Where Are We Headed? Where is UCG Headed?

My sermon is, Where Are We Headed? and Where Is the United Church of God Going? It might be a bit of a broad theme, but I have some very specific things that I want to get across this afternoon. Germany invaded Ukraine, or the USSR, in June of 1941, Operation Barbarossa. My mother and father grew up in Ukraine, my mother in eastern Ukraine near Kharkov. She was 15 when the Germans invaded. And my father was from the West. He was a teenager of 16, and he was living in still with, at that time, Poland. A year later, in 1942, the Germans took teenagers aged 16 and above to work in German factories. My mother Nina was one of them. The Germans came, they went to what would be the courthouse, got the name of all the families, the children, and sent a letter to all the families saying that your daughter, your son, is to appear on the train platform in two days, and he must be there, and he's going to Germany to work. The same type of thing happened to my father in western Ukraine. And they were both in work camps in Magdebur. Okay, thank you very much. I'll speed it up.

They both worked in work camps in Magdeburg, which was between Hanover and Berlin, and that's where they met. They suffered a great deal of terror during the war. My mother died almost 30 years ago this month. After she died, I found a number of letters among her private things, her papers, and there were two short letters I'll just read excerpts from that really told me the story about some of what she went through. This first one here is from her sister, and it was to actually a letter that was sent to me.

This was not to my mother. This was a letter that was sent to me after she had died. My dear nephews and nieces, I'm being one of them, your mother had a hard life. In the years of the war, our village changed hands six times between the Russians and the Germans.

The oldest and youngest were evacuated. Your mother Nina stayed behind where all the fighting took place. I still remember one moment when your mother was leading a cow home and had a frightened look on her face after the Germans bombed our town. Then the Germans took our village and then took Nina to Germany. She kind of told the story. The Germans had subdued my mother's, it's actually a town with 70,000 people, in a first air raid that killed 700 people. My mother was leading a cow home from the field, and she remembers the bombing all around, and she was just terrified, and she went undercover underneath the cow.

I remember as we were growing up, my mother still was shaking. She had never gotten over the shakes from the terror that she suffered with all the bombs going around her, but that was only the first time that she was bombed. There are so many stories of people who had gone through so much, and most of the stories can't be told because the people are all dead. Very, very few people survived. Another one, which is a letter I did find in my mother's things, was to my mother when she was in Germany from her brother Victor, my uncle Victor.

He says in the first lines of our short letter, our family greets you. Are you all right? You write that you are lonely, living on foreign soil, but you're not the only one separated from their family. Many people are finding themselves in this condition. You ask about your brother Alex. We have not heard from him in two years. He was in the service. He did return. But in the Soviet Army, one of those who entered the Army at age 19, one in a hundred returned, shows the level of carnage, 15 million Soviet military deaths in World War II. If we live, we will meet you again. The weather has been good for growing.

The gardens look good, and we will have things to eat in the winter. The Russians came in February, but the Germans returned in March. On the front, where we are, there has been no shooting.

But in May, many people in the neighboring villages died. The land is covered with blood, and the end of the war is not in sight. We're tired of the war. In 1988, I went back to my mother's town for a family reunion.

It was four years after she had died. I arranged, this was back when this was the USSR, to be with my uncles and aunts. Some of my cousins came even from Siberia, and we were together for parts of two days. It was still very difficult to go to the actual village, but we got special permission to go there. My uncle Victor and my uncle Valentin took us around the village where my mother used to live and said, here's where her house used to be, but it was totally destroyed by bombing.

Here's the root cellar where they lived, the whole family lived, for the years of the war. It was just surreal to see all this. And to say, did this really happen? Can people do this to one another? And I can't believe it's my family. I'm an American. Everything's supposed to be nice in my life.

Her brother continues in the letter, You said that you would like to see the flowers in the homeland again. That would be good, but now the land has been ravaged by war. I think often of your cheerful smile and your kind words to us, my loving sister. Please write to us about how you're eating and are the Germans good to you. We've not been receiving your letters. Please give greetings to your friends with whom you're working. My parents worked in two different factories while they were slave laborers, what it amounted to be. But the last few months of the war, my father was put into a concentration camp. And he was given a job that whenever the Allies bombed, which they bombed daily there at the very end of the war, the British were bombing all night, the Americans were bombing all day long. And their job as concentration camp prisoners was to go in and to pull out any bombs that hadn't exploded. The Germans basically used these concentration camp people for doing that. They didn't care what happened to them. If a bomb blew up, well, that's too bad.

