Our Time is Now

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Small choir, big sound. Very nice. Enjoy that very much. Appreciate the music here in Dallas to this Feast of Trumpets. My wife Debbie and I are very glad to be with you here for a short time today on this high holy day and to certainly share the holy day with you. I should explain briefly, perhaps, why I am here. Just to check up on your pastor. No. He's doing just fine. As you know, in about five weeks, shortly after the Feast of Tabernacles, we're going to be coming down to Texas with the Beyond Today Presenters, and we're going to do some presentations. One here in Dallas on the 20th of October. We're going down to San Antonio on the 22nd, and then on Houston on the 25th of October, and we're going to be doing a public appearance campaign with all three of the presenters on stage that night giving a presentation entitled, America the Time is Now. And I think you've been handed this brochure, and we hope that you will take those as you have opportunity to share that with people, friends, family, coworkers, etc., that you feel might benefit and desire to come to the one-night event that we are putting on. We were talking about this several weeks back, and that Cubic thought it would be a good idea if a couple of us and he and I were kind of knotted to do this, come down at this time and just explain things to the church and kind of encourage you and explain what we are doing and kind of wave the flag in a sense about this particular production. So Debbie and I were in San Antonio on the Sabbath. I think Victor was in Austin on the Sabbath, and today he's in Houston giving the message there as well. So I'm glad to be able to be a part of this. Gary Petty and Steve Myers and I and our production staff will be coming down to do these over that one-week period here shortly after the Feast of Tabernacles.

Before I get back into that, I just wanted to mention that a couple of things that are taking place at the home office, a couple of recent events you're probably well aware of, but we've just recently held a pastoral development class, 10 days of training for a group of new hires that we have made into the church ministry full-time. Some that had a couple of men came in who had been a part of the ministry one up to four years ago and one another who was hired a year ago. But MMS, Ministerial Member Services, is developing a pastoral development program. We have hired six new pastors or trainees, I should say, that we hope will become pastors full-time in the church.

Of course, Jay and Jennifer Ledbetter from this congregation, this area, were up there and they were part of that as well. Randy Erwiller from out in East Texas was up there and others that we have hired. It was a very productive session. We had a number of different classes just to put them through to help acclimate them to what they should expect going into the full-time ministry, a number of different classes.

So that's been a very positive development that we have made and it is showing that we are making some very serious steps to plan for the future of the church, the stability of the churches, the ministry, to provide for the care of the congregations. And so that is very encouraging. I think we can say the lights are on, the sign is out, and we're hiring at the United Church of God. We've also made some hires in the media area much needed as well as our efforts expand there.

But those are some encouraging matters. This particular public appearance campaign that we are going to embark on, we hope will be one of several that we conduct. It is an effort to engage with our audience, our good news readers, and the general public as many as we can reach and invite and would come out to hear a message and explain who we are, what we believe, and provide a message that is, we feel, the best message that the United Church of God can give right now to America and to others.

Actually, I'm going to be doing this in Canada, the Sabbath before the Feast of Tabernacles, and we've kind of entitled that, Canada, the time is now. So the title is adaptable to wherever we may be. Vim Decker is here from the Netherlands. I said, you know, we can come to the Netherlands and say the Netherlands, the time is now. It's a message applicable to anywhere, not just America, but we're in America. When Vic Kubik decided to come to Texas, he wanted to take this to Texas, we were discussing it in our staff meetings, and I made the comment, well, if we're going to go to Texas, we better have something to say.

Because you know the song. If you're going to go to Texas, if you're going to play in Texas, you've got to have a fiddle and a band, right? And, look, there are personalities on the religious stage in Texas that are quite large. All right, we all know that. This is Tea Party country. We all know that. This is Texas. And people have strong feelings, very conservative feelings, very religious feelings. People know that the world is in a very unusual moment in history, and America is at a critical point in many ways. And so let's acknowledge that, let's address that, but let's also give them a very compelling and a very important message that is unique, based on the knowledge that we have, and is unmistakable.

One thing we do not want anyone who comes to our these presentations to do, and that is to walk out the door thinking that, well, that's very nice. Now I'm going to my Baptist Church on this coming Sunday. Nice message, but no change. We want them to hear something that they would not hear anywhere else. And with the time frame and the night, we expect to do that. And I know that we have your support, your prayers, and your encouragement. And we look forward to being here in Dallas and San Antonio and Houston to do this, and to see what can be done, what God may be doing.

