The Pearl of Great Price

The anchor holds a perfect song after the announcement that we had heard. We're very, very saddened at the death of a brother in the ministry. Chris Roland, who manages Ministerial Member Services and I are both very distressed about this, and yet the anchor holds. Hope is the anchor of the soul, as Paul writes in the book of Hebrews.

John Sephorek and I graduated from Ambassador College in the same year. In 1969, he was sent as a Ministerial Trainee to Nebraska, and I was sent to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We saw each other quite often. In fact, we knew each other beforehand. In fact, his mother was in our church area. The very first visit that I was on as a Ministerial Trainee was to visit his mother, who lived about one hour north of Sioux Falls.

I knew the operation was yesterday, and much of the day, and I was wondering how it went, hadn't heard. Got up at one o'clock in the morning and went to check text and email. Ben Light, Elder in Salem, who is keeping the feast in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, texted me and said the operation went 11 and a half hours and gave the positive prognostication that was read by Chris Roland. And I was very happy.

I just felt very happy that his heart was beating, that everything seemed to go well. Then literally minutes later, I'm looking at another email from him saying that it's not going so well, that he's hemorrhaging, that his body temperature is falling, and it's very, very critical. So I wasn't picking up anything. I was awake for much of the time until after three o'clock, hadn't heard anything. And finally, four o'clock this morning, which is our time, Ben Light wrote that John had died. We'd also been with John's friends all these years.

I was pastor in Paducah, Kentucky, and he was pastor in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. We used to combine on the Holy Days, spring on the Feast of Trumpets, especially in one of the spring Holy Days. And we knew each other very, very well, very good friends. I talked to his wife, Sandy, this morning. I called her. I knew that she'd be up, and she was.

And she sounded very, very strong, even though it's very distressing, and she is wondering, because just before the Feast, I called John to ask him how he was doing. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks, because his first heart surgery was about two months ago, in mid-August. And he was very positive. He called. He had to call me back.

I wasn't able to reach him. He was so excited about getting back into work. He said, it should be November, and I'll be back to pastoring the church in Salem and Roseburg. He said, I'm looking forward to doing that again. And then this had happened. Sandy said that she regrets, more than anything, that they were looking for their 50th anniversary in the ministry, which would have been 19, well, in two years, same year as mine, and that would have been 50 years for their marriage and 50 years for their life in the ministry.

I'd like to give you Sandy's address, because she would really appreciate, I'm certain, from the Feast, from brothers and sisters showing support. 720 Van Buren Drive, Northwest. 720 Van Buren, V-A-N, then B-U-R-E-N Drive, Northwest. Salem, Oregon. Salem, Oregon, 97304. And I'm sure that she would appreciate support from people. He'd done a lot. He'd done a lot, especially in some areas of advancing the education, even of our ministry, into special services. He had become a licensed counselor as well, and he really helped us out with various matters, especially addictions and other matters that we consulted him about.

Well, certainly the Feast, I don't want to end it on a downer, because this is life, and it makes us appreciate the living and the time that we have with one another right now. It's very, very important to make the very best of it. My wife and I are saying to each other, what will the next year bring? Where will we be? What will happen to our lives as far as the whole world is concerned? And we praise God of the fact that we're not floating around without an anchor, as was sung by the song, the anchor will hold, that God will be with us, that we know how it's going to end, we don't always see the way to how it will end, but we know how it will end, and that God will protect us ultimately by granting us eternal life.

And we can be very, very thankful for that. Looking forward to being reunited with our loved ones and with everybody else that we had known, which leads me to what I'll be talking about today. I also appreciated the various things that we had here, the family variety show. That was really, really enjoyable. One of the best I had ever experienced. Also, the wonderful collection for the Crisis Center in Brunswick, Georgia.

The lady was, the director was here, and she was just really awed by the fact that so much had been donated. We enjoyed the senior lunch. We enjoyed being with all of you and visiting with all of you here before and after services. When we come to understand what this day is all about, from our earliest recollections of it, I realize that the meaning of this day was great.

It's the last great day, as we had called it. It's great. It's big. It's magnanimous. It's bigger than everything else combined. It's one of the greatest truths that we have come to understand. And for me, I consider it to be one of the most awesome life-changers in understanding philosophy of life than anything else.

Than anything else. I mean that without any reservation. Because when I received a four-page reprint article with one kind of fuzzy black and white picture on it, in the article that was entitled, Is This the Only Day of Salvation?