After the war, and there's a whole story, and I've written it and I've spoken about it a number of times, they ended up in a United Nations refugee camp in Hanover.

And they remembered the big news when they were brought into the camp that everybody was talking about, that an atomic bomb was dropped in Japan on that day. That was the big buzz, the big news that day. So this was August of 1945. The first atomic bomb was dropped 69 years ago, almost 70 years. And that's the day that my parents came into the United Nations camp. They were married there, and they were looking for a country that would take them.

They were married. I was born there in 1947. They looked and looked for countries. They looked for Australia, South America, Canada, but they just couldn't seem to make the connection. And they decided that, well, we might as well just go back home, back to Ukraine. And they left the camp, and were on the train platform, until a courier came to them with a letter. It says, a letter just came to you. A letter just came to you to my father. You may want to read this before you go. And it was a letter from his dad, David, that said, if you're thinking about coming back, don't. Under no circumstances are you to come back. Those who were slave laborers, who are returning now, or looked upon as collaborators, that are treated very badly, some of them are even being killed. And it says, my father, who was Ukrainian, married a Russian woman, a Russian wife. My mother was Russian. He says, that will certainly be a possibility for death for you. So don't come back. And so my parents didn't. And shortly after that, they did find a sponsor in Minnesota who accepted them. And we moved to Faribault, Minnesota, and ultimately to Minneapolis, St. Paul, that I still, in some ways, consider to be my home.

My parents would talk about how hard it was emotionally. We were just little kids. And we just hated to hear them talk about the suffering they went through, because they would start crying. My mother would always start crying about missing her mother. She would talk about the bombing. She would talk about the horror of the war. And we didn't want to hear it. We were just kids. We had no desire to go through that.

And then, one day, in 1953, this was the year that Stalin died, my father received the first letter in years from his home. I remember coming home from school. I was in first grade or so. My mother said, you better go to your room. You better not. You just stay out of dad's way right now. Because in that letter, he got the news of all the things that had happened since about 1947. He learned about the death of his two brothers in the war. He learned about the death of his mother. A lot of devastation in his family. Much of them were gone, scattered, and even unknown as to what their whereabouts were. This was my parents' first contact with the Soviet Union, because after Stalin's death, there was at least a little bit of ability to communicate. Before that, everything was shut down. It was very, very close between the U.S. and Russia. In 1962, I began listening to the World Tomorrow radio program. My parents read along with me what was being preached and talked about, and some of the literature that we received about apocalyptic events to take place at the end. My parents were becoming partial to the truth. They ultimately both came into the church in 1966. But I remember my parents looking over the literature and reading about the Great Tribulation. They said to us very, very straight to me and my brother. He said, we have already gone through the Tribulation. We have gone through invasion. We have gone through slavery. We've been workers in the camp working for nothing, not knowing what's beyond or what's going to happen beyond. We're used to bombings, or we had experienced bombs where our friends, close friends, next to us died. And we survived. We don't know why we're the ones, but we're the ones who survived.

So we lived all this. And when the Great Tribulation was being preached about it, we said, we have already been there. Now we also teach that prophetically, that before the return of Jesus Christ, there will be a time of Great Tribulation, a time of Jacob's trouble. We've been talking about this ever since I have been a part of the Church. It's been part of our teachings.

It's been a part of what we talk about to the world. We talk about the prophecies of the Old Testament as being a forerunner, being typical of greater fulfillments in our time.

Our understanding of the people of Israel and who they have become now has become the basis of a scenario of what would happen to the descendants of people who do and act the way that their ancestors did, what they do in this time, what will take place.

And these prophecies are to take place. And these prophecies are closer to fulfillment than when I first listened to the radio back in 1962. A lot more close. And when I take a look at what's happening in the world right now, I wonder just how close. Maybe we don't want to hear about these things.

And maybe we are just wanting to be like I was as a kid. I don't want to hear about it. Everything seems really fine. The stock market is at all-time high. It had a little blip last week, but stock market is at an all-time high. Gold is still worth a lot. And we live our lives as though, really, in some ways there will be a tomorrow.

