No Halfway Covenant

I want to dive right into Scripture to start off today, for illustration's sake. So if you'll turn with me to Acts 9, I want to review a pretty well-known story. And then we're going to review some other stories to set alongside it, and we'll see a little bit of a trend. Acts 9 will begin right at the beginning of the chapter. But as you might know, of course, after Christ's crucifixion, the church started very small. With that first Pentecost, a number of people came in and started getting attention, but also started drawing a lot of persecution. And one of the primary leaders of that persecution was a fellow who we believe had been in the Sanhedrin, went by the name of Saul, before later he would change his name to Paul. So let's begin in verse 1. It says, And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. And he fell to the ground, and he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, well, who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It's hard for you to kick against the goats. He was trembling and astonished, and said, Lord, what do you want me to do? And so the Lord told him, arise, go into the city, and you'll be told what you must do. And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no one. There's another account where it indicates perhaps they heard a noise but didn't make out the actual words. And Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were open, he saw no one. He'd been struck blind. So he needed someone to take him by the hand to lead him on into the city, into Damascus. And I'm going to skip ahead in the story. We know he stayed there a couple of days, and he was fasting and probably praying quite a bit, because suddenly his whole world had been turned upside down. He thought this new religion that he thought these people were crazy, and he needed to necessarily beat it out of them. Now suddenly the person that he thought was an imposter spoke to him from heaven and proved that he was God indeed.

So now a representative of this Jesus, whom he had been persecuting and now Saul was wrong, comes to him in verse 17. And I skipped over the part where this Ananias, Jesus talked to him directly as well and gave him the mission to go to Paul. So Ananias went his way and entered the house and laying hands on him and said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once, and he arose, and he was baptized. And so when he received food, he was strengthened, which you know how you feel after the end of atonement. You have a little food, you're strengthened. He'd been fasting two or three days. I forget the exact number. He was strengthened. And then Saul spent some days with the disciples at Damascus, and immediately he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God. So you could imagine very easily, after this experience, Paul had no doubt that he was called by God. God had reached down from heaven and knocked him off his feet, struck him blind, and then talked to him and sent a messenger to tell him what he needed to do. So Paul knew he was called for a special purpose. And from what we understand, reading the Scriptures, he never wavered from that his whole life. He stuck with that. Now, I want to read you another story, not from the Scripture. I typed this out rather than bring up the book, because I knew I'd probably forget it. But you might have heard of Duggar and Dodd's book, A History of the True Religion. Duggar and Dodd were ministers in the Church of God Seventh-Day that Mr. Herbert Armstrong first associated with when he learned about the Sabbath. And they had this book where they'd researched the history of Sabbath-keeping peoples and what they believed was the true Church going all the way from the first century to modern era. And there's an incident he describes in the 1300s I'd like to read. So it says, about 1330 A.D., the people of God in Germany were grievously harassed and oppressed by an inquisitor named E.H.R.D. It's spelled E-E-A-C-H-A-R-D. Not that you need to know that, but if you wonder why I'm having trouble pronouncing it. He was a Jacobin monk. After inflicting cruelties for some time upon these people, he was induced to investigate the causes and the reasons of their separation from the Church of Rome. The force of truth ultimately prevailed over all his prejudices. His own conscience attested that many of the errors and corruptions which they charged on that apostate Church, which they're talking about the Catholic Church, really existed. And finding himself unable to disprove the articles of their faith by the word of God, he confessed that truth had overcome him. He gave glory to God and entered the communion of the Waldensian churches. Now, the Waldensians is a name that had applied to groups of churches that were observing the Sabbath and, we believe, keeping the Holy Days. And we believe many of them were part of the true Church. So he joined them, which he had been engaged in persecuting even to death. The news of this conversion aroused the ire of the Inquisitors. Emissaries were dispatched in pursuit of him. He was at length apprehended and conveyed to Heidelberg, where he was committed to the flames. So things did not end well for him, but, interesting, like the Apostle Paul, he had been persecuting the truth and then was convinced that it was the truth and started teaching it and he believed it and stuck with it even when he was killed for it.

Now, moving far ahead in history again, many of us are familiar with the story of how Herbert W. Armstrong, who began the modern work that we carry on today, was converted to the truth. And if you read his autobiography, he describes how before the Great Depression, he'd completely lost one successful business after another. He'd been a wealthy man, but it seemed like as soon as he'd start accomplishing something in his career, it'd crumble. It'd go away.

And at one point, while he was struggling to put his life back together, his wife Loma was shown in her own Bible the truth of the Seventh-Day Sabbath, and she was convicted that she needed to start keeping this. Now, Mr. Armstrong thought that she was becoming some sort of religious fanatic, and since he was unemployed at the time, he decided he was, you know, he said, I can read a Bible. I'm going to study and prove that Sunday is the correct day.

Of course, the more he studied his Bible, the more he saw that what most churches teach is true is not based on the Bible and not acceptable to God. He became convicted of the truths that he learned in the Bible, and he came to a deep repentance. To paraphrase his own words, he came to see his own life, he says, as nothing but a burnt-out hunk of junk.

And he went to God on his knees, he said, my life is worthless, but if you can use this life, I'll give it to you, and you can do with it what you will. And we believe that God went on to use him to build a great international work.

So I wonder, what about your family?