We have, personally, I'm not large, I want to see certainly a good turnout. We want to encourage you to be there as well. And we hope a larger general public audience will come from our subscribers and beyond. I'm not personally interested in trying to set numbers. I've been around the church long enough to know not to do that. But we'll see what God has in mind. And if we need to tweak this again as we go forward, hopefully we can do this in some other areas which have expressed interest. And as time and budget and all the resources allow, we will do that. So that is what the America the time is now will be. And Gary, Steve, and I will present three largely 20-minute sessions. We're in the age of TED. TED Talks, you know, 20 minutes. Max, or 18 or 20 minutes, I think, is where those things go. But we recognize we've got to be compact and short and get to the point and mix it up a bit. And we will. We'll have a little bit of video in and out of that, but it will largely be focused on the message. So please be praying about that over the next few weeks, and we will regather after the feast and kind of go through a dress rehearsal, and then we'll pack up the van and come down and do that.

Some of you have been around for a number of years. I've been around in the church since the early 1960s when my mother came in the church. And you may look at a title like this, America of the Time is Now, and say, hmm, sounds familiar. Sounds familiar.

About two months ago, some of our crack media staff got out on Google on the internet, did a little googling, and discovered a whole bunch of letters from the days of the Church of God archives that are out there on the internet, and discovered that way, way back in that ancient time of 1970, the Church did a public appearance campaign called America Listen.

America Listen. And the Church leader's personality was on the stage with a very, very powerful and very compelling message. I think one of those was done in down in San Antonio at that time. The first one was done in Nashville, Tennessee. I was 18 years old. I went to it, drove down from my hometown in Cape Girardeau, Missouri with a carload of other young adults, and we went to the National Auditorium on Sunday afternoon in July and listened to America Listen. When we picked this name, I certainly knew that that would be the connection. I was there and I heard it and was a part of it, in terms of at least being in the audience. Well, our crack media staff got out and did a little research, and they kind of put all these articles and good news, old ancient good news articles together and sent them around to our internal mail server. And just for everybody's information, one of them walked into my office, and I have a letter here that was written to explain all of that way back in July 22, 1970. One of the young men, twenty-something, 28-year-old men walked into my office and he said, okay, I got a question for you. 1970, America Listen campaigns. The church did this. 45 years ago. He said after that happened, he said America didn't go down. He said Ronald Reagan got elected president. I'm surprised he even knew that, being only 28 years old. But he said, yeah, Ronald Reagan got elected president. I said, that's right. He said, it was morning in America again. I said, that's right. America got stronger than ever before. I said, that's right. And we're still here. I said, that's right. He said, so why are we doing this?

I said, sit down. I'll tell you. I was there. I was a part of it. Yeah, I said 1970, and this is 2015. 45 years later, an entire generation has gone by. And so let's talk about that for a minute here on the day of Trumpets in 2015, where we are. I told him, I said, look, 1970 was an interesting year. Have you ever heard of the 1960s in America, I said? Of course, he hadn't too much. He hadn't lived it. I said, well, again, I was there. Pretty bad time. Vietnam was a big issue, had been. It was still roiling at that point. Riots in the streets of 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Political assassination, which began right here, 1963, 1968, two more men gunned down in the streets of American cities. There was a spirit of revolution in the air, a change in cultural, political revolution that was taking place. There was actually a song that came out about 1968 or 1969 called The Eve of Destruction. Go out and listen to it tonight.

How many of you remember The Eve of Destruction? I know. We're all gray-haired, so the gray-haired you'll remember that song. It was a song. It spoke to the times. Many felt that the country was going to come apart. It didn't. We went into a lull. 1970 came and went. We had the 1970s, which was in many ways a very forgettable decade. But we had a malaise. We did get to 1980. Ronald Reagan became president. It was morning again in America. We're still here. But as I was telling him and a few others who gathered to kind of listen to what I was trying to say, the world was dangerous in 1970. There was a message that America needed to listen to. In my opinion, in 2015, the world is even more dangerous than it was in 1970.

It is more dangerous. There have been more changes to take place in America culturally, socially, that have brought us to a period where many people wonder what is the next turn going to bring in this country and in other parts of the world. The Middle East is even a bigger problem than it was in 1970. Nuclear threat in many different ways now is even greater than it was as the nuclear weapons have gone into the hands of rogue nations.