There will be a day of reckoning, but I don't want to think about it. My dad also said this about the village where my mother was that was leveled. He said that after the Germans came and destroyed their house, that they still could live in a root cellar, they still had a garden, they had a well, and there was a spirit in the town of working together and helping one another out after the invasion took place.

My dad said that, look where we live. What would happen if the water went out? And it's not a matter of just calling the water department and saying, could you get our water going? What would happen if the electricity went out? And it's not a matter of it coming back on in 15 minutes or an hour. We just fully expect this just to kind of happen. It will never come back on.

What if the Internet went down? You can't tweet, text anybody. What if there was none of these things and you only have maybe a week or two of food? And there's just a very few survivalists who have a missile silo in Colorado that they turn into an apartment that will survive maybe just a little bit longer. You know something? We're cooked. We have nothing. What would you do? What would I do? I think that these are questions we need to think about in context of where we are and where we're headed.

Right now, the world is in the most dangerous state. All of a sudden, just out of the blue, arises ISIS, this mess of Sunni Shiite between Iraq and Syria, a totally disengaged, lawless area run by warlords. That's a problem because it's growing. Syria and genocide. Last night on Fox News, released on their website, they had some horrific pictures of the genocide of thousands of people. And people, over 100,000 in camps, about to be killed as well.

Horrific genocide that has not been seen since, well, I mean, it happens every few years or so, but just horrific. And they had published some pictures, so we're just terrible. They said, be careful. These pictures are a graphic. Then what's happened with Hamas in Israel? It's just not another flare-up. It's not just another flare-up. The feelings run deep. And it's a matter of one side has to win over the other. The Palestinians, Hamas, or at least the terrorists, want to see it to the end. Even if it destroys themselves personally, they hate Israel so much that they want to see their lives come to the end.

That situation has brought on a lot of conflict. A lot of conflict around the world is people's side with each side. Oh yeah, then there's Iran to think about. We've almost forgotten about Iran. We're so worried about them of getting the nuclear capability to destroy Israel, which they probably will get in probably just literally months, if not just a year away from getting the bomb. Then what? Then what kind of an iron dome will be required to protect them, to protect Israel from Iran? We live in a very, very dangerous world. At Rotary Club in Batavia, we had a special guest speaker who is now the deputy ambassador to Iraq.

He was between assignments. He was working in the American embassy in Israel, now was reassigned as the deputy ambassador to Iraq. His name is David Cottle, and he's from Batavia. Actually, his home is Batavia. He had been back to visit and gave a very, very informative and sobering speech.

This was not some kind of fear talk. This is simply talking about the facts on the ground in the Middle East. He said that the Middle East crisis is beyond negotiation. It isn't a matter of just, let's sit down and let's just have some potential Nobel Peace Prize people get together and talk and have a lot of rhetoric. It's beyond that. It's way beyond that. He said Egypt has imploded. It's serious coming apart, but it's spreading its poison throughout the Middle East. It's been a haven for terrorists.

He said that Israel, in spite of the fact that there may be anti-Israeli sentiment in the U.S., half the U.S. military aid budget goes, foreign military aid budget goes to Israel. Who are given, as he put it, the latest stuff. And that's how Israel is able to make it. A country with just a very few million people is able to withstand everything from North Africa to Iraq to Iran to Saudi, is able to withstand the whole thing which cannot go on in Tiram There will come a time when this whole thing will come to a collapse. And then, of course, there's Ukraine. That one really strikes deep inside of me. I am of Ukrainian descent. I have traveled to Ukraine at least 20 times, doing things with everything from ambassador foundation to working with Sabbatarians to working in Chernobyl. I speak the language flawlessly. I didn't know English until I was five. And so I'm able to get around very, very easily. But that one strikes very, very painfully at me. Because it was such a surprise and a happy moment in 1991 when Ukraine became independent, when the USSR literally overnight imploded. I couldn't believe how peaceful it was. And Russia and the other 14 republics all of a sudden became separate countries, literally within a month. It was just an amazing phenomenon of history. But that's all coming to an end. The same spirit that has ruled the czars and the communist leaders now rules the current leadership in Russia. They are not people who want peace. They are people who are hateful. They are people who are greedy and don't care. I've been in contact with our Sabbatarian friends and ministry over there and have talked to them, and they are really concerned about what's going on. They said, we can't believe how dehumanized we feel, even by our own government, and of course much less by the Soviet government. We feel all those pressures and all those feelings from years past all come back, and they're right here. And I have seen real fear in the anxiety of the future.

