The Pearl of Great Price

Good afternoon, everyone. Here in the Salem Church, good afternoon, Sandy. Carmella, Berkeley, the Weiss family, family, friends. I wanted to be here today. I wanted to be here to share in the loss of our pastor, our friend, husband, father, a person who truly is one who built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ with gold, silver, and precious stones.

And even as we have this fiery trial, which it is, because this is so sudden, we have not even had a chance to process all the information. We see that his work, the work that he's done building upon the foundation of Jesus Christ, has produced everlasting fruit in the churches here in Salem, this morning's visit with the church in Eugene and Roseburg. We were not in Roseburg but Roseburg as well.

But I'm here to honor my fellow friend, and I really wanted to come here as soon as I could. My wife would have come, but this was just right after the Feast of Tabernacles, and we have a major camp directors conference coming, and we just couldn't pull it all together. But I wanted to come here, in one sense, at all costs.

I want to thank Ben Light for communicating with us at the Feast of Tabernacles with the events that took place with John and communicating with me all that had happened. As we know, John had a heart attack in the middle of August, and I had talked to him a number of times. And just before the Feast of Tabernacles, I wanted to make certain that I at least touched base with him.

I'd heard in a month or so, and I thought, well, no news is good news, and I was just very happy. But before the Feast, I called him, and I didn't get a hold of him. He called me back in the evening, and he was talkative, dynamic, probably more animated and happy than I had ever heard him. He was very hopeful of the future, very hopeful of getting back to work. I didn't want to press him in that point, but I was asking how he was doing, and he volunteered and said that I am looking forward to coming back to work about November, the first part of November.

He was very, very excited about that. He was very animated. John usually was a person of many words, but not so much. Sometimes when he's done talking, he's done talking. But he just talked and talked and talked, and that's the longest conversation that I had with him in a long time. But John and Sandy then went to the Feast of Tabernacles in Bend, and either the altitude or circumstances, he had developed symptoms of congestive heart failure, and they went back down here.

It was in determining, with the echocardiogram, I'd expect this situation was uncovered. He had pseudo-aneurism and was a hole in the wall muscle tissue of the heart, and this then became serious. Immediate surgery was necessary. They said eight hours at first, turned out to be nine and a half hours. We were all waiting breathlessly. We were at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jekyll Island to hear how it was. Ben Light was in Mexico, and he was texting us and communicating with us. I'd like to read what Ben had written because it was beautifully written from the heart about John's death.

It is, with the heaviest of hearts that I notify you of the death of John Sephoric. John has served God's people for many years in many congregations and was a shepherd in the truest sense. The sheep always came first. We're going to miss him terribly, but we praise and thank God for the example that he set for the time we had with him. Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his saints. We all look forward to the fulfillment of God's plan and the resurrection of his saints when we will see him again.

John was born in South Dakota. He attended Ambassador College from 1965 to 1969. I attended from 1966 to 1969, and we were both sent into the field ministry as ministerial trainees in 1969. He took Nebraska, and I was sent to South Dakota. I was on Interstate 90. He was on Interstate 80, the highways across the state. We saw each other at conferences, and when I was working as a ministerial trainee, the very first visit that I was taken on was to visit John Sephoric's mother in about an hour or so, maybe a little bit more, north of Sioux Falls.

She talked about her son John, who was just starting out in the ministry. I saw where John grew up. She showed me the farm, and she showed me what John did, and so forth. I had the opportunity to visit the farm in northern South Dakota. Later on, he was transferred to different areas as well.

For a while, we were neighboring pastors. He was in Missouri, living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and I was living in Paducah, Kentucky. We saw each other from time to time, and combined services on the Holy Days from some of the combined Holy Days. We enjoyed that very much. That was a very wonderful time. One of John's greatest contributions, not only in his pastoral work, and he truly was a person who was very well respected as a pastor, in that he was a person who was a good listener.

He knew the Scriptures. He knew the Bible. He was a person who was fair. He was a person who listened to what people said, and a good person for consultation. He was well studied in the Scriptures of God. He also had a degree, studied for a degree, in, we see the master's degree in psychological counseling from southeast Missouri State, which really helped out with the work that we needed in the ministry, where our experience is usually in biblical studies, but thin and professional understanding of dysfunctions and psychological problems.