Probably you, many of you in this room, and if not you, perhaps your parents or your grandparents, had a somewhat similar story. Maybe not being struck blind or being put to the flames, but a similar story in that suddenly truth dawned, and there was this revelation. You know, from my family, it was my grandmother in the 1960s.

She'd been looking for a church that taught some of what she was seeing in the Bible. She tried the Seventh-Day Adventist, but things didn't seem entirely right. And then one night, she was tuning a new radio, and it was in the middle of the night she was tuning this new radio, and she came across Herbert W. Armstrong presenting the World Tomorrow program. And I like to tell the way she's... I've heard her tell the story so many times, she says, that was it! I knew that was the truth. She began receiving the Plain Truth magazine, which the church distributed at that time.

She took the old 52 lesson Bible correspondence course, and then in time she was baptized. She remained a faithful member of the church for about 40 years until her death at the age of 95. So it's easy to find several common elements in these various stories. I've told you the stories of several people as they were called and came into the church. They all came to a knowledge of the truth, and made a decision that they would leave behind the religion and the life they had known before.

For most of these people, it was a dramatic, obvious change. And for a lot of them, many of them faced trials, difficulties. One of them I just read was, you know, tortured to death.

But they were willing to endure them because they had no doubts about their calling, that it was a special calling from God. But there's another commonality among them that's not described, and you wouldn't necessarily know it's not readily apparent, but I think it's very important for many people in the church today, and even many who are in this room. Because all of these people, well, at least all of them probably had either children or members of their family who were younger that didn't experience their conversion or that calling in that way.

You know, Mr. Armstrong had this dramatic change, but then his children were taught that way of life most of their lives. In many cases, these younger people hardly suffered any persecution at all by comparison. Now, it's easy and it's interesting to focus on the dramatic stories of calling and conversion. But today, and all of this has been by way of introduction, but I'm getting to where I want to talk about a type of calling that is really much more common in the church. And I'm talking about what we often refer to as second or third generation Christians.

Now, it's interesting. We use those terms, and I'm not saying they're incorrect. I use them all the time. And I've struggled with saying, well, should I be considered a first generation Christian or second or maybe 1.5? Computer programs have made it a little easier. But I think it could, in some ways, depending on how you look at it, in one sense, you could say there's no such thing as a second generation Christian. Rather, there are different ways to be called into the church. And I've got a statement here. There's no halfway covenant. Now, I'm going to explain what I mean by that term later on, but if you want a title for the sermon, and Mr.

Callback there's probably going to want a title, I'm calling it no halfway covenants. And as I said, I'm going to get a little while, and I'll explain what I mean by halfway covenant. But let's start...well, I do have a note here that I wanted to make. That you might think I'm directing this mostly at our younger people, and I do have some important things to say at younger members here in the congregation, but it's not just for them.

Older members, I think it's important for us to understand the different experiences that we have. It's easy to look and say, well, you didn't go through what I went through, so it's not as valid. Or, I don't know why you're acting this way.

We do need to understand each other. Just like a lot of sermons have been directed at men and women in marriage relationships and saying, we need to understand each other, because there's differences. Now, I've said many times in the past year that being called by God is a privilege. It's a privilege to be called by God. For us to be here today on the Sabbath is a pleasure. It's a blessing. Some in the past have called keeping the Sabbath a burden, and we know that's not true. Keeping it can and should be a delight.

It's one of the greatest blessings we have. But there are others out there that see it differently. There are many people who say Christianity is only one choice of many possible ways to worship God and please Him. That way of thinking says, oh, there are many paths to spiritual fulfillment. Am I saying that? Have you heard that phrase before?

Many paths that lead to the same destination? The Bible says that's not true. The Bible says there's the opposite of that, I think. But even among those who call themselves Christians and who accept the Scripture that says Jesus Christ is the only name given under heaven by which we must be saved, many of those people, not in this room, think that currently there's going on this great titanic struggle between God on one side and Satan on the other, and they're trying to win souls.

And of course, I didn't make up that image, but we say, well, if that's the case, guess who's winning? Numbers alone would indicate Satan's got almost everybody on his side, and God has only a few. But these people think they've got to get as many people as possible to accept Jesus and get them into heaven. Well, you know, I think those people are in error. They mean well, and God is going to open their eyes in time, but they don't quite understand God's plan right now. Now, I'm pointing these things out not to criticize others.

I want us to not forget how special our calling is. For us to understand these truths is an amazing, wonderful thing that we can look in the Bible, and it makes sense to us in a way that it doesn't to a lot of people, not through any fault of their own. As I've said, in studying history, a lot of people over time have known Greek and Hebrew and could read the Bible in its original language and knew all the history involved.

And I'm amazed at how much more than me they knew, but without God's Spirit opening their mind, they fall short. They don't quite get it. Let's turn to John 644. We're near there anyways, and I know this is a memory scripture, but I want to look at it and then move ahead. John 644 reminds us of how special it is to be called.

It's also special to be in the right chapter when you want to read from it. Jesus said here, No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I'll raise him up at the last day. The calling to true Christianity is not automatic to everyone. Well, not yet. We've just come through the fall Holy Days and, of course, the last great day where we see it is going to be automatic to everyone in the right time.