The doctor that we work with in Chernobyl sent me 4th of July wishes. He says, Victor, he says, Congratulations on the 238th anniversary of independence in America. We've had 22 years, and it's coming to an end. It's just very, very sad. It just hurts very, very deeply when this is said.

Remember Alina Chismar, the young lady who was here and spoke to us? This last week she said that, in fact, we invited her to come to ABC. She knows enough English to where she could make do. But she said, no, I don't think so. I'd like to. And she has a visa that could keep her here as much as anybody. I really need to take care of my mother and my sister, who are back in Ukraine, and I really don't think I can come this year.

And we stayed in touch with her on Facebook and email and Skype. And this past week she said that she was in the neighboring town from where she lives, and it was all barricaded. The military had come in. This is Western Ukraine now. This is as far away as you can be from Eastern Ukraine, where all the trouble is taking place. And the military had come in and they were going around looking for boys aged 19 and up to recruit them on the spot.

They just, I mean, there's absolutely no law, when it's martial law and it's Gentile in that way, there's no going to your congressman type of a thing. There's no outrage. It's just you're put under the boot immediately. So she said that the roads to the other town that she was at, the next town, Uzhgorod, were blockaded, and she was not able to leave.

Not sure when she would be able to leave. She contacted again. This was yesterday. And they said they had a youth conference planned for the Sabbatarians. And they said they're not going to have any kind of meetings now, because what the police does and what the army does now, they look for meetings. They go there and they grab young men and put them in the army, and they are sending them now right straight to Donetsk, to the east.

This is not just something from a movie or this is not something that is scared talk. This is what's happening this week. A young lady who spoke here back when Ukraine was at peace in November, in an hour, it's very uncertain as to what will take place. But knowing the 800-year history between Russia and Ukraine, if things were just to play themselves out, it's not going to be good. It's very painful. We had, we worked with a street children's program in an orphanage in western Ukraine. We sent three people there this year. We sent five last year. And one of them was a young lady from Denver, from the United Church of God. We thought it was totally safe.

But literally a week after they left, a week or two after they had left, mid-July, the armies come in and martial law is declared. We live in a very, very dangerous time that's spoken of biblically as a time of Jacob's trouble. It's not something to put off and not something to sweep under the rug, but something to think about as part of where we stand and what we believe.

As part of what we preach. You know, we preach three different major areas. Prophecy, doctrine, and Christian living. And there are times when prophecy gets abused or misused because certain very enthusiastic people predict nations and people in the events that take place at a certain time. I feel it's a tool of the devil to get people to poo-poo and disregard all prophecy when you have people who are less than balanced be able to make predictions like that.

But the Bible does prophesy them, and most of all Jesus Christ, who said that unless these things were to take place or to be stopped, there would no flesh be saved alive. We'll take a look at some of those passages. This last week I've looked at the book of Jeremiah because it's a book that kind of, the vibes of that book kind of correspond with the way I feel right now about what's happening in the world.

Especially with what's happening in Ukraine and what's happening with genocide in Syria because I'm a humanitarian. I love people. I love helping people. And I hate it when we help people on one side and there's another entity completely destroying people, killing them, ripping families apart, and having total disregard for them in the process. But the book of Jeremiah has a tone. He has, in fact, they say that if you have a Jeremiah attitude that you're a melancholy person because the spirit of Jeremiah is very melancholy. And even more so for the other book that he wrote, which is the book of Lamentations. But it is a book that talks about what Israel would go through and what hardships that they would go through because of their abominations, because of false gods.

There were reasons for it. But Jeremiah felt so badly for what would happen. I might say, too, that with my parents, after they came into the church, one thing that was very, very clear to them is that they felt God's hand in their lives. Not at the time that they were going through these events, but when they came to understand the truth and they began to understand the bigger scope of life and prophecy and so forth, they saw how God had protected them one step at a time.

There's another whole story that I could tell about their escape. But God had worked through them and protected them and brought them through. And if there's anybody that I would say that my parents have been protected from now is not to have to go through the tribulation again.