I would say that the thing that I did most with John in the last number of years was to often, not often, but from time to time, talk to him about his advice on ways that we can help our brethren with various addictions and abnormalities and family issues. He was very good. He was very knowledgeable, and he actually spoke at our last regional conference, which we held in the Portland area. He traveled to different places in the world.

To Canada, England, New Zealand, Jamaica, Australia, and notably for me, Estonia, we had a wonderful feast of tabernacles in the year 2011, at a very beautiful place on an island in the Baltic Sea. He gave an outstanding sermon, one of the best I have heard, on the meaning of the last great day, or the white throne judgment, or the eighth day, as we call it now. It was called, The Rest of the Dead. I remembered well, for this reason, is that we had a number of people who attended from other Sabbath-keeping groups, Ukrainian Sabbatarians, Latvian Sabbatarians, that came to the feast, who had kept the Holy Days, were beginning to keep the Holy Days, but didn't understand all the meanings of every single one of the Holy Days. And this one, they had very little knowledge of. And I was a translator into the Ukrainian language from John, on the rest of the dead. And the people who heard it, the Ukrainian Sabbatarians, said they had never heard any such thing. What a wonderful truth. It was truly a tremendous sermon that he gave on that subject.

We as a church are going to go through a process here of mourning and grieving. It isn't something where we can just give a few messages, so forth. Biblically, mourning was given 40 days or more for any condition, for us to thoughtfully go through the process of separation. Because it is indeed a process. It is not something to hide. It is something to examine, to grieve, and to cry. We have all done that. When we gave the announcement of John's death in Jack O'Lanlan at the feast, we cried, because he was very, very close, not only as a person that we knew, but a person who truly represented to the ministry some of the finer abilities of pastoral care. This area, Salem, Eugene, and Roseburg, are some of our finest church areas in many ways, as far as congregations have been built upon gold, silver, and precious stones. And while Jesus Christ is the foundation, it is built upon by the day in, day out care of a pastor, and is built in and out by the work of the ministry in visiting, preaching, counseling, and being made available. So we want you to go through a period of mourning, of disspection, over the next month as we go through. In the meantime, we are very grateful for the work that Ben Light has done, and he will become the interim pastor for this area as we determine what steps to take on. But this is something that we will consider with the leadership, with Sandy, all of us, will consider all the factors involved as to where we go from here. The subject that I wanted to talk about today, in the title of my sermon, is the Pearl of Great Price. The Pearl of Great Price. Why did I choose this sermon? I've spoken on this subject before. In fact, I spoke about it just a few weeks ago at the Feast of Tabernacles on the eighth day. It's because my mother, who was a member of God's church, found the Pearl of Great Price. But not only that, she spoke openly of it, and she died before her time. She died at the age of 58, of leukemia. In fact, when we first determined that she had leukemia, it was only three or four weeks before she died very, very suddenly and very quickly of acute leukemia. I'll tell you a little bit about her life, her past, where she came from, and the people that she was connected with. She had a letter read at her funeral. The pastor who conducted the funeral was Noel Harner, who you may know. He was her pastor in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a letter in which she knew that many of her friends from the past, and friends that she tried to maintain relationships with, would be at the funeral. She wanted the letter read to express to them that she had not loved them any less, because she did leave a very tight community. She loved them, but that also she had found the Pearl of Great Price. While she was maintaining as much as she could the relationship she had, she had to go where God had led her in finding the Pearl of Great Price. I'm wondering if we could write such a letter to be read at our funeral, to those who are around us, those who would come and be there at the funeral service and hear about our life, and have something said about us, what they would think.

What would they think? How would they react? But more importantly, how would they react when they come up in the great white throne judgment? What type of reaction will they have? Oh, I knew that! There was something about that person. There was something about their life, their character, their work, their worth, their behavior. That is very, very special. That person is very, very special. The great white throne judgment, to me, probably is the greatest truth that I have come to understand for this reason, from the standpoint of just numerics. Because the question arises right now as we look about the world. Why are so few people attracted to Christianity?

Why are so few people in Salem a part of the truth? Why do most people not care? Are they going into everlasting condemnation? Will they be lost? How many people are going to be saved? And what do the religions of the world say as far as the probability of salvation? What is the probability of salvation? When we understand the truth about the white throne judgment, we see the great love that God has for humanity and how He longs and desires to bring many sons to glory, how He wants to establish a family. And it's not just something where only a few will experience that, but that He has a plan for bringing many people along. And I want to tie this in with finding the pearl of great price now and the future.