But in this day and age, it's limited. If someone does come to Jesus, though, it's because the Father drew him. Let's look ahead to verse 65. John 665, Jesus says almost the same thing. Therefore I've said to you that no one can come to me unless it's been granted to him by my Father. So this indicates there's not some big contest going on between God and Satan. Too many pages here. But God does call some at this time. Not a contest. It's not that Satan's winning. It's that God is limited who he's calling. But to continue the story here in John 6, we want to point out that there's more to it than just whether or not God calls you out of the world.

Look at verse 66. After he said, None could come to him except it was granted by the Father, it says, From that time many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. And then Jesus said to the twelve, Well, are you going to go away also?

Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also, we've come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. That's interesting. A lot of people had been there listening to Jesus' teaching, had the Son of God right there explaining things, but he said some things that were kind of tough. Earlier he was talking about how they'd have to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be saved. And a lot of people were saying, What in the world is going on here? And maybe they'd had their children healed or been healed themselves, but when he started saying those things, they said, We're out of here.

Jesus looked at the twelve and said, Do you want to go too? No. We know that you have the only way to eternal life. But what I want to get at, though it's interesting, this particular moment was not when they were called. They'd been called earlier. And let's go to an example of that in Mark chapter 1.

This wasn't their calling. It was when, perhaps, Peter at least expressed a confidence in that calling. But they were called much earlier. Mark 1 will begin in verse 14. I'm reading some scriptures I've used several times in sermons lately, but this all fits together to move us ahead. Mark 1 and verse 14. Now, after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time was fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. And as he walked by the sea of Galilee, or as I said, he's perhaps one morning, and he's there by the sea, and there are fishers in various places, he saw Simon and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, because they were fishermen.

Jesus said to them, Follow me. I'll make you fishers of men. Follow me, and I'll make you fishers of men. And they left their nets, and they came after him. Now, we suppose he probably had not just met them. Jesus grew up in that area. They were a bit younger, but it's probably not the first time they'd laid eyes on him. But he issued them a specific calling. And we'll see. He goes on a little further.

In verse 19, When he'd gone a little farther from there, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who were also in the boat mending their nets, and immediately he called them. So I'm pointing out, this is a calling. And they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and went after him.

Now, he didn't call Zebedee or the servants. He called Simon and Andrew. He called James and John. And sometime between this moment, when they were called, and the moment we read earlier, where Peter said, No, we're not going to leave because you have the words of eternal life, they became convicted. We don't know exactly when, but sometime between when Jesus said, Come on with me, I'll make you fisher of some men.

And later on, when a lot of people said, We're out of here, they had become convicted and said, No, we're not going to go out of here. We've come to believe that you're the son of God. You have the way of eternal life. But I wonder, would you say their calling was dramatic? Having Jesus walk up and say, Yeah, come on with me.

I'll make you a fisher of men. Is not the same as when the Apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus and there was this great blinding light and he's knocked off his feet and he hears a voice from heaven talking to him. So you could say having Jesus walk up to you and say, Come with me is dramatic, but by comparison, not very dramatic at all.

Or compared to this guy whose name I can't pronounce in the 1330s, E. Curd, or the monk who'd been persecuting the church. And as he talks to them, they say, No, we believe this. And this is what the Bible says. He starts studying it. He says, Well, it does say that. And he keeps studying it. I've got to do this. And he forsakes his whole life and even sacrifices his life and would die defending it.

So what I'm getting at, and what might seem like a roundabout way, but fortunately we're a little ahead of schedule, it's not how a person is called that matters. There are different ways to be called. Now, my grandmother, when she first got the calling, she heard a new voice that was unfamiliar to her in the night that started explaining the Bible in a way that made sense. But later, in my calling, I heard a familiar voice, my grandmother's voice, explaining the Bible. And it made sense. It was fairly easy. My calling wasn't very dramatic, but it was still a calling. Yet, and here's where it gets tricky. Well, maybe not that tricky. That calling alone is not where it ends. That's not enough. Let's go to Matthew 22. Matthew 22, beginning in verse 14.

We're coming in at the end of a story here, but I want to get to the end before we go back to read the beginning. Matthew 22 and verse 14, Jesus makes an interesting statement. He says, For many are called, but few are chosen. Many are called, few are chosen. Have you ever wondered about that? Why is there a distinction? Why would call... Say that again. Why would God call someone? Why would He call many people and then decide not to choose them? Well, the answer to me seems to be that the determination between calling and choosing maybe doesn't rest on just God deciding to call someone. Maybe it rests on what the person does after they're called. So I said, God, you know, Jesus walked up to Simon and Andrew and said, Come on with me. And we, you know, maybe He didn't know how it would go from then. But by the time He said, Do you want to go away also? Then they were chosen. They knew. There'd be something different. To see some of that, let's go back to the beginning of this chapter. Matthew 22 will begin in verse 2. This is the parable of the king's wedding feast. It says, The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and he sent out servants to call those who were invited to the wedding. I'll make a point. In Greek, those words are almost the same. You know, calling is an invitation.