The cultural decline of America is even more grave. And yes, we are still the most single, most powerful economic and political power in the world. I know that. I read the news. I understand that. And yet, there is still a very important message that the Bible has for the world, for America, at this time and at this age. And I think that we should understand our role and our part in that as God uses us by His grace. As small as we might be, it is still a very big message. It is a very powerful message that we should understand. And as I wrapped up my message, we're calling it America, the time is now. And it's really a take-off from Mark 1, verses 14 and 15, where Christ came preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, saying, the time is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. The time is at hand. The time is now. And the time is always now.

And the bottom line is, for us, for you and I today, for America today, for all of us to consider as a very important message on the Feast of Trumpets in 2015, our time is now.

Our time is now. Your time and my time. We have been called by God to know His truth in advance of all the billions of mankind who will ultimately have a chance and an opportunity for salvation. God has called us now. And though 45 years may be a span of time, that seems very, very long. And for me, it really doesn't seem that long. As God looks at it, it's not even measurable.

God's mercy and even God's judgment that the Scriptures talk about are not bound to by time.

As you and I have come to be called and to be a part of the church, we have been called now.

And as the Scripture says, judgment is now upon the house of God. And from the moment that we heard that trumpet sound, a trumpet of a message of urgency, a message of repentance that brought my mother, your parents, your grandparents, you to a point of repentance and to accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior, accepting the truth of God into your life and a relationship with God unlike any you had known before, from the moment you listened to that trumpet sound, that trumpet sound in your life, that figurative trumpet, you responded, and your time and my time began. Our time of a calling and of a preparation for eternity in the family of God began then.

And as has already been mentioned in the sermonette here this afternoon, it's what I intend to live for the rest of my life. I hope and pray by the grace of God to finish this out.

When I was taught from a youth, when I've taught my children, when I've taught for more than 40 years in the ministry, I intend to finish it out.

Because that is the message that we have been given. We look yet for a time that is described here in Revelation chapter 11. This is one scripture that hasn't been read here today, so let's turn and read Revelation chapter 11. That is a very powerful message that speaks to the meaning of this day with the sounding of the seventh angel, chapter 11 of Revelation and verse 15. And there were loud voices in heaven saying, The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever. The twenty-four elders who sat before God on their thrones fell on their faces and worshipped God, saying, We give thanks, O Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was and who is to come. Because you have taken your great power and reigned, the nations were angry, and your wrath has come, and the time of the dead that they should be judged, and that you should reward your servants and prophets, the prophets and the saints, and those who fear your name, small and great, and should destroy those who destroy the earth. With the sounding of the seventh angel and a great trumpet blast, this event will begin to roll. And the kingdoms of this world will go under a judgment that has been prepared that many scriptures speak in great detail to, and they will become ultimately the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He will reign forever and ever. And God will intervene in history, unlike any other intervention that has had before. And God has managed and intervened in history down from the beginning of time. God is a God of history. He is in control of events in the world. He's in control of the events that are prophesied in the Bible. He knows the timing. He knows exactly how it is all going to take place. We look for this moment and we look for this time, and we have been from the very day that we were put into the waters of baptism, and we made a decision to obey God and to follow this way of life. Our time is now. And the timing of when it will happen and all the other details that we might glean from Scripture or even speculate about in terms of the resurrection, the appearance of Jesus Christ, it doesn't really matter to me when, because I know God knows.

I don't get caught up in trying to teach dates. I've learned my lesson from that. I hope we all have.

I cringe when people like Mr. Camping, described in the sermonette, will do that because it's a direct contradiction of Scripture. I know that if I die before Christ returns, my next waking moment will be at the sounding of that trumpet. Because this is my time of judgment and of, hopefully, salvation. And it is yours as well. So I don't really worry about it.

I study prophecy and I let it motivate me to good works and better living and a sense of urgency about life because I know what that means. And I understand the times in which we live in, and I do believe that we are at the end of an age, as Christ described it. And I think that events in this world are at a moment of critical change that echo the words that God said to the prophet Habakkuk in verse chapter 1 of Habakkuk, where he said, you watch, I'm going to do something great in the nations in your day. I think we are at a moment like that, or certain moments of world history that you could kind of point to where a door turns, a hinge turns, and empires rise and fall, and events totally change things, and the world comes out onto a completely different path. I think we are at that at such a moment.

And I think the message that needs to be given of hope, as well as understanding, about this world and about God and about God being involved in the world is one very important message to give to people to hear, to give them hope in a world that might not offer a lot of hope.