I believe what I was reading. Because it did answer some nagging questions about life, about Christianity, about why and how is it all going to work out. Everything in the world looks so terrible and stinks. And yet, we're not seemingly making progress as Christians. We're not onward Christian soldiers marching on with victory. We live in a world that's just getting worse and worse and worse and worse. People are confused and mixed up. Religion, Christianity is all over the place. You can have any kind of Jesus you want.

You can have a Jesus that's very strict. You can have a Jesus that's very liberal. You can have a Jesus who was a created being. You can have a Jesus who pre-existed. You can have literally hundreds of versions of Christianity. Which one is right? Who will prevail? Who is the biggest? Who is the strongest? And who is the truth? But this article really did make a change in my life because it showed that God really is a God of love. We take a look at what other major denominations believe. I think it's important just to mention a few things about what they do believe and where we stand.

Because I think that this is all the difference in the world. As far as salvation, as far as who will be saved. Evangelicals and certain other Protestants believe that God is trying to save everyone now through the name of Jesus. But since most have not heard the message of Christ, most of whoever lived will be eternally lost. It's not a great marketing program. Calvin and his Protestants, even worse, God is not trying to save everyone now. He just creates them, you know, like sea turtles, you know, thousands of them.

But only one in four thousand, you know, make it. Most of whom, pardon me, and never had a plan to truly offer salvation to all of us as humans who are sinners and who deserve eternal punishment. You know, you're going to die eternal and you deserve it. Yet God is so merciful that he sent his son to die for a few, roughly one to three percent of the population who were predestined to be called now and saved. And this shows that God has love, albeit little.

Nearly all who have ever lived will be eternally lost. Unitarians. God does not really care what you believe or do. But if you try to lead a decent life, he will save you.

I've had friends who have been Unitarians. They don't know what they believe. They don't care. Some of them don't even believe in eternal life. Then there's Universalists. God loves everyone and will save everyone. The Mormons teach that since God will not condemn those who for no fault of their own have not accepted Christ, that he will save many through baptism for the dead, kind of retro salvation.

You know, for all the people that, you know, weren't righteous. That's why they're so interested in genealogies, in looking back and going through the family history, and then they baptize for the dead for people who have lived before. Hence, they try to find the names of the dead through genealogical research and have people baptized in proxy for them.

The church that I used to be a part of, the Eastern Orthodox Church, believe in God's plan of being highly sacramental, and they teach that God will actually save more people than the Protestants and some of the others here who I have mentioned. So we were just a little bit better, probably more than 3%. Catholics, God wants to save everyone, but most will not be saved. Despite not hearing the name of Christ, God has a plan, and will save some from the pagan religions who strive to live right, and will give salvation to Catholics who have gone through the right sacraments at the right time.

I've always wondered, I've always been a person who wonders a lot, even when I was growing up in the church, in the Orthodox Church, because I was not one who was seeking God, necessarily, because in a sense I had thought that I had found God, I was happy, I was devout in my religion. I had my little prayer book, and I made sure that I read from my prayer book in the morning prayers and the evening prayers. It was almost completely worn out because I wanted to do things right. But I did wonder about the people in China.

I wondered about those who had never heard of Christ. I wondered about all the multiple millions of people in India. What would happen to them? They hadn't heard the name of Christ. And could they be saved through another God? Does God manifest Himself to them in other ways that are just as good, but that's just the way He manifests Himself to Him?

But then when you hear the words and read the words of Jesus Christ, it's only through His name that you could be saved. So how does this work? Am I lucky? Have I drawn the right lottery ticket? Am I on the right path and everybody else is going to die? I just really felt sorry for people. Actually, I didn't feel sorry about myself at all.

I was very, very happy with where I was. And right now, people take a look at opportunities. In the U.S., we have tremendous opportunities for worship, freedom of religion. What about the poor people that are born in North Korea and trying to establish some type of evangelistic work in North Korea? What about those poor people that never have a chance, that are locked in, they're stuck, there's no way out, and they will die?

Why isn't Christianity doing better? Christianity, even though it's huge? Two billion people are labeled as Christians, but it's not the fastest growing religion. They're actually losing market share to the world, to Islam. Also, are we responsible to convert people? Are we responsible to do more in our community, in our church, as the United Church of God, to convert people?

And as we see ourselves not obtaining some of the results that we want to, are we somehow doing something wrong? What is it that we're not doing right with God? Or, as the story in the article is this only a day of salvation, or at least the way that it was advertised on the World Tomorrow radio program, and this was a story that was told. The story that was told is that a missionary was headed to a remote village to do an evangelistic campaign to bring people to Jesus Christ. But he had a flat tire.