I said, Sent out a servant who called and invited the wedding, and they were not willing to come. So he sent out other servants, saying, Tell those who are invited. See, I've prepared my dinner. My oxen and my fatted calves are killed. All things are ready. Come to the wedding. You know, what a strong calling. It's ready. Come here. But they made light of it, and they went their ways. One to his own farm and other to his business. The rest seized his servants and treated them spitefully and killed them. King heard about this. He was furious. He sent out his armies and destroyed those murderers and burned up their city. And he said to his servants, Well, the wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore, go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding. So the servants went out to the highways, and they gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man who didn't have on a wedding garment. And he said to him, Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment? And the fellow was speechless. And the king had his servants bind him hand and foot and cast him out. And, of course, then he comes to the conclusion, many are called, but few are chosen. Compared to the whole world, the whole world out there, it's not that many that are called right now. But when you think, compared to how many respond favorably, and thus are chosen, there are quite a few many are called. Many people have been exposed to God's truth. Many people have heard the word. And another parable Christ talked about a sower and a seed, and he's broadcasting the seed. Some falls on good ground, but a lot of seed falls on the wayside, or in a thicket of weeds and gets choked out, or stony ground.

In this parable, we see that many were invited that didn't value the invitation. You have to put a certain value on an invitation if you're going to respond to it appropriately. Haven't we all had different invitations to a variety of occasions? We tend to value some a little more than others.

I was thinking of that. We can make the mistake of valuing an invitation based on its form rather than its substance of what it's an invitation to. I try not to end my sentences with prepositions, but... Let me give you an example. Say I go down to the mailbox one morning, our mailman usually comes pretty early. I pull out this envelope, a very fancy envelope, and open it up and have an embossed invitation with gold lettering on very fancy stationery. It might be from some local politician inviting me to a soiree. I can't pronounce that one.

I might get enthusiastic and say, wow, this is great! Look at this invitation to this fancy party! But if a friend just came up to me, say at SABAS services, and I'm giving you an example from my life's history, a friend comes up and says, hey, why don't you come over to my place tomorrow morning? There's something going to happen. I'd like you to be there. Yeah, no big deal. I might just say, eh, I'm going to stay home and watch cartoons Sunday morning or something like that, you know?

I might blow that invitation off because it wasn't very dramatic or fancy. But that was exactly how I was invited to attend the baptism of a good friend of mine several years ago. She didn't let me know what it was going to be. She said, come over to my place. There's something going to go on. Actually, it was a friend, not her place, but some other people who happened to have a hot tub. Rick, you'd appreciate that. And so I was very glad that I got that invitation, but it was very casual.

You know, much to something much more important than some fancy party put on by someone I didn't know. And that's where I make the association. You know, when Jesus walked along the seashore and he came up to James and John and said, come on, follow me. That strikes me as being more like the friend who said, come on over to my place. And yet, when Jesus did walk up to James and John and said, come on, follow me, you know, we're going to do something cool. Which that's not in your Bible that he said it like that, but...

That was the same destiny they were being called to as when he knocked Paul off of his feet and struck him blind. Same destiny. Different way of calling them. Very different. But they were being called to the same thing. Among those of us here today, we could probably recount many different stories of how God called us. How did he draw us into the church? You know, I didn't see the numbers. We're probably close to 100 people here. Some of our stories are probably similar, but I'll bet there's a lot of interesting variety.

I've told you some of mine. I told you some of my grandmother's. But I want to get into talking about, once again, a particular group. That God is...or a particular way of calling a certain group that God has used many times. Many people have been called into God's church, called by God into his church, in a way that's not very fancy, not dramatic. And I want to...I'm introducing the subject, and now I want to come to an aroundabout way by giving you a little mini-history lesson in early American history. And I'm hoping you won't groan, because it's a part of history when I was teaching class.

A lot of the students go, ugh! Because I'm going back to the mid-1600s in early American history. Now, to set it up, in the mid-1600s, several ministers in New England held a special conference. And during that conference, they developed what was called the Doctrine of the Halfway Covenant. I told you I'd come back to that eventually. Let's go back and talk about the Halfway Covenant. But to understand what the Halfway Covenant is, I've got to back up a little further and talk about the American Puritans.

You've all heard the term Puritans, right? And if you're like a lot of people, you think of people wearing black with funny hats with belt buckles on them and, you know, what muskets that look like trumpets on the end. I'm hoping somebody has that vision, because it's fun to talk about. A lot of that's not accurate. Let me talk about what were Puritans. Well, they started in England. They were a religious group. And if we go back far enough, you remember King Henry VIII and all the pictures we see of him as this big fat jolly guy who ate these big legs of mutton.

He wasn't always so fat and eaten legs of mutton. He was actually a good-looking, vibrant, healthy guy when he was younger. And he's famous in British history for separating the Church of England from the Catholic Church. He's the one that said to the Pope, I'm done with you. I'm going to form my own church and I'll be in charge of it. Now, he didn't have the best reasons for doing that. His reasoning was he wanted to separate from his wife, who he thought wasn't able to have a son.

Turns out later, now we know from genetics that it was all his fault in the first place. But he separated from the Catholic Church. The Puritans, or the ones we would call Puritans, were thrilled about that. They didn't like the Catholic Church. They weren't so thrilled that Henry, and then later his daughter Elizabeth, and then her second cousin James didn't change the Church as much as they thought.

Great! We're away from the Pope and Catholicism. But the Puritans said, we need to change more. We need to get rid of some of those practices that are in the Church. In other words, they wanted to purify the Church. And that's where the name comes from. Let's make the Church more pure. And so they became known as Puritans.

Some of the Puritans said, we've got to go further than that. It's never going to be clean enough. We've got to separate altogether. The Church of England, or as we call it nowadays, the Anglican Church, isn't going to be pure enough. So we need to travel, leave them behind. And so those are the ones that would become known as pilgrims. A pilgrim is when you go on a journey for a religious reason. Some of them went to Holland, other parts of Europe. Some of them would come to America and settle in New England.