When we come on this campaign, we are going to talk about the world and the mullet and the times in which we live and address that, but we are not going to just give a whole night on that.

One of the things we talked about in our planning for this was, look, everyone knows there are problems out there, but the world is in a mess, and that America is at a critical time.

They watch Fox News. They know that. They listen to Glenn Beck.

They watch the headlines, and they get scared to death. They don't know what does it mean. We can give them a message that does provide understanding, but also provides the hope of what they can do. Most people cannot do anything about the mess in the Middle East or the Quagmire in Europe. We certainly know that we are not going to prevent a decision to appease an Iranian force in the Middle East and their drive to create a nuclear weapon along with their threat to use it against Israel or against America or some other Western nation. We don't have the authority or the power to stop it. My! The Congress of the United States doesn't even have the power to stop it. On 9-11, of all things, they voted to let it go through.

I don't have that power, nor do you, but we do have the ability, as well as the responsibility, to do something with our own life in hope as we come to know God and the truth that He has extended to us. And so that is where we are and where we will be as we present this to the world today. They know that there is a difficult time. We look for this moment when the trumpet sounds and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord. But we also know that there's going to be a very difficult passage that has to be made before we get there. In Matthew 24, beginning in verse 21, as Jesus spoke in great detail to the signs that would lead up to His coming and at the end of this age, He says in verse 21, This is after He's mentioned specifics about war, about famine, about religious deception, and even the preaching of the gospel.

There is the hope of rescue that Christ always holds out. God's messages through whichever prophet of the Old Testament and even Jesus here in His major statement on prophecy always has an ending of hope. There is rescue. Human experience is going to bring the world to a point where human flesh could be exterminated, but it won't happen. The message of the Bible is always one that is positive. The popular culture that tries to talk about apocalypse and, you know, the day after or a post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear holocaust or some other catastrophe always presents it in a very gray, dark, bleak scenario with very little hope.

There are some direct scriptures that speak to plagues, tribulation, trumpets, and yet there are scriptures that always show that God is in charge, and He is going to bring peace ultimately to this world. And He will not let it go to the point where there is hopelessness. This particular verse here gives that hope.

The world in our time is one that the Apostle Paul described over in Romans chapter 1.

Romans the first chapter gives a very detailed glimpse of the world in our time.

In verse 16, Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Paul lifts that quote there at the end of verse 17 out of the book of Habakkuk, the second chapter, and a message to a prophet of God who himself was trying to understand the times that he lived in near the end of the collapse of the nation of Judah in the fall of Jerusalem. And Habakkuk saw the problems of his land and his time there, and he held up his people kind of like a father with a sick child and said, God, we're sick from head to toe.

Help us. And God says, I'm going to. I'm going to send the Babylonians the Isis of their day, and they're going to deal with your people.

Habakkuk couldn't believe it. But God, in the midst of that, he says, look, you live by your faith. In the midst of when everyone else is mashing, dashing headlong in a culture of sin toward death, God says to his people, he said to Habakkuk, Paul lives here in Romans and talks about it during the time of the Roman Empire. He says, the just will live by faith. Live by what you know.

Live by your faith. Don't get caught up in the crowd. Don't get caught up in the culture of the world and society at your day and abandon your faith. Live by it. That is your responsibility because, as it was with Habakkuk, as it was for a Christian at the time of Paul, our time is now.

Their time was then. Our time is today. We are to live by faith, the faith that God has given to us righteously. And the times and our knowledge of the world and of history and the times in which we live and what God says and the hope of the holy days, even portrayed by this one here today, should motivate us to godly conduct and to live a life of faith day in and day out.

Regardless of the ups and downs of politics and the ins and outs of society, God's word is eternal. It is sure, and the promises are there.

And rather than scoff as Peter said some would do and say, my Lord delays is coming, we resist that temptation. Which is why, 45 years later, we feel a compulsion to stand up and say, the time is now to America, to those who will listen, to those God will bring to hear that message. The time is now. Repent. Believe the gospel. Turn your life around. Live by your faith, the faith of God. Make a better life. Pull out of the chaos and the confusion of your life.

As you move on here in chapter 1 of Romans, he describes the first century world of really Rome at its height, the Roman Empire. But it's also a description of our day, where it shows here that God could be known even in the first century, and people rejected that. They would not keep God in their knowledge. In verse 21, though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. They could have known God then, and God can be known today. The sermon this morning, and just talking about the beauty of the metamorphosis of that part of creation, in itself, shows the beauty of God's design and purpose and plan.