And he was a day late. But when he came to the village, one of the people that wanted to meet him died, and they weren't able to receive Christ. Argument is, is that person condemned to eternal hellfire because of this missionary's flat tire? Might seem somewhat silly questions, but there's a point to it. This day, this day, the Ace Day, is a day that celebrates God's love towards all mankind in a way that I could barely describe with the words of joy that God has for all of mankind.

It is a day that we have inklings of in Ezekiel, in Revelation, in Isaiah, in Matthew, about God raising people from the dead and having their opportunity for salvation. To hear the Word of God in freedom with the same opportunity that you and I have. And it truly, to me, then spells, yes, this really brings true. God is not going to condemn 98, 99 percent of the people to eternal damnation, extinction. That is not of their fault because they were born as an Asian, or they were born in a restrictive environment, or atheistic USSR, or whatever, and never had opportunity or chance or any of that.

No, this day portends that God loves mankind, that human beings who were made in His image, in His likeness and image, have been chosen for His kingdom, that God will work with everyone in equal may. God is no respecter of persons. He's not a respecter of the people of the United States, even though this is the bulk of the Church right now. He's not a respecter of people who have opportunity. He will give opportunity to all. What I wanted to talk about in the time that I have this morning is the conversion of my mother to the truth.

Because it was a remarkable event. Both my parents came to understand the truth of God. The route they took was from atheistic USSR, where there was no God, though God was taught. God was irrelevant. To their adopting a Christianity that they were not comfortable with, and them coming to the truth. And a lesson and a testimony that they have left to the people along the way.

You've heard me talk about my parents and my last two sermons. In fact, I'm glad to get this through in three sermons, so you don't have to forget the story, and some of it you'll just remember. But my parents were some of the expendable people from Eastern Europe among the millions who have suffered and perished. We're lucky ones. I mean, I don't consider myself to be all these poor people, the poor cubic family. We're the lucky ones. We're the lottery winners. We're the sea turtle that lived to adulthood, not among the little hatchlings that most who perish, of which my parents, friends, and family were.

To me, the story about my parents shows a love of God working with the lowliest of people. The Ace of Day also is a lesson about our responsibility right now, because you're also lucky sea turtles, every one of you, who have lived to adulthood, who survived the world out there. Those are little hatchlings. Some die here, some die there, some never make it, some are eaten by barracudas. If you go through the museum of the sea turtles here, you get the story. In a way, I kind of thought about that in comparison to the Word of God going out and how many people really come to that point in this lifetime. Is this the only day of salvation? No, it's not. This truth is so wonderful and great. I might mention one more thing about John Sephoric. He came to the Feast of Tabernacles with us to Estonia in 2011. He and Sandy came to the Feast, and he gave a sermon on the Ace Day and entitled it, The Rest of the Dead. At that feast site, we had a family of Ukrainians from Ukraine who came up from Ukraine to keep the feast with us in Estonia. These were Sabbatarians, but they had not really understood. They were just beginning to keep the Holy Days. In fact, some of them, this is about half and half, some keep them, some don't. But they kind of allow for both ways. And I was translator for this gentleman, who's a very good friend of mine, Ivana Yurishko, and his wife, sat in the back of the hall. And I translated from English of what John Sephoric was speaking about the rest of the dead into Ukrainian. And, you know, I was just translating, you know, just going back and forth with him. And after the sermon, he says, that is an awesome truth. I did not realize that. It was something that was also an eye-opener, something that was a big, big change in his thinking right away. I just didn't realize that you could find that, and from all those scriptures, and John Sephoric spoke for whatever it was, an hour, an hour and ten minutes or so, about the rest of the dead. It was very, very enlightening to him.

I entitled this sermon, The Pearl of Great Price, and you'll see why. Matthew 13 has a number of parables. They number them differently. They were from six to ten, by the way. The commentaries number them. They kind of combine some together and some kind of spread some apart.

But there are parables about the sower and the seed, the tares, the mustard seed, the leaven. Then there are two parables about hidden treasure and the pearl of great price. They're just very short one-liners. The parable of the hidden treasure, and then there's also the one about the dragnet and the householder. But these two, about the hidden treasure and about the pearl of great price, both are about the value of the kingdom. All the parables are about the kingdom of God, but both of them talk about value of the kingdom.