Now, am I talking about a tribulation coming here next week? No, I'm not. I'm really not. I'm just talking about the things that are biblically stated. I do know this, is that if a cataclysm were to take place, it would be very, very fast. Right now we have Internet, we have telecommunications, we don't have the type of scenario where armies march on for weeks coming to do battle. Things right now are done very, very quickly. World War I was armies fighting armies. And people in the U.S. and people in Germany led lives that were relatively normal because they were not endangered.

World War II was a war of populations. Now there you had cities like Warsaw that was 90% destroyed or Stalingrad, 90% destroyed. Or Dresden that was destroyed by the Americans in fire bombings. But World War III will be a complete disaster of our planet. Nobody will be spared. Nobody. And we more than ever need to be praying for God's protection upon His people. And to pray for safety to come to us. Can I tell you where that place of safety is? Absolutely not. Or when, or where, or how to get tickets or frequent flyer points for getting there. I can't tell you any of that information. Maybe Erindine could tell you about the frequent flyer points. But I certainly can't. Now people have had some very, very impractical ideas and have set themselves up as those who would do such things. My parents were protected by angels who watched over them in Ukraine, in Germany, and in America, and brought them to this country. I particularly feel a sense of destiny of coming to this country and being one of the survivors when there's many like me that are dead who cannot tell their story. Jeremiah 30 verse 1. And I'll just read just some passages just to get the flavor. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel, saying, Write in a book for yourself all the words that I have spoken to you. For behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that I will bring back from captivity my people Israel and Judah, says the Lord. These are people who had already been taken into captivity. I don't think that we realize just what a horrific thing a captivity is. Now, what if some foreigner came here and just ripped you away, took your kids out of school, took your husband from work, and he's gone. He's taken into captivity someplace. You have no idea where he is. Nobody's listening to you. Nobody cares about you. That's what a captivity is, a national captivity, which the North and Ten Tribes suffered by being led to Assyria completely, and in the South, in Jerusalem, Judah, they were taken to Babylon. These were horrific, family-altering events. And I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. Now these are the words, verse 4, that the Lord spoke concerning Israel and Judah, for thus says the Lord, We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask now and see whether a man is ever in labor with a child. So why do I see every man with his hands on his loins, like a woman in labor, and all faces turned pale? Alas, for the day is great, and that none is like it, and it is a time of Jacob's trouble, the great tribulation. But he shall be saved out of it.

One of the good stories that follows thematically through Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, that God will punish, God will allow these things to kind of come to a cataclysm and a lot of suffering take place, but that God will bring people back. And that he has a plan of redemption.

In the church, we need to pray even more fervently that the woman was taken to a place where she was protected. As you think about your children, and you think about your families. These are serious things to think about, you know, at our time. Jeremiah, chapter 11, and verse 22, Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, Behold, I will punish them. The young men shall die by the sword, their sons and their daughters shall die by famine. Here's violence and death.

I'm just thinking about what would take place in January in a city like New York, which is pretty much supplied by a long string of tractor trailers hauling food from California and Texas. If all that was to be stopped, what is the storage of food that's in a city like New York or Washington, D.C.?

Certainly not like in Joseph's time in Egypt, you know, where they had food stored up for years.

But you'll find that Costco is closed. You'll find Walmart, you can't get into it. Everything will be shut down. Everything will be raided. People will act like animals. And if they know that you have anything, they'll take that too. It will not be humane at all in any manner of thinking. Jeremiah, chapter 44, verse 11, Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, I will set my face against you for catastrophe and for cutting off all Judah. And I will take the remnant of Judah who have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt, to dwell there. And they shall be consumed in the fallen land of Egypt. They shall be consumed by the sword and by famine. They shall die for the least of the greatest, by the sword and by famine. And there shall be an oath, an astonishment, a curse, and a reproach. It talks about how horrible things will happen. And the reason I say this is because my dad used to read these passages and said, This is what we went through. We experienced this. We saw this in our friends. We saw people dying to the right and left.