And we can go on and on and on with that in looking at our world, the natural world, the cosmos, to understand God's design and plan. And the Bible reveals more of that detail to us.

Paul talked about those in verse 22 that professed to be wise but became fools, and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man. And as a result of that, God gave them over to uncleanness in verse 24, to do what their heart wished to do.

They exchanged the truth of God for the lie in verse 25, and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. And for this reason, God gave them up to their vile passions for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. And the men did the same thing, one for another, and they reap the penalty that is due as a result of that. And verse 28 gets to the heart and core of Paul's age and our age today, as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge. God gave them over to a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting. Our world today, the 2015, is making a headlong dash, as fast as it can go back to the world of Rome in the first century in so many different ways.

So many ways. We sometimes talk as we design our Beyond Today programs, especially at the time of Easter and Christmas and the programs that we will do at that time. And sometimes we say, well, why talk about paganism? They already know it's pagan. Christmas or Easter. And they do.

They know it's pagan. So why even take that approach? We were about to not do that. Actually, we didn't even do a new Beyond Today television program for this Christmas, December season, we'll air an older one. But I did write an article because earlier this year we took a, some of us took a study tour to Italy, and we were with a group of other Protestant, led by Protestant pastor, who as long as he stayed on Roman history and the contextual world of the New Testament, he was pretty good. But when he got off into theology, he was kind of squirrely.

But there was one morning, one day we were at a villa down near Pompeii. It was the villa that where the wife of the Emperor Nero had been raised, a lady named Popia. And it was a nice, nice villa, been excavated, all the ash had been excavated out, and the ruins were there, and it was quite interesting. And we, as on these tours, you kind of take a little, you know, have a 20-minute, 30-minute, 40-minute talk as you get off the bus. And he was talking about the Roman culture of the first century, this time Paul was talking about it. And he said, in Rome they had about 150 different holidays every year on the Roman calendar, 150 different holidays. And he said, which do you think was the biggest? I raised my hand, I said, the Saturnalia, December 25th. He said, that's right. And then he said, was Christ born on December 25th? Some of the other people in the group were starting to nod, and I was going like this. He said, that's right. He wasn't. Scripture says there were shepherds in the field, and that couldn't have happened in December in that part of the world.

And then, just like that, he went off into another subject. And I'm thinking, wait, whoa!

Hold on, what did you just say? Let's talk about that for a few minutes here.

He's a Protestant pastor. He knows that. They know that. But they don't care. There are so many different reasons to excuse that, if you choose, as many have. And yet, it is thoroughly pagan. But they, bottom line, they don't want to retain God in their knowledge. And there is a form of God that it is not a complete knowledge. This is the world of our time and of our day, right here. What is our role? Well, Ezekiel chapter 3 speaks to that question.

Ezekiel the third chapter.

How do we deal with that? We have a lot of bad news to traverse before we get to the kingdom of God. And we'll end it. The prophetic understanding that we have helps us to frame that. And yet, it also brings a responsibility. In Ezekiel chapter 3, there's a well-known passage that talks about Ezekiel being described by God as a watchman. In verse 17, God says to the prophet, Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel, a watchman, one who stood on the wall of the city and made a noise, would sound a trumpet if there was danger approaching an army or other problems. The watchman stood on the wall to guard the city from danger. He said, I've made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Therefore, hear the word of my mouth from my mouth and give them warning from me.

This scripture has been a guiding scripture for our time in the church.

I heard it when I was a 12-year-old boy, first attending services of the church of God.

It has become a guiding scripture for us, and it is just as relevant today as it ever has been.

What does he say? When I say to the wicked, you shall surely die, and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way to save his life, that same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.

We have always taken this as a responsibility in the church, that there is an opportunity to repent, that people will heed and turn to God. But someone has to be sent to give that message.

How are they going to hear, Paul said in Romans, if someone doesn't speak it?

Following along the same thought here, God said to Ezekiel, warn them, if you don't do it, I will require the blood at your hand. Yet, verse 19, if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you have delivered your soul. You've done what you should do. If they don't listen to it, go on, move on. I'm not going to require that. I will not hold you guilty.