The hidden treasure, and they're quite different. The hidden treasure is a man who stumbles upon a treasure in a field. He's just walking around, hears the property for sale, and he just kind of walks over the property. All of a sudden hears a big treasure chest full of diamonds, gold bars, everything. He says, boy, this is valuable. I'm going to sell everything I've got to buy this piece of property because I have stumbled upon something very, very valuable. This is a person who stumbles upon the truth. The parable of the pearl of great price is a merchant who's seeking goodly pearls.

He's looking for something. Ah, this one? Nope. Not good enough. Defects here. Ah, here's another one? Nope. Nope, that's not the one. Oh, here's this color? Ah, nope. It's just not quite the thing that I really wanted. And then he finally comes upon the pearl of great price. Aha! This is it. This is the one that I'm looking for. And he goes and sells all he has so he can buy that pearl of great price.

Which one are you? Did you come into the truth because you stumbled upon it? Where you just kind of came into, wow, I didn't realize all this. Oh, this is the truth. Or were you a person who was seeking goodly pearls? I've known people like that. They were just looking and looking for something in life and things didn't satisfy. They would try to, this church, nope, they're too wild. No, this church, they're too placid. No, this priest, this minister, nope, that's not it.

And then they come upon what's here. Really rings true. And then they invest heavily in that. They may have to sell off friendships, relationships from where they were, but they have found the pearl of great price. And biblically, we've had those people. Lydia, the seller of purple, she was looking, looking, looking. I'm going to go into these stories quickly. You can read the whole story yourself. And she was looking, and a call was made to get Paul to come and talk about Jesus Christ, and Paul came. The Bereans, they were searching, searching, searching.

They searched the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Or Cornelius, the Roman centurion. He was a devout man who was searching, searching, and he called for Peter to come and to baptize him.

Or we have the Ethiopian eunuch. The person was also looking, wanted to have things explained, and came to him. So which one are you? You know, I'm very, very interested in this. I was going to have a show of hands, but I'm going to ask you to do this. I created a poll just for the next couple of days.

Go to my website, cubic.org forward slash poll, and click on one of two things. Did I stumble onto the truths, or was I searching for the truth? I'd like to see what the percentages are. To me, I've always wondered about how people came into the truth. Did you just kind of stumble into it, or were you searching for it? Myself, I stumbled into it. I wasn't looking for anything particular. I thought I had already had it. I was very, very happy with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

I prayed. I was a very active in our youth movement. I had a good relationship with our priest. I enjoyed his sermons. I wasn't looking for anything. But when I came to understand the Sabbath and what the Bible said and what it did to my life, I was one of those who stumbled into it. I knew others in our church that were looking for something, and they found it.

One of those people is my mother. My mother came from atheistic USSR. Atheism was taught and practiced. Many people became that way, not only because the government enforced atheism, but they had given up on religion. The Orthodox priests, the Catholic priests, didn't do anything for the country. All they knew was death. All they knew was civil war. All they knew was World War I, where casualties were numbered in the millions. There was no God. As I was growing up, I heard stories about immigrants coming over and talking about their fellow co-workers back home who would throw themselves on the railroad tracks. They just wanted to commit suicide. They were just tired of life. There was no meaning to it whatsoever.

But when these people who were from atheistic USSR came to the United States, they organized themselves into traditional churches once again. The story about my mother begins with Operation Barbarossa, which was Germany's attack, Nazi attack against the USSR, which began on June 22, 1941. Three million German troops rolled over into the USSR with 3,300 tanks, and the initial blitzkrieg devastated city after city. I wish my mother lived in one. My mother lived in a little town, well, actually not so little. 70,000 was the population of Likhachev, about 70 miles, about 50 miles or so, 70 kilometers south of Kharkov. And the Germans came in. They bombed the city. 700 people that day were killed in the bombing. My mother was eight years old. No, she was 15 years old, I should say. And she was bringing the cows in from the field back towards their farmhouse. And she told me about how she saw the German airplanes coming, and they were bombing, and she hid herself under the cows for protection. And her hands, to the day of her death, were still shaking from the horror of that moment, although that was only the first of many bombings that she would endure.