The truth came to me in a four-page article called, Is This the Only Day of Salvation? It was not a fancy article. It was a four-page article with no picture on it. It was written by Steve Paul Meredith, and it was about what we believe about the great white throne judgment.

This article, this four-page article, changed my outlook towards how God views mankind, not only by just something that was a great wish or a great philosophical thought, but something that was biblically relevant and biblically provable. It helped me explain about why is it that people who are unfortunate to be born in countries like North Korea, should we begin a work in North Korea? Absolutely not. Those people have no opportunity, no chance. There's no way we could go to those countries.

Even our church, as zealous as we are in doing the work, our voice is not heard very, very loudly on the world's scene. Now, someday God will speak out loudly, but right now our voice is rather quiet as much as, no matter how hard, we try.

Why isn't Christianity doing better? Why is it losing market share? Why is Islam growing at a much faster rate, where Christianity actually, as far as market share, is declining? Is God just not up to the job, not interested? What is it that is so true about what's happening?

Why isn't Christianity doing better? And then there was a story in this article about a missionary that was headed towards a village to talk to people that wanted to learn about Christ. But as he was entering the village, he had a flat tire, had to spend the night before he could enter the village. When he came to the village the next day, the person that he wanted to see died. Is he responsible? Is that flat tire responsible for that person not coming to conversion? That was a good question. That was asked on the World Tomorrow program time and time again.

And I finally sent for an article about, is this the only day of salvation? And also, John Sephora's sermon at the Feast of Tabernacles, which was entitled, The Rest of the Dead, is one that caused the eyes of people to open widely. People who knew and understood some of what we teach, people who were Sabbath keepers, but not fully knowledgeable about all the holy days, particularly about the eighth day, which is kind of tacked on in almost the time when you really are just ready to finish the feast after seven days and just go on home.

And yet it represents some of the greatest opportunity and shows the greatest love of God. And John Sephora presented it in the most compelling way on that day in 2011 in Estonia. It explains that those of us who are His elect are not the only elect, that God is going to elect a lot of people. In fact, everybody is going to be elected. Everybody is going to be on a ballot someday. I'd like to tell you how modern Christianity actually gives assessments of probability of salvation. Evangelicals and certain other Protestants, here's what their belief is, God is trying to save everyone now through the name of Jesus.

But since most have not heard the message of Christ, most who have ever lived will be eternally lost. That marketing program is very bad. Calvin is Protestant, because he's even a little bit worse. God is not trying to save everyone now and never had a plan to truly offer salvation to all humans as sinners. In other words, He creates these people one after another in His image and likeness, but they have a very, very slim chance of salvation.

Just like when we went to the Jekyll Island Turtle Museum. Out of 4,000 little turtles that are born, only one out of 4,000 make it. Is that the way God works with salvation and creating those in His image? Yet, God is so merciful that He sent His Son to die for a few, like 1 to 3 percent of the population, that were predestined to be called now and saved. And this shows that God has love. To me, this is not love. This is exclusivism.

This is a bad ratio. This is very, very discouraging. Unitarians believe that God doesn't really care what you believe, but if you lead a decent life, He will save you. Then there's the Universalists who believe that God loves everyone and will save everyone. The Mormons believe that God will not condemn those who for no fault of their own have not accepted Christ, but He will through a baptism for the dead be able to save people retroactively, retro salvation. Where people dig up.

That's why the Mormons are very interested in genealogy, so they can go back for old relatives, for old people from times past, and be baptized for the dead. The Catholics want to save everyone, but most will not be saved. Despite not hearing the name of Christ, God has a plan that 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. They have to go through the right doors, right sacraments, right positions, and so forth.

And those are the people who have salvation. Otherwise, the default position for everybody else is like a fire, or roasting in fire forever. Very, very unfortunate. I'd like to talk to you about my mother because of her background and how God had called her and the example that she set. My mother is from the atheistic USSR, where atheism was taught and practiced. She was from Ukraine, but she was Russian.

Where people endured famine, the horror of war, oppression. Many people literally had given up on God. They were tired of the Church. The Church did nothing for them. The Church was no help.

Oftentimes, the Church was in cahoots with the government, and people were burned out on Christianity. They were burned out on organized religion. They were in terror of the government, and they were always caught between wars between various nations, where millions of people were killed. Many people just became atheists. There is no God. In 1941, the Germans invaded the USSR with three million men on June 22, 1941.