At the very end of the war, when Magdeburg was bombed by the British and the Americans night after night, because there were huge petroleum reserves in, gasoline reserves in Magdeburg, was fire-bombed. And every night, people went to the bomb shelter. Of course, the Germans were allowed in first, the citizens were first, and then the workers came in second, if there was room for them. And they said that every night, if there was a direct hit on a part of that bomb shelter, which was built in zigzags, because if it hit one section there, it wouldn't just spread its force out over the whole bomb shelter. It would just kill all the people in that one section, but not everybody. But they would go in there and find out that this friend was killed, that friend was killed. That's what they went through. They kind of became somewhat inured to that.

They said, we have gone through that. We've seen that. Our nation is going to be punished for its moral stance, is forgetting God, is keeping God out of our lives completely. But, you know, there are people who will come out of that, even now. And that's where we get to the work of the Church, which I want to speak to you about as well, because the work of the Church will continue. In no way is the work of the Church going to be curtailed from preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which is the greatest prophecy of all. The Church will not be deterred from preaching a message of repentance, of change your lives, turn around, come around. And there are people who are going to come out of that, even in this world. We're not going to be stopping from preaching Christian living, how to treat one another, how to be Christ-like. We're not going to stop preaching about transforming and changing your life, all the things that we have been done. But we have to do it with wisdom, with balance, as to how we preach about the Kingdom of God. Another great prophecy, the greatest prophecy of all, the Kingdom of God, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ will return. This is prophetic teachings that were taught in the 1700s and 1500s and 1100s, whatever. That in spite of all the tribulation in this world, Jesus Christ is returning, and the Kingdom of God is coming to this earth.

We preach a message of warning to prepare ourselves. Prepare ourselves. In Matthew chapter 24, actually Luke chapter 21, Luke chapter 21, in verse 36, this is when Jesus Christ talked about prophetic events, that when you see certain things on a fig tree, when you see the leaves at a certain point, you kind of know the season is there. And that's what we try to tell people, too. We're in no way trying to delay the coming of the day of the Lord, or in any way trying to minimize it.

In fact, the day of the Lord is a lot closer to its ultimate fulfillment now than it was back in the 1960s, when I, with great enthusiasm, listened to this. Watch therefore and pray always, that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man. This is Luke 21, verse 36. Why do we watch? Why do we listen? Why do we pay attention to this? Why do we listen to prophecy? Is it to get inside information about how to beat the system, which in the case of some has been, their interest in prophecy? You know, whenever there's some horrible thing happening in the world, our listenership and our people who subscribe to us take a greater interest because, oh, here's more information that could guide me to what's going on in the world, rather than to watch that we may be counted worthy, that we may change our lives, that we may become righteous, that we may repent of our sins. That's why Jesus Christ said to watch what's going on in the world. One thing about prophecy is this, too. Prophetic things that I've said, and some of the things that I've said right now have not been pleasant, maybe even troubling or disturbing to hear. But John, on the Isle of Patmos, was given visions of cataclysmic things to come to pass. The book of Revelation is not a pleasant book. It ends up in a grand way the last two chapters, The Return of Jesus Christ, The Garden of Eden reestablished, the kingdom of God on the earth. But when John was given this scroll, this book, which contained the prophecies of what would happen to different nations and kings, here's the way he describes it. The angel said to him, so I went to the angel and said to him, give me the little book, John says. Revelation 10 and verse 9. Revelation 10 verse 9. I went to the angel and said to him, give me the little book, this little instructions of what's to take place. And he said to me, the angel said, take and eat it, and it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be sweet as honey in your mouth.

That to some prophecy enthusiasts, it's kind of fun to know what countries will be groups of nations, who will be the king of the south, who will be the king of the north, who ISIS is, and what Europe is, and Germany, and so forth. They get excited about this, they make their visio charts out there, and have all this grids of information of the fulfillment of these prophecies. But you know something? While it may be delicious to kind of do these things, they do make you sick because of all that's happened and what's happened to the human race. Jesus Christ, in his Olivet prophecy, said the following in Matthew chapter 24, and he talked about cataclysmic events that would take place. I mean, among the last things that Christ taught were prophetic scenarios. And he writes, and says in verse 20 of Matthew 24, Pray that your flight may not be in the winter or on the Sabbath. For then there shall be great tribulation. Christ prophesied this. This is what events to take place before his return. Obviously it wasn't then, obviously it wasn't in the year 1000, obviously it wasn't in 1800, whatever. It hasn't taken place yet. But these are some of the things that will take place. There'll be great tribulation, such as, Never been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. So what I'm saying, what I'm talking about, is not something that just is a fear thing or something that kind of got into me this past week. Jesus Christ said that there'll be great tribulation before his return, the likes of which have never been and will never be again. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved. But for the elect's sake, those days will be shortened. Basically, where is the world going? It's going to oblivion. It'll go into self-destruction. It'll be a total, not a population war, but environmental war, the side of our planet. And that's what would take place unless those days were shortened. And we're to pray always, as we read in Luke 21, that we may be accounted worthy to escape. That should be part of our prayers, if we haven't been thinking about those things we should. Because that has been one of the major focuses of the things that we have talked about and have understood. And like my parents, who have gone through it, they nodded their head and talked about how God had protected them and what a great tribulation means. They said, we have gone through it.