When the Germans occupied the cities that they did, one year later, my mother, who was 16 years old, was told with other teenagers that they were required to go to Germany to be workers. The Germans came in and occupied the courthouse, operated the city government. They went through the list of people in town, and they said, we want this, this, this, and this person, these teenagers, to appear at the train station on the platform for hours, and you will be taken to Germany to become workers. My mother was one of those people. These teenagers were told that this will be just for six months, it's a temporary thing, and you will be back home. As it turned out, it would be 27 more years before my mother would return back to see her family. My father, in the same way, he was a teenager, he was two years older, he was 17, from eastern Ukraine. Actually, at that time, it was Poland, still eastern Poland, and he, too, was taken by train to work in Germany. My mom and dad were in the same town of Magdeburg. It's a big city between Hanover and Berlin. My mom worked in a shoe factory, and my dad worked in a jam factory that produced jam. Conditions for workers were very, very strict. They had to wear a big yellow sign. Jews had to wear a big star. My parents had to wear a big insignia that said, Ost, O-S-T. They were Ost Arbiters, East workers, and they weren't allowed to walk on the sidewalks, they had to walk on the street. And, you know, they were slave laborers.

The mindset between Germany and Russia was a very harsh one. They were harsh to each other. They treated each other in the most savage of ways. The war between Germany and America and Britain was far more civil, so to speak. But between Russia and Germany, it was savage. Millions of casualties. On both sides. Of course, far more on the Russian side. Russians lost 15 million men, military deaths, 15 million civilian deaths, and half the housing was destroyed. The nation had fallen apart. Here's a few notes that I had found in my mother's papers after she died. There were letters that she kept from communicating with her parents during the war. June 7, 1943. It was from her brother in Ukraine writing to my mother, who says, In the first lines of our short letter, our family greets you, Nina. That's my mother's name. Are you all right? You write that you are getting lonely living on foreign soil, but you're not the only one separated from their family. Many people are finding themselves in this condition, Nina. We're not receiving your letters. In 1943, we received only two postcards from you, one dated January 20th and one February 8th, which we received in June. You ask about your brother Alex. We haven't heard from him in two years. He was in the service, but he returned. In the Soviet Union, those who went into the service at age 19, only one in a hundred returned. He's talking about the devastation of a whole generation of people. If we live again, we will meet again. The weather has been good for growing, the gardens look good, and we'll have things to eat in the winter. The Russians came in February, but the Germans returned in March. On the front line, we've had no shooting here, but in the neighboring village, many people have died. The land is covered with blood, and the end of the war is not in sight. We're tired of the war.

Another letter. You said that you'd like to see the flowers in the homeland again. That would be good, but now the land has been ravished by war. I think often of your cheerful smile and your kind words, my loving sister, my mom and dad, and your sister, Tonya, work on the collective farm, and I work at the railroad.

This is for my mother's brother. Please write to us and tell us how you're eating, and are the Germans good to you? We're not receiving your letters. Please give greetings to your friends with whom you're working. And then when my mother died, my aunt wrote to us. This is in 1984.

My dear nephews and nieces, your mother had a hard life. In the years of the war, our village changed hands six times between the Russians and Germans. All but the youngest were evacuated. The Germans bombed our village, and they took Nina to Germany.

She worked there for three years. My parents developed a relationship with another couple, and the foursome became friends. Even though slave laborers, in their social time, they had opportunity to develop a friendship. Towards the end of the war, my father was put into a concentration camp.

He was guilty of some infraction, and he was put into a concentration camp, and his job was to go through rubble after bombings and to pick out unexploded ordnance. Through his friend, he was able to, in the last months of the war, to kind of walk off the work detail, and he escaped to a farm. And he and his friend both stayed on the farm.

The end of the war was coming. Everybody wanted the war to end. The German population, they saw the handwriting on the wall, they were just waiting for the war. There was a lot of confusion and disruption, but one thing that was certain, that there was still a lot of bombing that they had to go through.

The British bombed all night long, the city of Magdeburg, which was very strategic because it had a lot of oil and petroleum supplies for the Germans. American bombed all day long, so day and night, carpet bombing over the whole city of Magdeburg. Now, my mom and dad, my father was on the farm, my mother was still in the work camp, and they would send people to bomb shelters, which was almost every night. She said every night the sirens would sound, and they would go to the bomb shelters. And they were zig-zagged concrete structures, so that if a bomb fell in one of those zig-zags, the people in that section would die.

But people in the adjoining zigs and zags would not. They would be spared. And every morning my mother would see that there would be a section that would be blown out, and some of her friends who were there all had perished.

In fact, after a while, they didn't even go into the bomb shelter. They were just like surreal. And they just stood outside and just watched the bombing like the Fourth of July fireworks. It was so, if we die, we die. Then you'd bother to go into that. Anyway, the war did come to an end. My mom and dad remembered the first Americans coming. The Americans brought in a whole different spirit.