They rolled into Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia very, very quickly. The initial blitzkrieg killed hundreds of thousands of people. My mother's city of about 70,000 was attacked by German bombers, and 700 people were killed that first day. My mother was 15 years old. She was leading a herd of cows from the field back to the house, and she was hiding under the cows, looking for protection. Her hands shook to the day of her death from the terror and horror of that moment. But that was only one of the first times, one of many times, that she would be bombed.

A year later, the Germans started taking teenagers from the USSR to use a slave labor to work in German factories. And my mother was one of them. She was 16 years old. The Germans came to the courthouse. They got their records out of who's the population.

They said, we want you, you, you, you, and you to be on the train platform to go to Germany to work. And my mother was one of those who was selected to go with many of her friends in a boxcar across Poland and to Germany.

The Germans told them that they would be only for six months, and then they would come home. A lot of those kids, literally kids, teenagers, thought it was kind of an adventure for them. And one of the safest places during World War II was Germany itself. All the fighting and destruction was in Russia. It was, you know, in a war with the West.

It was in North Africa. It was Italy. But Germany itself, through not until almost the very end of the war, is when Germany suffered the destruction that it did. My mother worked in a shoe factory. She had friendship with another young girl from her town. They were 16 years old. My father, in the same way, from eastern Ukraine, was taken to work in the German factories.

He was a year and a half older than my mother, and he also went and worked there. He also had a friend. And these two friends, these two couples, got to know each other when they worked in the slave camps. My mother worked in a shoe factory, and my dad worked in a food factory. My mother, it would be another 27 years, though, before she would come back to visit her parents, which she finally did in 1969, the year that I graduated from Ambassador College.

Conditions for the foreign workers were harsh. They had to wear a yellow badge, like the Jews did, but it said OST on it, AUST, East. They were East workers. They could not walk on the sidewalks. They had to walk in the streets, and they were treated, as Wunder mentioned, as less than fully human, in a sense.

The mindset of the Russians was horrific as far as what had happened. I don't think that we could ever understand the amount of horror, the amount of death that took place in the killing fields between the East and West. The USSR suffered 30 million deaths, 30 million deaths. The United States suffered about 200,000 dead in World War II in the European theater. The Russians, in one sense, said we're the ones who fought World War II. You know, you didn't.

America's just put very little in. But the amount of death was horrific. Hundreds of thousands. Russian battle deaths and battle deaths were numbered in the hundreds of thousands. What America lost in all the war with Germany was something that would be a typical loss for one battle with the Russians and Germans. In the last two weeks of World War II, Russians lost two million men because Stalin said, take Berlin at all costs. And he didn't care. These were statistics to him. And yet these people were people just like you and I. We have children. We love our children. Just like the one we blessed today, he's valuable. Very valuable. They are very, very important to us.

Our children are very, very important. We love them. And the Russians, Ukrainians, love their children as much. But these perished by the millions. My parents, then, as the war was coming to an end, as the war was coming to an end, my parents were not married yet. They were just dating the two couples. That's when the American and the British bombing started over the city of Magdeburg, where they lived. Their city was a strategic center for fuel storage.

And the Americans bombed all day long, the British bombed all night long, and many, many civilians, collateral damage, were killed. Among them, many of the slave laborers. And the Germans and the British came with carpet bombing. They didn't have the precision kind of bombing that they do now in the wars in Iraq and other places, where they're just very, very precise as to where they bombed.

They just came in, and one square mile of the city would be taken out every night. The next night, another square mile would be burned up. And the third night, another square mile would be burned up. Many civilians died. And among them were many of my parents' friends. My mother and her friend were given access to a bunker to go into, and they would walk into these bunkers that were like zigzags, and they were built that way so that if a bomb dropped on one of those areas, the people in that section would be killed, but not the whole area.

But after a while, they just got tired of going into the bunker. They'd just like, if we're going to die, we're going to die. And they would just watch the bombing like the Fourth of July fireworks. It was kind of surreal watching all this happening. And that's what they lived in the last days of the war. Finally, the war came to an end. Actually, my dad and his friend were able to escape to a German farm. Everything was kind of chaotic. The German population was seeing that the war was coming to an end, and everybody just wanted it to end.