Am I making this lesson too slow? Hope not. I've talked about this stuff so many times in college classrooms, in their writing notes, or sleeping. But the Puritans, they did have some things that are familiar to us. They were determined to study the Bible and to obey it. And we believe that some that were in this group, it's a very generic term, Puritans.

People who didn't believe the Catholic Church was right, they wanted to follow the Bible. But there were some within that group who we believed, believed all that we believe. That they had the truth. They were remnants of the true Church mixed in with other Puritans who didn't understand all the truth. But like us, they didn't believe that anybody and everybody could be part of the Church. And this is important, one of the main reasons I want to talk about the Puritans. They said, okay, we're going to make everybody in town come to church services.

You have to come, and they did it on Sunday mornings, most of them, you have to come and sit in church. But not everybody sitting here is a member of the Church. How do you get to be a member of the Church? Well, when an adult person would have what they called a conversion experience, that was usually some kind of emotional feeling.

God is calling me. I'm saved. I know God's grace. It was usually quite a feeling. He could apply for church membership. He'd actually have to submit an application and then stand up in front of the other members and explain his conversion experience and why he should be part of the Church. Nowadays, we might call that giving a testimonial. I'm going to explain who I am and what I believe. And they would vote. Is he in the Church or not? Now, in the early days, when the Puritans who first came over, you think of the Mayflower and the many ships that followed the Mayflower, it was kind of easy.

They'd separated from the Anglican Church. They'd studied the Bible. Some of them had suffered strong persecution. They'd left homes and families. They traveled across the ocean and carved a home out of the wilderness. Boy, I can explain my conversion. I really believe. I know I should be part of this Church in that case.

Now, and by the way, I should mention what... Boston was established in 1629 and I believe the Plymouth. I forgot the name Plymouth a few years before that. So now we come to the 1650s, 1660s, a generation or two later. Church membership began to decline. The numbers are going down. Historians, like me, called that the Great Declension. You don't have to worry about writing that down again. But the Great Declension meant the numbers of Church members were going down.

It was declining. Not the number of people attending services, because they still made everybody come, whether they wanted to or not. Some of you who wanted to sleep in this morning might be nodding your heads, right? No, of course not. Where was I going with this? Okay. Not as many people were applying to be Church members. It turns out that among the children and the grandchildren of those original pilgrims, not as many of them were having that conversion experience.

They were waiting for it, saying, when am I going to have this big feeling? And know that I'm being called by God. They were waiting for it to happen, and it just, for many of them, wasn't happening. They wanted it to happen. They thought it was too important to fake. I'm not going to get up there and tell people I've had it if I haven't, so I'm waiting. God, knock me down, strike me blind, do something. No, their parents or their grandparents had left the Church of England, sailed across the ocean.

They built civilization in the wilderness. What had the next generation done? They just seemed to coast into this way of life. They'd had it established for them. As I said, many of them wanted to have that conversion experience, but they weren't going to pretend that they'd had it if they weren't sure. And reading this reminded me, when we had the seniors' dinner, I'd found a joke online. I'll share it with the rest of you if I can remember it well enough.

Sorry I'm getting out of the history lesson, but it seemed too funny to skip. But it was an older, younger fellow was talking to one of the seniors and saying, you know, when you were kids, you didn't have the Internet, you didn't have cable TV, you didn't have iPods and all this. What did you do that was worthwhile? And the older fellow said, you're right, we didn't have any of those things when I was young, so we invented them.

What are you doing for the next generation? You know, you can see how a kid might feel a little humbled by that. These Puritan, you know, pilgrim grandchildren are saying, yeah, look at my dad, he did all this. There are leaders in the church. What have I done? And they're waiting. Meanwhile, the ministers and leaders of the church are saying, hey, our numbers are really dwindling, we don't have members of the church. We've got to come up with a solution.

So they held this conference. What was it? I wrote it down. 1662, and I didn't write down the city, but you probably don't care. But it was in somewhere in Connecticut, if I remember correctly. And they discussed all this, and they invented the halfway covenant. The halfway covenant, this was an arrangement that said, if your parents are members of the church, the children are automatically members. They don't have to get up and give a testimonial and explain, you know, why they should be members and there doesn't have to be a vote. They're just in. Now, there are some technicalities that I'm not going to explain because some of them have always been too complicated for me to keep straight in my memory, where they were sort of halfway members.

They were restricted on voting and certain church matters and things like that. But they were members of the church. And then their children would be members of the church. Because of the halfway covenant, you just came in. You didn't have to explain your conversion. You didn't have to do anything. This kept the Puritan church going.

And I'll mention, this is one of the questions I had when I studied this. It's like, well, there's a Puritan church around here. Now it's known as the Congregational church, and it has been through most of American history. So the Congregational church continued, and it's still there today. But you might guess, as generations continued and people didn't have that big, that hurdle to get over, people's commitment to the church kind of tended to fade. They weren't so sure they had a special calling. They hadn't taken any special action to show their commitment. And that leads to an important discussion of the calling of a younger generation in our church today.