They came with chocolate, hams, cigarettes. They came in with their jeeps and rolled into town, the American flag. Liberation, liberation from oppression. They were so happy. Two days later, though, in Magdeburg, they didn't hear the voice of Americans anymore. They heard Russian voices. What's this? Well, at the Potsdam Conference, where post-war Europe was to be divided, they decided what the boundaries of the various sections of Germany would be. No matter who conquered what, they would be divided the way they were.

My parents were in East Germany, and even though the Americans came in, this is what got Patton so upset, they had to back out to the boundaries that had been agreed upon. And the Russians looked upon these workers, these people. Now my mother is 19 years old, my dad is 21. They weren't married yet, they just were friends. As collaborators with the Germans, they interrogated them incessantly, and they treated them very, very badly.

And they were going to be taking them back to the USSR. My father was about to be drafted into the Russian army because the Russians had just declared war on Japan. My parents and their friends said, we've got to do something. We can't be here. It was a transition camp. It was kind of loose, and they were hurting these people. It says, we're all going back to the USSR.

And to make the story a little bit shorter, my parents were able just to kind of walk away, and were able to get to the border. They were able to bribe guards. My dad had talked to one of the guards. He said, what would it take to have our freedom? He says, a watch, a bottle of vodka, and a suit. And so they went to the border with these three items.

The guard needed to pay off the two other guards, but thought that was the price of freedom. They didn't even know if they'd be betrayed, double-crossed, or whatever. But at midnight, when the changing of the guard took place, the guard let my parents across the border into what is the British zone.

And so this foursome went across the border, but then the rustling was heard, and there was firing into them. Guns were shooting at them, but they had run past the shooting that had taken place. They ran and ran and ran. They seem to say they ran a couple of miles.

Until finally, look, nobody's chasing us. I guess we're okay. And they worked themselves over to Hanover, which was the place where there was a United Nations refugee camp. And they said the news that day, when they walked into the camp, the big news of that day was that the Americans had dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. So you know what day that was. That was in August of 1945. There my parents and this other couple lived. My parents were married in the first part of 1946. I was born in 1947, and they were looking for a country. They were looking for any place that would take them, just like refugees now.

You know, they're in these camps, you know, and they have no citizenship. They have no status whatsoever. But they're desperately looking for someone who would take them. Four years went by before my parents found passage to the United States, and I would explain some of the citizenship thing in my last sermon. They came to the United States, and my parents then formed, along with other immigrants, a community of people in St. Paul, Minnesota, an Orthodox Church. They had a priest, actually a very fine person, that I really got to know very well over the time I worked.

I was an altar boy for almost ten years, almost from the time that I was just eight years old, almost to seventeen years old. And I was very active in the Church. But my mother was never comfortable with the Orthodox Church experience.

In 1962, I sent off for the first Plain Truth magazine. I listened to the program for a whole year. I used to work at a miniature golf course as a clerk there. And I was listening to the radio at seven thirty each evening at work. I would listen to the World Tomorrow program. I listened and listened and listened and found the voice to be ringing of truth, but I was afraid to write for whatever they were offering.

But I finally did, in 1962. I shared this information with my mother. I was very close to my mother. I just shared what I had. I was afraid of my dad. But my own mom, I would just talk to her about this thing. We went through every article in the Plain Truth magazine.

And I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And she was very interested in it. Very, very interested. I could tell you she was far more interested in religion than she ever showed in the Orthodox Church.

I applied to Ambassador College. My father was furious. Holy rollers, nuts, fruit and nuts people in California. That's what I keep hearing from him. I want you to be a mathematician. I want you to go to IT, Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota. That's where all the good Ukrainian men go to. I want you to become a civil or mechanical engineer. And God had called me for something else. I was compelled to go to Ambassador College. I did not go. My parents wouldn't let me. I was still seventeen years old, and legally they had the right to keep me at home. But that was an amazing year because something happened with their mind. My mother did not want to make the step of becoming a part of a church. She waited for Dad. And then my father, who was an avid reader, he'd read all of Winston Churchill's books. He would always talk about that. He would talk about other things. He was just very interested in his own history and the history of the times. Invited the minister to come and talk to him. This minister, who had Spokesman's Club that night, had somebody else take it. And he was there at our home till two o'clock in the morning. And my parents were invited for the Pentecost services in 1966. That was their very first service. And were baptized that fall at the Feast of Tabernacles. A very wonderful moment. My father died very suddenly in the spring in 1967. My mother was a widow for 1967 to her death in 1984. It was very hard for my mother and parents to leave their church. Believe me, this is one of the most traumatic things for a tight-knit community that had gone through the war, that were survivors, and then they become part of something else because it is the truth. It was very, very difficult for my mother and my dad. I remember how difficult it was. They saw now the crosses, the icons, all the trappings of the church as not being godly in what they should have been doing.