And my parents finally saw the Americans come, and they were all excited. The Americans came in. A certain very happy note was apparent. Americans came in with chocolate, cigarettes, hams, you know, worthless things. And the people were just very, very excited and very happy. And liberation, finally. We survived. We survived this inferno of what we had gone through. And they were waiting to see what was next. But two days later, two days later, they weren't hearing American voices anymore in Magdeburg. They were hearing Russian voices.

What's this all about? Well, what this was about was that in the Potsdam Conference, just at the very end of the war, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divided up Germany according to zones that no matter who got where, the boundaries would be what they had designed. The Americans had almost come all the way to Berlin. They had passed Magdeburg, and they were on their way to Berlin. The Russians had already come in and swarmed over Berlin.

But the boundaries would be what they were before Germany was reunited, East Germany and the three Western zones. My parents were in the East German zone, and the Russians came. The Russians then looked to these workers, these East workers, who were just teenagers when they went to Germany to work as collaborators, as traitors to Russia, to the USSR. They were interrogated. They were treated very, very badly. My parents were put into transitional camp, and they said, what are we going to do?

They know that they're going to be herded all the way back to Russia, to Ukraine. Fortunately, President Eisenhower figured out what the Russians were up to, and they stopped this movement of people back west. But my parents still had to leave this transitional camp at this time, and they managed to escape. That's a story of its own. You can read about that, or you can listen to it on the website. I have this entire story that I have explained and told you about. My parents then came to a United Nations refugee camp in Hanover, Germany.

They worked their way over this force them to this refugee camp in the British zone, and they remember very well what happened on the day that they entered onto that camp. The big news that day was that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, so I know when that happened. There, they settled, just like many refugees all over Europe, different places in the world.

They have no passport. They have nothing. They are nothing to the outside. They have no documentation. They are just people without a country. They are DPs, displaced persons. So this camp—and I've gone back to visit that camp. You know, it's the school of police now, just north of the downtown area of Hanover, where I was born.

My parents married in 1946. I was born in 1947. My parents were looking for a country to take them. They looked to Canada, to Australia, to South America, to the United States, but they had no sponsors. They knew nobody. Their friends, the other friends from Canada, had an uncle in Canada who sponsored them, and he was able to get them over to Canada. But my parents had to spend several more years in a camp just looking and looking, and they had finally come to a point in 1949, when I was almost two years old, that nobody's going to take us.

We can't just live in a refugee camp, and we are going to go back home, whatever the cost is, because we need to go home. When my father's father, my grandfather, heard that my parents were considering coming back, he sent an SOS message to them, don't come back! Don't return home! They will kill you!

They will kill your son! That's what they've done to others who have come back. They were looked upon with contempt as those who had collaborated with the enemy. So my parents continued to stay in the camp. But they were able to quickly find, all of a sudden, providentially, a sponsor in the United States, who was a friend of the family in Ukraine. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota, and he sponsored us to come to Minnesota. So I was two years old, July of 1949. My parents came on a troop transport to Minnesota.

They came to see the Statue of Liberty. They went through Ellis Island, put on a train, and sent to pick apples in southern Minnesota. The Ukrainians then began to form this whole community that of these stragglers kind of found each other from several camps and started a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, also in Minneapolis.

They were stragglers. They had a priest. My father was on the board of directors. They bought a building, and they had church going. They, all of a sudden, after atheism, became orthodox and began to adopt the old rituals and all the customs and all the art of the religions that were known in those countries. My mother never felt comfortable. My mother never felt comfortable with what she was hearing and what the format of the services was and what all the liturgy was.

She never was comfortable. But for many, it was that way. It was just a way for people to get together and to be at one. We were very involved in the church. I was very involved in the church. I was an altar boy for many years. I even considered the priesthood. But in 1961, I began to hear something on the radio talking about the Sabbath.

But why do you keep Sunday when the Bible so clearly states, remember the Sabbath? And I was very religious in the church that I was in. I read my prayers morning and evening. I was very serious about my faith. I was very involved in our use and in the principles of our teachings. And I began to have questions. I went to my priest, and I said, I really need to talk to you about some of these questions, because this really is nagging on me. Why do we observe Sunday when the Bible says to remember the Sabbath? And he gave me the standard answers that I had already been reading about in the literature that was sent to me about the Sabbath.