You know, younger generations being called to the true church. For some reason, that's hard to get out. Well, I was leading up to this, and I've been coming around in a roundabout way, but I want to move on to the point of saying, our children are called by God to be in His church. And I'm saying, our children, I could say, you children, any of you, all of you, you're called to be in God's church.

The Scripture says so. Now, the calling might not be a dramatic change from a previous lifestyle, you know, like it was for your parents or grandparents. You've probably heard the stories. Like I said, my grandmother told me, I was a midnight, and I heard this voice come on, and I knew this was it. I didn't have that. I just had my grandma there telling me that.

A lot of you have been living this way of life all your life, you know? But that doesn't make the calling any less valid. It's not inferior. Matter of fact, I'd like to propose that it might actually be a superior way to be called.

Let's turn to Acts 2. Acts 2, and we'll begin in verse 37. This is the famous sermon that Peter gave on that great day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out, and it appeared as tongues of fire, and people began speaking in tongues, and everybody heard them in their own language. And after Peter gave this very moving sermon, of which we probably only have part of, in verse 37, the people who heard him gave the sermon, said, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart. You know, they were moved.

And they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, men and brethren, what shall we do? And Peter said to them, Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you'll receive the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are far off, as many as the Lord God will call. By my way of reading, that seems to include three categories of people. Those people right there, to whom Peter was speaking, and they saw the miracles, and they were cut to the heart, but also to their children.

Some of the children might have been there, but a lot might have been at home. And then the third category, those who weren't there, whom God would call later. But all were called. And Peter said, yeah, the promise is to you, the promise or the calling, that if you do these things, it'll happen. It's to you, your children, and to the others that God will call. Let's also turn to 1 Corinthians 7. 1 Corinthians 7, beginning in verse 12. Now, I'm breaking in. 1 Corinthians 7 is known as the marriage chapter, because Paul's discussing a lot of issues about marriage.

But he makes a comment here that's almost an aside, but it's very important. Here he's addressing issues of if one person's in the church and the maid is not. Say, the husband might be in the church, the wife's not, or the wife could be in the church, the husband's not. And Paul says, to the rest's eye, not the Lord's eye. If any brother has a wife who does not believe, and she's willing to live with him, let him not divorce her. And if the woman who has a husband who does not believe, if he's willing to live with her, let her not divorce him.

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife. Sanctified, meaning set aside by God. Set aside for a holy purpose. And the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but now they are holy. And sanctified and holy have similar meanings. Interesting, because he's addressing the issue of the unbelieving mate being set aside for a special purpose. He says, if not, your children would be unclean, but they're holy. He's sort of saying, we take it as a given. We know our children are holy. We just know that.

Partly based on what Peter said. And who knows, I'm sure, remember, Paul was taught by Jesus directly, and we don't have all the teaching, but it became clear to him that children are holy. And because of that, we know the unbelieving mate also has a special purpose. They're sanctified. Paul and the church, they took it as a given. Children of church members are holy. They're set apart by God. They are called. And one of the reasons I'm saying this, you might say, well, yeah, we know that. There was a time several years ago in the church that we weren't so sure about that. I say we, it was early before I was looking into this.

I was just a little kid. But at that time, we didn't understand these scriptures. There was a time when the teaching in the church was that God might call your children, or he might not. And when we didn't know that for sure, when we didn't understand these scriptures, in the church we tended to be kind of like the Puritans.

We were focusing on a dramatic calling, waiting to see how someone's called. So you could say, looking for a conversion experience. Now, over time, we came to understand the scriptures that we just studied. And we came to see that the manner of the calling or the invitation doesn't determine whether or not someone is called. For some people living in the world, God might have to send the equivalent of a glitzy attention-grabbing invitation, like with gold embossed lettering on fancy paper.

But for those already familiar with God's way of life, a casual word is enough. Like when my friend said, come on over tomorrow morning, there's something I want you to see. Now, a minister I've heard teaching in the church sometimes has compared this to the difference between coming in the front door or coming in the back door. And I had to back up and look at the history a little bit, because for me, front door, back door, it just matters where you parked the car.

But if you go a little earlier, there was a time in American history and world history, like the back door was for servants or for workmen, not for family. The people that hired servants or the people that were dirty would have to come in the back door. Friends and family were welcome to come in the front door.

Well, I think when our children are called by God, which they are, they are welcome to come in the front door. They can just come right in the front door. It doesn't have to be this dramatic thing, because they're already family. They know what they're doing. They're welcome. That's why we say our children are part of the church, but they're not finished at that point. And that's where I want to make that distinction and something we all want to look at and our young people want to think of.

You are called, but we also want to be chosen. In God's church and in God's family, there is no halfway covenant. Now, there's no halfway covenant. Just because your parents are members, you're not just automatically in. No one becomes a member without just doing something. That's why I say in that sense, there aren't any second-generation Christians. Being called isn't enough. A lot of people are called, but then what do you do? Well, remember, Peter gave that sermon and they looked at him, cut to the heart and said, well, what should we do?

Well, the answer is the same for everybody. Whether you're one of the ones there or you're the children or you're someone afar off that God would call. Every member of God's church is called, drawn by the Father. And so I want to make the point, everyone here has that. If you're young enough, you probably got driven here by someone else.

Your parents might have driven the car, but you were drawn by the Father. And I'm emphasizing that point because when I was younger, I was like, nah, are you serious? The Father doesn't even notice I'm here. He's talking to my grandma and my mom. But I had to look and say, well, no, that doesn't seem to be what the Bible is saying.