Again, verse 20, when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits an iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die, because you did not give him warning. He shall die in his sin, and his righteousness, which was done, shall not be remembered, but his blood I will require at your hand. And so, if a righteous person turns from their righteous way, and teaching, admonition, warning is not given, then he said, I will require that of you. In other words, even when someone has turned from the way, gone back to wickedness, to sin, to the world, like a dog to his vomit, as Peter describes it, you still have a responsibility.

One of the prayers that I make, one of my hopes that we can do with these public appearance campaigns, as we make known and wherever we might go with this, is that we will shake loose people who have been a part of the Church of God in the past and have fallen by the wayside.

And that maybe they will be awakened as they hear, and it somehow through publicity, through someone giving an invitation, that they might be able to be reconnected. It's happening all the time. I hear evidence of it. People have been gone for 20 years from the Church. Suddenly, in a sense, kind of waking up. I don't know if they had a dream like Stephen DeCampos did, but they they wake up. About a year and a half ago, I got a message from a family in a congregation I used to pastor. Twenty years later, they began to attend the services again, and they're there every week. I get an email from them every week. I had thought, surely, they'd gone back into the world. There's a lot of people out there like that. And our responsibility through all the efforts we make to preach the gospel, to make the truth known in our media efforts, through the internet, through television, through print, accomplishes something here that God says we should be doing.

This is a scripture for us and for our time today.

And so, when you look at this, finally in verse 21, if you warn the righteous man that the righteous should not sin and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning.

And you will also have delivered your life.

And so, it works at multiple levels. This is a scripture for our time, a guiding scripture for the work that we have been a part of and continue to do and have the responsibility to do as well. While we're here in Ezekiel, let's just quickly look at chapter 14 of Ezekiel.

Another comment that God makes to the prophet in verse 13, He said, Son of man, when a land sins against me by persistent unfaithfulness, I will stretch out my hand against it. We're in such a land right now, persistent unfaithfulness.

You know, we can get rightly upset over the recent Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.

And the implications of that are yet to be fully determined and seen in this nation.

But it's not the only one, nor can it be seen even to be the worst. Certainly a surprise, certainly persistent sin by the highest court in the land.

But the chain of that begins in 1962, when the Supreme Court made a decision to remove public prayer from the public schools.

And the Supreme Court made a decision to remove God from the public arena in that narrow area. And that came at a critical moment in American history, as it was on the verge of what I described earlier as the 60s, a time of a sexual revolution and a social revolution that began to sweep over the country. That interesting decision made in 1962 and 63, there was another one made on that area, was only the beginning.

In 1973, the Supreme Court made another decision called Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.

And since then, 55 million legal abortions have been performed in America alone. An entire generation has been removed from this land. And then in 2015, a decision on same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court enters into the realm of the kingdom of God and says human constitutional law trumps the law of God, the law of the kingdom of God. Do we not have a message to give to a nation, to a people, to a community, to a neighbor? Do we not have a message to give to whoever will pick it up and listen and hear of repentance and of hope and of understanding of why we are where we are today and why it just doesn't seem to be working and the country has changed so dramatically in the last seven years in ways that no one could have ever seen. The understanding for that is important to make plain. And the hope of what one can do, at least in their own life, to live by their faith is important.

Because in this particular passage here in Ezekiel 14, God says through Him, look, in verse 14, even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in the land, they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness, says the Lord God. And He goes on to talk about things passing through and happening to the land, but He said in verse 16, even though these three men were in it, they would only deliver themselves, not their sons, not their daughters, only themselves. The just shall live by faith. Everyone has a responsibility. Noah, Job, and Daniel lived faithfully in their time as it came to them. And life and God put His hand in their life and in their world and acted, they could only save themselves. You can only save yourself with God's help, in a sense that you can only act for yourself. God saves us, we know that. But you and I can only act for ourselves.

He repeats this again in verse 20. Even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it as I live, they would deliver neither son nor daughter. They would deliver only themselves by their righteousness. And so it was their time. And in our time today, we are responsible for ourselves.

And how you and I live is our answer to the world and the cultural drift that is taking place.

Your faithfulness, your sincerity, your overcoming is your answer to those issues and to our time and to the way of life that we will live. Because the trumpet has sounded in your life, and this is your time to live before God. It is mine. And however long we will live, however much more time God has before these events that this day herald will take place, we don't know. We could pretty well figure how many more years some of us might have.

I turned 64 this year, so I know that there's more years behind me than there is ahead of me.

My theme song this year became the old Beatles song, Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me When I'm 64? My wife is still feeding me and I'm pretty sure she still needs me. I keep reminding her she still needs me. But when it dawned on me, I'm turning 64 this year.