I began to talk to my mother about these things, who was not happy or not fulfilled in her faith. My mother took a special interest in every single new thing that came up about Christmas's origins, about the Holy Spirit, about the Trinity, about the Sabbath, prophetic events, things that she was not hearing in the church, and yet they were from the same Bible. And my mother and I talked about these things, but my father was very much against it. But my mother just waited. I went through my eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade. I didn't realize that there was a church forming in Minneapolis at that time. At that time on the radio, they didn't say much, but I listened to the World Tomorrow Program every day and began to listen to it with my mother. She was very much searching for the truth. I was to go to Ambassador College the same year that John Sephora was to go to college in 1965, but my father put his foot down. I was 17 years old. He says, you're not leaving this house. You cannot go. I had no money anyway. You're not going to go with those holy rollers out there in California, and anybody who was in Orthodox was a holy roller.

That's the last thing we are, believe me.

Fruits and nuts, he called him holy rollers. He was just very, very upset with them.

And I didn't go. I went to the University of Minnesota that year in preparation for going the next year. But during that time, my mom and dad began. I started attending services. They let me go to Sabbath services. I went to Sabbath services, and I went to church on Sunday. Sabbath services in church on Sunday. But after Sabbath services, which was at Laidlaw Hall, South Minneapolis, I would go through the sermon with them in real time. Every scripture, what the minister said, what was said. My parents listened with open eyes and open mouths.

They listened and listened and listened. They were hearing things that they could not believe were in the Bible from their own son. All I did was just read the notes that I had taken in services that afternoon. February, March came. And finally, my father said, I want to talk to your minister.

And our minister came over to the house, and they talked until two o'clock in the morning.

Two o'clock in the morning. That was a long visit for the pastor. My father had asked all kinds of questions, but the end of it was, is that my parents were finally invited to services for Pentecost. It was a happy moment. But it was a difficult moment because they had to leave the people that they were so close to. It wasn't just good buddies and things that they had met in the neighborhood, you know, at the pool or anything. These are people who were bombed on. These are people who survived. These were a group of people that said, we really made it through through a very, very difficult time. And, you know, when my parents were reading about the tribulation and what we said about the tribulation, they said, we've been there, you know, we've got that out of the way. Because they had gone through just about everything that we say about the tribulation, about people dying, people dying by the millions. And that is still ahead of us.

My parents knew that, and they saw what the Bible said. And they also, they were not antagonistic towards the people around them, but they said, this is not the truth. My mother said, I have found what I have been looking for. And that's when we started attending services.

I went to Ambassador College. My father went through his first baptism in 1967 and then died of a heart attack. A few weeks later, he died on May 5, 1967, 50 years ago this year.

My mother was a widow for the next 15 years before she died of leukemia.

She was a very faithful member in the church. Her home was about three miles south of where services were, which were morning services. And every Sabbath, people just came over to our house.

We had kind of a big old farmhouse, and people always just enjoyed being with her. She never missed anybody's birth. And a baby was a gift or anniversary. She was truly an amazing woman who had found something really great. Her life was totally changed, and she was totally committed to the kingdom of God. She loved it when I gave any kind of a sermon or wrote about anything dealing with the kingdom of God. This was something that was so important to her.

After her death, and one of the people who came to her funeral was John Bald. You might know him. He was a pastor for many years. He was a pastor in Rochester, Minnesota. But again, as I already said earlier, my mother had a letter that was read at the funeral. And John Bald heard this, and he wrote in the United News in 2001. In 2001, he wrote in the United News an article about seniors in the church. The article was entitled, Crowns of Glory, and gave stories of about three or four different seniors. And one of them was my mother. And here's what he said about her. He said it was titled, An Outstanding Example. In this context, I am reminded of a truly outstanding example of a senior citizen in the church, now deceased. She was Nina Kubik, the mother of Victor Kubik. 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 person's camp for four years. In 1949, she and 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. The 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 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 concerns her deeply as she tried to serve both the needs of the church and her Ukrainian friends. So great was her concern that she left instructions that a letter be read at her funeral by the presiding minister, who is no Horner. This was done. My wife and I were privileged, John Bald writes, to be able to attend her funeral and to 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 that she had previously, but she wanted them to know that it 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, and that she felt compelled to pursue the way which she pictured the Bible as that incomparable pearl. This was one of the most moving experiences of my life, and I was very impressed by her expressed concern for her longtime friends, as well as by the need she felt to serve the God she had learned about in the Bible. Let you turn to Matthew 13.

Matthew.