My mother was a very serving person. Our house was only three miles south of where church met, and they had a big old farmhouse, and we had people at our home all the time that came after services. Because services were in the morning, people came over, and she was a serving widow. But then she died. I remember, before she died, she died at our home of leukemia just literally weeks after she was diagnosed with leukemia, but she died. But she talked a lot to us about how important it was for her to get a message to the people that she had left, the people of the former church, because that was close to her. It isn't like here where you could kind of move from one group of people to another. These were people who were like family, and even closer than family, who had survived a lot. And my mother said, at my funeral, I want to have this letter read. She wanted a letter because she knew that many people from the old church would come to her funeral. They would be there.

I had a number of ministers from the worldwide church I've got at that time that came over. One of them was John Bald, which many of you may have known. I was the minister of one of the churches in the Twin Cities, the St. Paul Church, and my John Bald was south in Rochester, Minnesota. He came up. And he wrote an article for the United News in 2001. I'd like to read a portion of that article.

It was about an article about crowns of glory, it was called. It was about our elderly and about our senior citizens. This is from the October 2, 2001 issue of the United News. He wrote about a number of examples of people who had distinguished themselves as seniors. He writes about my mother, an outstanding example. In this context, I'm reminded of a truly outstanding example of a senior citizen in the church, now deceased. She was Nina Kubik, the mother of Victor Kubik, a member of the Council of Elders.

During World War II, she was a teenage slave laborer in Germany, taken by the Nazis when they invaded Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. After the war, she married and lived in a displaced persons camp for four years. In 1949, she, being pregnant with her son Olle, her husband Igor and son Victor, emigrated from Hanover, Germany, to the United States. The family traveled with a group of friends and acquaintances and settled as a group in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota. This group of Ukrainians lived in close proximity to one another and assisted one another in adjusting to a very different way of life.

In doing so, they quite naturally formed very close bonds and ties. Later, Mrs. Kubik was called into the church, and this markedly changed her lifestyle and her priorities. She had less time than previously to spend with her friends in the Ukrainian community. As time went on, this concerned her deeply as she tried to serve both the needs of the church and her Ukrainian friends.

So great was her concern that she instructed a letter be read at her funeral by the presiding minister, who is Noel Horner. This was done. My wife and I, John Baldright, were privileged to be able to attend her funeral and hear her words coming, as it were, from the grave. In the letter, she stated that she realized that in recent years she had not spent as much time with her Ukrainian friends as she had previously, but she wanted them to know that was not because she thought any less of them. She stated that she wanted them to know that the reason was that she had found the pearl of great price.

That she felt compelled to pursue the way which was pictured in the Bible as that incomparable pearl. John Bald continues that was one of the most moving experiences of my life, and I was very impressed by her expressed concern for her long-time friends, as well as her need to serve God that she had learned about in the Bible. Such things constitute part of our heritage. These are examples and actions of faith that were preserved in the examples of people's lives. None of the people of the Ukrainian community understood what my mother and dad did.

They just knew they went to some church that started keeping the Sabbath, and they continued in their worship of the Orthodox God. I went to Minneapolis Congregations 50th anniversary in 2013, and I went back to my old church and talked to some of the people who were the same age as I was.

We talked about my parents and about their being there, and so forth, but nobody really understood what we believed, why we did, and what the truth was. I was so moved by what Stan Martin read yesterday from Isaiah 35, because oftentimes we read this chapter from the standpoint of physical deafness and suffering. When you take a look at what's going to really be opened will be the minds, the eyes, the ears of people at a future time.

I know that those who were there, when they heard the words of my mother saying they had found the pearl of great price, she really meant it. She had studied that, she had known it, she understood that what she had found was something that she was looking for. She couldn't find it in Germany. She couldn't find it in the religions that were there in the Orthodox Church. She couldn't find it in Bible story books, but she found it right here in the truth, and she was ensconced into it.

She loved the kingdom of God. More than anything, she loved to hear about the kingdom of God. I gave a sermon at the Lake of the Ozarks about the kingdom of God that she listened to over and over again, not because necessarily it was her sons, but because that was what she lived for, that was what was important to her. It was not some heaven and staring at God forever. It was the kingdom of God coming to this earth.