I'm reading it, I understand it, I must be drawn. And all of you, you're here. He might not have struck you blind on the road to Damascus like he did to the Apostle Paul, but you're here. I think there's a danger young people in God's church could be like those people at the wedding feast, where they get an invitation and they take it lightly. You could just now make excuses. Or you could say, yeah, I'm going to go, but not bother to put on the proper wedding garment.

And if we look at other parables and look in the book of Revelation, we see the proper garments are symbolic. And of course, going on a wedding, you do want to put on the proper clothes. But in these ceremonies, or these parables and prophecies, the proper wedding garments are symbolic of the righteous acts of the saints, having the proper conduct. So it turns out, many are called, not all are chosen. To be chosen requires a proper response to the invitation.

So how should a person respond? How does a person know when to respond? The Puritans back in the 1600s were looking for this big emotional experience, the conversion experience. And then when their kids didn't seem to feel it, now they just called them church members anyways, without them having to do the steps that normally would be required. But it's not that way in God's true church. As I said, there is no halfway covenant. Now, we never require anyone to give a testimonial.

You know, it's bad enough you have to listen to me get up and talk to you. But we're not going to ask other people to. But, you know... Well, yeah, I skipped over something. You don't have to convince us that you're called. None of us has to convince someone else, because we know we're called.

But to be a Christian, what do you have to do? The Apostle Paul wrote it there in Acts. You have to repent, be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit. And usually they go in that order. Let's turn to the book of Romans, chapter 8. Romans 8 and verse 8. And before I go further, I'll comment. I'm not trying to make an altar call and tell all of you, if you're not baptized, you better get baptized.

That's not what this is about. But it is about thinking, where am I? What's my future? Why act on what I know? Romans 8 and chapter 8. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you're not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now, Paul's making some plays on words, because we're still flesh. But he's saying, if the Spirit of God is in you, God is looking at you, you're not just in the flesh.

You're in the Spirit. Now, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he's not his.

And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But think of that. If the Spirit of God is not in you, you're none of his. That's what I said. There's no halfway covenant. You have God's Spirit in you or you don't. And you can make a note of John 14 verse 17, when Christ was talking to the apostles, he made a clear distinction then. He told them that the Comforter will come. He said, it's been with you, but it's going to be in you. Before Christ's crucifixion, they didn't have the Spirit in them. They had it working with them. And I believe all of our young people have the Spirit working with them. That's how God draws you. You've got to have some way to draw you. The Spirit works with you and it draws you. But then you've got to do those three steps. You've got to repent. Be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. Have it in you.

And as I said, I've got a note again. No altar call here. I'm not expecting a bunch of people to call me and say, well, I've got to get baptized today because you said so. Please don't take it as that. Each and every person has to be careful. Think about that. It's making a commitment that applies to the rest of your life. It's bigger than marriage because it applies not only to the rest of your physical life, but on into eternity. You've got to do it when you're ready and for the right reasons.

It's funny, I told you a little bit about my calling. I remember...well, I'll tell you a little bit later on. I got it in my notes. I just remembered. But I want to make it clear when you're thinking about these things, don't think you're not ready just because you haven't had the conversion experience. Think, what is it I'm looking for? Am I waiting for blinding light to be knocked off my feet? It's better instead of focusing on how you were called, focus on what you know. What do you know? And do you know that you know it? Consider what you believe. Do you believe it? And all of us at some point have to answer those questions. And as a matter of fact, I'll point out, you don't always answer it just once. How many of us in 1995, 1996, around that time said, What do I believe? And do I really believe it? And we had to dig into our Bibles and say, You know, am I believing this because my parents told me and I've just been doing it? Or do I believe it because I believe it? Which that might sound like I'm talking in circles, but I went through that. Let's turn to James 4. James 4 and verse 17. It's a very brief scripture, but I think it fits in here, and I wanted to read it from the scripture rather than just quote it. Because this is something that was actually a vital part of my taking that next step when I was younger. In James 4, verse 17, you know, we think about sin as what you do. You know, I've committed a sin, I've done something, I've stepped over the line, and that's usually what it is. But here it says, Therefore to him that knows to do good, and does it not, to him it's a sin. You know you're supposed to do something and you're not doing it. That's a sin, too. When you're invited to go to a wedding, and if you decide to go, you've got to put on the proper clothing, when God calls you into his family and he shows you how to live, you've got to live that way. Not thinking, well, I'll do it later. Or, you know, it's different for me, that doesn't matter. No, we're all responsible for what we know. And when you know what's right, you've got to do it. Let's also go to 2 Thessalonians 2. This is the one we've looked at a lot in the church, I think, lately and in the earlier crises. I thought of this because of a discussion I was having with the fellow at the feast, and he said, have you ever thought of it this way? Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way, and I don't know if the way I'm going to describe is accurate, but it's worth considering. 2 Thessalonians 2, beginning in verse 9.