We have parables that Jesus Christ gives to His disciples on the subject of the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God. Now, it depends on how you number these parables. Different commentaries, some say they're six parables, some say they're seven, and one even has somehow divided them up into ten different parables. But there are parables here about, of course, the sower and the seed, the wheat and the tares, the mustard seed, the parable of the leaven. But then there are two parables that are very, very similar. The parable of the pearl of great price, the parable of the hidden treasure, and also the parable of the pearl of great price. Let's read them. They're very, very short. Matthew 13 and verse 44.

Again, the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, the other writers of the Gospels call it the Kingdom of God, is like the treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid. He's the person that stumbles upon a treasure in this lot that has for sale on it. And for joy over it goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

He finds this bucket and he kind of kicks it and there's a couple gold bars there, and he says, this is a very valuable piece of property. And what does it cost? I'm going to buy it, because what I have found here is so very valuable. He sells everything he's got. He sells relationships, so to speak, or he distances himself from all the associations that he had in order to buy that field. That doesn't say that he had to, it would be antagonistic, but he had to put his first priority, the purchase of that field, which often leads to your will. The next parable is verse 45. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. Here's somebody who says, you know, I'm just looking for some really quality things. I'm trying to find some extremely valuable pearls, something that's really worthwhile.

And when he had found one pearl of great price, when he finally found it, aha, there it is. That's the one. That's the most valuable thing, perfect diamond, perfect pearl. He went and sold all that he had and bought it, because it was the right thing. And my mother wanted every one of her friends to know that she had found the pearl of great price. She had found those things that were most important to her, the most important aspects of life and purpose of living, the real God, that she had found the pearl of great price. And as she said in her letter so very well, she didn't think any less of them, but she also said that she found the pearl of great price that followed that right lot in life. Would you be able to say, would you be able to write such a letter to your friends? My mother truly was a woman that really set an example in her community, and she was highly regarded, even by people who knew that we had gone off to some wacky California group and left the traditional Orthodox Church, because most people just, if they went to any church, it was a Catholic church or it was a Ukrainian church, or Orthodox church. And the reason for it, and a big part, was the fact that they spoke those languages, the services were in those languages, and so they could understand it instead of going to an American, you know, English-speaking church. But I do know that for some of the people, it was a very difficult separation, that my parents, who had separated themselves from people that they had gone through so much, would value something in life that was so much bigger, and so much more important, that they were willing to jettison, they were willing to go by, they were willing not to have those things that they had before, so that they could put all their efforts into the pearl of great price. Now, some of us stumbled upon the truth. I would say that I'm the one who found the treasure in the field. I just stumbled upon it. I just turned the radio dial, was hearing things, and I said, what's this? What's this? You know, and listened to it for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now, this stuff, that quality to it, this stuff is thought-provoking. This stuff is valuable.

And I had to go through a stage, even though I was a young age, I was not even baptized, where I had to not be in debate anymore on Saturdays, could not be involved with tennis, could not be involved with the different things I had, because I had found the treasure in the field. And it was worth changing direction in life. It was worth all those things, because I had found that treasure hidden in the field. I was the one who stumbled on it. My mother was the one who was seeking it. She was seeking it from the time that she was still in Germany, when she came to the United States. She was the Lydia, who she and the people in Philippi were talking about one another, studying the Scriptures, and said, We've got to get Paul here. We've got to get one of the apostles and one of the disciples over from Asia Minor to come over here to explain these things to us. We're seeking, we're learning. Or the eunuch, who was studying the Scriptures, said, Show me, show me, show me. He was searching. He was looking for the truth. I had one person in the church in Minneapolis who, also the same way he was searching, he just never found satisfaction with what he was learning and studying and finding in the religions that were around him. But when he found the truth, he said, Aha! That's it. That's it. We had people who had farms in northern North Dakota that sold their farms so they could move to Minneapolis, St. Paul, to be closer to church. They made big, big sacrifices, big changes, life-changing things of that sort. My father so badly wanted me to go to the University of Minnesota to become either a mathematician or just anything with I.T. and I enjoyed double-E, electrical engineering. But I had to make a change and go to this college out west that truly taught me the principles that really I was passionate about and wanted to work with all my life, not just something that's kind of a temporary thing. And you know, right now we're having the ministerial trainees that we are bringing into the church. One of the most exciting things that I'm finding about the church and the new people that we're having come in as husbands and wives in the ministry, that I'm seeing that same passion that we had among those of us like John and Sandy, where this was the truth, this was our job, this was what we were seeking, this is what we're going to give our life to. And we're finding that right now as we're ordaining them one after another and repopulating the church. I'm very, very excited about this phenomenon that's occurring in the church. It's not just a job. It's not something that you kind of do part-time. It's not something, but it's a passion that you're just driven to serve and to care for the needs of the sheep, the being a shepherd, and truly being that way. I found John to be that way. He was a person, as one individual told me, and two individuals have told me, or maybe was that one individual told me twice. Anyway, he said John was a person without guile. He was a person that he wouldn't be trying to say all kinds of evil things or thinking evil things when he would just say nice things. He didn't think badly of people. He thought highly of his work in the ministry in Salem, or whether it was Cape Girardeau that at least I'm familiar with, and I'm certain in other areas. But he truly is a minister who will be missed for that. We only have about 80 pastors in the United States where at one time in 1994 we had 400 pastors, 400 pastors. Now we have 80 pastors serving the same geographical area. We really have a great cliff to climb.