I said, oh man, there was a great song from the 60s about that.

You can listen to that one too on the internet if you want to.

And so again, we have to live that way. The wind of Christ coming does not matter.

What matters is Christ's work within each of us and collectively what he is able to do as we work together in the church and our part in the body of Christ. We do have a work to do, to discern the times, to issue a message of warning and of repentance, and to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God.

And to see what God might be doing. We've taken the book of Habakkuk as the foundational theme for this personal appearance campaign. And if you turn back to Habakkuk chapter 3, my wife tells me I've been stuck in Habakkuk for several months and it's true, I have been.

But you haven't heard me be stuck in Habakkuk, so it's new to you. But Habakkuk chapter 3, the prophet is resigned to what God is going to do in his day, and that is punish Judah. And he has to give it up to God and leave it. And his parting prayer here in chapter 3 of Habakkuk is a very compelling prayer, but it focuses on God and what God is doing. And he said in verse 2, O Lord, I've heard your speech and was afraid. He heard what God had said to him in a dialogue that takes up the first two chapters and it struck fear into him. And then he says, O Lord, revive your work in the midst of the years. Revive your work in the midst of the years. In the midst of the years, make it known. In wrath, remember mercy, which God always does.

But this is an interesting statement. He says, God, revive your work in the midst of the years.

In our years, I pray that God would revive a work for us and in us as we yield ourselves to Him. And the people of God could experience a revival, a true revival, a godly revival, rooted and anchored firmly in the truth of God, in the message that God has for not only America, but for the world.

A message of hope, of a coming kingdom, and of a time when Christ will begin to rule in justice and in peace. And that we can take that message and not only take it to people, but also allow it to kindle a new fervor, a new zeal in each of us that will allow us to rise above sin in our own lives.

The unrighteous conduct that we might slip into when we are weak, when we might stray as we get enticed by something in the culture. That we might rise above sin in our lives and experience more righteousness, better days, less chaos, less confusion, and have an energy and an urgency born not out of some date that we might set, or some off-balance interpretation of prophecy, but out of a clear reading of the Word of God, and even look at something said to a prophet in the sixth century BC, and say, yeah, that's what we need today in 2015. That's the prayer we need to make. That God would revive his work in the midst of our years and our time, and it would begin with each one of us. And we would awaken and let God's work through his Spirit be done more within each of us. That we might cast off some of our spiritual stupor. And every one of us is prone to that. As we get caught up in our world and the world around us, and to whatever degree it is encroached into our life, and we favor that over the way of the kingdom, we have come a long way since 1970. There's been a lot of water under the bridge. There have been a few bridges battered even during that period of time. I know that. I'll tell you, I thank you.

I thank those of you here in Dallas and Fort Worth. Thank you for your faithfulness.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support of the United Church of God.

Most of all, thank you for your faithfulness to God. You have endured a lot, as has had many of God's people in recent years. And it is very encouraging to come into this congregation here and to see you. So I just say thank you for your support and your faithfulness, and encourage you to continue on. We are certainly looking forward to coming back here in a few weeks with our staff and our crew and see what God has in mind in this area. We know that we have your support. We know we have your prayers. And let us all be revived. Let us all seek a revival as we go from this day on to the Day of Atonement and then to the Feast of Tabernacles, wherever we may be.

Remember this prayer of Habakkuk. God, revive your work in the midst of the years.

And let's see what God is doing. It may be that God has paused for a moment in his look at the nations, and he's paused. And regardless of the suffering, regardless of the sin, the persistent sin of this land and other lands, God, I think, is taking the measure of the nations. And he hasn't acted. We'll go back to our jobs tonight. Some of you will begin to climb on your airplanes and go to your fee sites, wherever it may be. And we'll enjoy the blessings of this land that God has placed us in and the land blessed tremendously with the blessings of Abraham. And we'll fill up our tanks and put our credit cards in the machines and take some money out maybe tomorrow. And everything works. There's money there. We have a job, and Apple's coming out with three brand new products this fall.

Technology works. It's a great land. Yeah. And I don't know how much longer, but I know what we have to do. And let's not be lulled by the culture of the world.

The culture of the world. Let's be wooed by the culture of God as we go to observe the Feast of Tabernacles and portray the coming Kingdom of God. And if we do that, God can revive us in our time. I look forward to being with you again in a few weeks. Enjoy your fall festival season.