to the Korean War because most of them were veterans.

They had their experiences from state side during those times and they would reflect on that, and then they would shift around to when they came in to knowing God's truth.  Then there would be another transformation that ended it every time; it was usually a two-hour get together. We'd have to refill our cups half way through.  They would then start talking about the Kingdom of God and what it will be like.  What the World Tomorrow will be like and I didn't guide it and neither did the other younger guys. I didn't say well, let's talk about this and then let's talk about the Kingdom of God.  No, no, no.  I didn't need to.  These men were guided by God's spirit.  They'd have lived long and they were faithful and they just loved to talk about those things.  They remembered some things; some sad times for the nation and then they would move on to wonderful times to come; the Kingdom of God on earth.

So you start thinking vertically.  You look to God.  You look forward to His Kingdom.  You know Christ came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God.  That is in Mark 1, and saying, repent and believe the gospel.  And it was the gospel of God's Kingdom that He was telling us to repent and to believe. That brings the joy; that tempers the sadness but the sadness leads to a greater appreciation for God's coming Kingdom.  Human culture will be repaired; our nations will be healed, as will our own emotional hurts.  God's Kingdom will turn sadness to joy forever.