But I truly believe that the lives of the pastors that have come before us, and John, before his time, perhaps this focuses our attention upon his work and what he had to do.

And what we can do in memory of him is to serve and to have that passion to be able to continue searching for truth, passing on the truth, being unified as a body, to apply the teachings of John, the things that he taught you, the things that he motivated you with. Time to get those notes out and see what he said and what he taught and how he enriched to this congregation.

Now we're finding that there are times when somebody's taken before the time because John and Sandy wanted to make it to their 50th year of marriage, which was just two years away, their 50th year of service in a ministry, but it's not going to happen. But perhaps a way to honor their work is to look at the teachings that he had, to listen to the things that he said in sermons, to apply them and to take them much more seriously. We don't know how much time we individually have, and neither do we know how much time there is in the world.

But the reality to us right now is, is that we're going through a period of mourning, and in a sense, a period of, in a kind of a denial, we're not fully impacted fully with all what this means individually, I'm sure in the lives of the Sephoric family, and even with the people that I've met in Eugene this morning and with you, too, the statements that are made. I don't think it's really fully sunk in all the ramifications of this. But let's be ones now that take the legacy of John's work, of John's sacrifice, of John's the legacy of his work, his studies, and so forth, to move us forward into where we need to be as a church, and ultimately as servants of God and being part of the God family. The great white throne judgment is called a period and what we are taught is a period where people are judged by the books. The books are open and they're judged. This was no doubt read to you just a little over a week ago. But do you know that judgment is now upon the house of God in 1 Peter chapter 4, 1 Peter chapter 4, in verse 17, that we're actually living the great white throne judgment in one sense now.

This is not just a trial run. We're being judged now by the books in the same way, by what we're taught in services, what we're taught by our leaders.

1 Peter chapter 4, verse 17, for the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God. And if it begins with us first, what shall be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?

Judgment is beginning right now. We are being judged. The knowledge that we are receiving week in and week out, the things that we have been asked to pray for, it's not something we put away and kind of get around to it someday. It's time now. It's time to take a look at the things that the church should be doing in its overall mission of producing sons and daughters for God's kingdom as a whole church effort. It's a time for our church to be unified and to work through process, whether it be doctrine, procedure, or whatever we do, to be a church truly that others can say, when they come up in the white throne judgment period and they see you, they can say that truly that person was very special. They will about my mother. Will they say the same thing about you? And could you write a letter to your friends that you have found the pearl of great price and they take you seriously someday for it? Certainly, again, we are going through a period of love and support. Right now, I can't explain anymore of where we're at.

The one thing that we do need right now is to hug each other, is to love each other, and to support the Sephora family. And to grieve through this just the way that Abraham grieved for his wife, and he cried for her for a long time, for 40 days. And the same is true as we also grieve through this. As a church, we don't want to do anything very quick or change. We don't want to bring anybody in here, does another thing. We want to walk through this week by week by week until we come to understanding which will become clear at that time. Well, it's been wonderful to visit with you. I'm just very, very thankful to be able to come here at this time. I would not be able to come on November 11th when the memorial and the celebration of life will be held for John, but I wanted to be here for Sandy, for Carmella, for those who I know are going through a period of hurting and grief at this time.

So may God bless you, and I look forward to talking to you after services.