When my parents came into the church, one of the things that they said about the church was, at that time we spoke a lot about the Great Tribulation coming. My parents said about that, we've been there. Those things that are spoken of in the Great Tribulation, we've been there. We've experienced it.

I do know that the words of our mother will stick in the ears of others, and then when the spiritual wax and when the spiritual blindness is taken away, they'll see that yes, Nina lived a decent life.

She was somebody special. They will look to her as a person that was a beacon of light at that time. My question to you now is, are you that beacon of light to the people around you? Could you write a letter to people that are around you, that's saying that, you know, I've not gone to Christmas events, have not exchanged Christmas presents, have not done the traditional Christian things that people do, because, you know why?

I have found the pearl of great price. Most of the people around us are those sea turtles, the 3,999, that aren't going to be in the first resurrection. There are going to be billions of people brought forward into a time of judgment, that right now is upon the house of God. Peter wrote now his judgment on the house of God, 1 Peter 4 and verse 17.

1 Peter 4 and verse 17. For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God. And that judgment is a period of evaluation, a period of trial, a period of living the truth. Now, we're not a church that believes in a second chance.

You know, you make a mess of this life, and you've got something else. No, our time is now. This is the only time for us to straighten out our lives, to prepare ourselves against odds, against statistics, against big numbers that are contrary to us, to the people that are closest to us. I do believe that my mom and dad set that example. They were so devoted to the truth of God, to the kingdom of God.

They were so happy to be part of the church. My father was very involved in his church. He was on the board of trustees. He had to leave that. My father was an artisan who built the interior of the church, who built the Econostas, which is this partition across the whole church that has icons and carved golden doors and so forth. He did all those things, and he walked away from it. He had to endure some of the persecution that came from the people that were closest. But that was understandable. When somebody leaves us, we feel the same way, too.

For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God, verse 17 of 1 Peter 4. And if it begins with us, first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? Now, if the righteous one is scarcely saved, where will the ungodly and the sinner appear?

I really do hope that we take very seriously the calling that we have right now. You are very special. I don't want to sound like Joel Osteen. Now, you are very, very special. God has called us to a very, very high calling, and we are very fortunate. We've survived bombings. We've survived the predators. We've survived everything. We've even survived the church. We can be very, very thankful of what we have come through. We've just got our naked body and life to show before God about our faithfulness. That's what's most important, and that's what God wants.

As my wife, as we talked about the content of this sermon, we want to be able to, when we meet people that we've known, our classmates from high school, our neighbors and so forth, will they say to you, when they see you as glorified beings, saying, well, why didn't you tell me about this? I would have never known that you were one of those. How did you qualify, so to speak? Judgment is now upon the house of God, about how we live, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we treat one another, the way we respond to the teaching of the church, and how we prepare ourselves for eternity. I would hope that when they meet you, they say, oh, now I understand. Now I understand when they come up in the white throne judgment period, when God's truth is known, when the whole plan of salvation is rolled out, they'll say, I see why this was so important. I certainly hope that all of us realize that we are living, and Peter also wrote in 1 Peter 2 and verse 9, and this is where I will end. You are a chosen generation right now. And as I said about my sermon about citizenship, it's not because we're so elite, and God has just said, you're special. You're special because of whatever reason. You've been called into a community. Israel was called into becoming the commonwealth that would spread its truth to others, which it failed to do. But I certainly hope that we, by our example, by people who are our neighbors, maybe we don't feel like we could just walk into their house and start talking about the kingdom. We're not asking about that. But we want them to see how you live, how you conduct yourself, how you look, how you address them, how you respond, and other aspects about basic human behavior. You are a chosen generation.

We've been given a new citizenship, a new identity. We are a royal priesthood. We have special function to function spiritually in this world. We are His own special people. We are citizens of God. We are in the world, but not of the world. We've not been called into a commune of being just a group of people that lives off to itself. Christ said twice, You are in the world, but not of the world, because you have a special role and special purpose. People need to say that you were special. I hope they don't say, You were so weird. We don't want that. We want people to say, Now I see. Now I see. And they will understand, because their ears will have been unplugged. I just enjoyed what Stan read yesterday. Then Isaiah 35, then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Now we talk about the healings of Christ, but the greater healing is a spiritual healing that will take place. The lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will sing. People will start making sense in this very senseless world. So let's rejoice in the meaning of the Holy Days. This is the last day of the festival cycle of the whole year. It is truly a great day of salvation, the eighth day when mankind will all have the same opportunity that you and I have been given right now.