Oh, I thought that was wrong. Excuse me, I'm wondering what I was looking at in 1 Thessalonians. Say, the coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception, among those who perish. Some translations say, are perishing, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason, God will send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie, that they may all be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure and unrighteousness. We in the church, we've been looking at this for years and years and saying, well, what does this mean? How does this apply in a certain time? And I said, one person said, I wonder, could this apply to young people in the church? Or maybe not necessarily young, but someone who has the calling. But then, you know, because he said, to not love the truth, you have to at least know what the truth is or have some access to it. So maybe once you have it, like a calling, do you choose to love it? Or if, maybe you don't take it so seriously, you don't choose to love it, you can become deceived. And as I said, I don't know for certain, but I know, as I said, you're responsible for what you know. If you know something's true, you can't just treat it as though it's a small thing. You have to act on it. And I would suggest love the truth. Far better than not to, and it's worth loving. It's wonderful. But one thing we know, as the old saying goes, you don't get into the kingdom of God on anyone else's coattails. You don't get in because your best friend's in. You don't get in because your mom and dad or whatever. It's between you. I will just quote this Philippians 2, verse 12. The last part of it says, Work out your own salvation. Now, when it says, Work out your own salvation, it doesn't mean you're doing the right tasks and you earn it. We know better than that. You can't earn your salvation. There's nothing you ever have done or ever could do that will earn salvation. We rely on God's grace, His mercy. Only Christ's sacrifice can pay for our sins. But we have to come to God and ask Him to apply that sacrifice. That's part of what repentance is. And I keep that in mind again for younger people. Sometimes you say, Well, repentance, I've been living God's way all my life. What do I have to repent of? But you have to realize you need to repent for being human, for being in an existence that's not God's way that will lead to death. Only Christ's sacrifice can change that. So you have to ask God, saying, I'm sorry, I'm not you. Please help me to become like you. And I'm simplifying that somewhat because it's hard to put into words. But I think most of you know what I'm getting at. We acknowledge that we're carnal and that we have a sinful nature. And that without Christ's sacrifice covering that sinful nature, we're going to go the way of eternal death. Not because we're evil people doing all kinds of heinous sins, but just because it only takes a little sin to lead to death. God has called all of us. He's invited us all to join His family. We may have received the invitation by varying means, and we all have to take action, though, to accept that invitation, however we got it. And I said, my particular calling wasn't all that dramatic. As I said, I began learning the truth from my grandmother, kept the Sabbath. My family hadn't been religious before, so I didn't have to swear off any great thing. And I hadn't been smoking and drinking because I was only like 10.

So I didn't have to leave behind any of that. But as I started learning, I said, okay, I listened in church services. I didn't sit and read books or play video games. And that was easy because video games hadn't been invented yet. Books had been around, but I said, I want to know more about this. I always assumed I'd be baptized one day. But I didn't know when, didn't think much about it. You just keep going along. For me, the change didn't come. I believe I was in my 20s. And one day my mother got baptized, which made me think, oh, hmm, maybe I should, you know, people do get baptized who have been in the church well. And that's a long story and another case. And I said, what am I doing in my life? And I looked at it. I was at that time dating a girl that I worked with who wasn't in God's church. And she was a very nice girl, not hostile to the church at all. And we'd actually, you know, we were very fond of each other in talking about marriage. But it's funny, and I stopped and said, I've got to look at my life. What am I doing? He said, well, I know what I want in life. I know what I know. I hadn't thought about it seriously before, but I said, if I know what's right, and I know that I know, I need to go that way. She's not a bad person, but she doesn't know what I know. And I want the person I'm married to to share the most important thing in my life, which is God's way of life, you know, that destiny to be born in God's family.

And so at that point I said, hmm, I must be getting grown up. Maybe I should think about this repentance and baptism thing. You know, that's where I realized that this life is what I wanted, and I was going to make that commitment. You know, for every person, it can be a different thing, a different thing that makes you start thinking that way. You know, this sermon might, like I said, I'm not going to say this sermon is what tells you to get baptized, but it might tell you, at some point, stop and think. And I want to say for the older people in the church, when young people do make that, you know, turn, we should accept it as normal. We should encourage them and help them. We also shouldn't take it lightly. Just because they're calling and later their repentance and baptism isn't the same form as ours, it's just as valid. And fortunately, they're coming right in the front door. It's easy. Well, that's not always easy, but it's as easy as possible. God considers them part of the family and will bring them in. Yeah, that's funny I'm going to note. When I started counseling for baptism, that's a whole other story. My six or eight month session that went, well, not one long session. That would have been really bad, but... But it was part of that thing. It's like, you know, my minister went, so, what are you doing this for? Do you really know what you know? I mean, he made me think about it again and really focus on that. And so it's a good thing to do. But for everyone here, I'll say, when you know what's right, you know how to live life, you shouldn't wait to do it. But, of course, as I said, it's not something you do lightly or for the wrong reasons. So I'll say, everyone here, we have that calling from God to be here. For some of you, it was a dramatic calling, and it was an abrupt change in your life, just like it was for Mr. Armstrong or like it was for the Apostle Paul. Others had a calling that was like mine, and it wasn't dramatic at all. In fact, it might be so plain, you don't even recognize it. It's like, oh, I was called? I didn't notice. That's not bad, though. But whatever form your invitation takes, you have to act on it. And I'll say it again, like I said, that's how I settled on the title. There's no halfway covenant. You have to go through those steps. We all do, and we have to let our children go through those steps. In a sense, we all have to choose to make a commitment to God, and when we do that, in that way, we're all first-generation Christians. And I'll say, if that's something that's dawning on you and you're realizing that, then congratulations and welcome to the family. And I hope we all have a wonderful Sabbath.