Where is the United Church of God going? Some people say, you know, our mission may be changing whatever. Absolutely not. We're going to be preaching. We have always been preaching what we have. And the mission of the church is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the kingdom of God in all the world, to make disciples of all nations and care for those disciples. Preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, His return, and the kingdom of God is what we're doing. The kingdom of God entails all the things that I have spoken of, because before the kingdom of God there is this blip in history of the great tribulation, of the great cataclysm, that God is not even bringing that on.

That's brought on by the vicious nature of the nations who are fighting one another, that God will have to stop. Whoever is the spirit that drives one nation or drives another nation or drives a group of people who are hateful, terrorists, whatever, is all going to kind of come to a head, and it will be brought to an end. Thank God. And beyond that is the kingdom of God.

That's the good news. That's the good news. And that's what we will continue in doing, be doing. We'll be making disciples in all nations. There will be people who will respond to the message that we preach. There will be people that say, I want to know more. I know that a prophetic message could be a magnet to some.

In my case, it really wasn't. It was certain doctrinal things that were of more interest to me than even prophetic scenarios. To me, what was interesting was the Sabbath, surprisingly. I really found that to be so interesting because it was so simple, so straightforward for the Bible. I said, why doesn't anybody get it? And when I got it, I was starting to tell everybody about it because it was so simple and lost a lot of friends over it.

But for some, it's prophecy. For some others, it's different things. But our job is to make disciples in all nations and to care for those disciples. That's what ministerial services does. It provides a ministry, and we have changed the name about four years ago from ministerial services to ministerial and member services, which more completely describes caring for those disciples, with giving caregivers and caring for the disciples themselves.

And this includes talking about prophecy, talking about Christian living, and talking about true doctrine. It's talking about repentance. It's talking about transformation. Jesus Christ's ministry began with the words repent in Mark chapter 1, which we have read so many times, and it was the main theme verse for the Kingdom of God seminars. In Mark chapter 1, in verse 14, Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

That was his gospel. I mean, how clear do you want it to be? But then he also said, after taking a little breath here, next sentence, repent and believe the gospel. Repentance is required, and that's a very big part. You can come as you are, but you can't stay as you are. That's our message in the church. You can come as a person who's a sinner, but we expect you to change your life and to transform your life and to renew your life. That's how Jesus Christ's ministry began. Those were the words that set the tone, the keynote for his ministry. And then in Acts chapter 2, verse 38, the beginning of the New Testament church on the day of Pentecost, Acts chapter 2, and verse 38, Peter said to them, this is his famous Pentecost sermon, repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.

This was in response to a question when people were condemned, indicted, I would say, by Peter earlier, by saying, you killed Christ. And they say, well, you know, what do we do now? We know that, you know, it's terrible. We did that. We're guilty. He said, well, I'm glad you asked. Repent and believe the gospel. The New Testament church began on a message of repentance, as well as the ministry of Jesus Christ began on a keynote of repentance.

Change, transform your life. Don't lead a double life. Be singular in thought. Be like Jesus Christ. That's what we teach. And that's what comes through the Good News magazine. That's what comes through the Beyond Today. That's the message that we just absolutely pump out as much and as powerfully as we possibly can. We're starting a new initiative, a new initiative with public appearance campaigns. And this has so many of us very, very excited about using yet another means to reach the public. You know, we have been very effective on the Internet. Many people watch the Beyond Today program, wish we could have more stations, actually, another network and so forth.

I really do wish that we could have had more saturation so people could see the people who speak. We have the Good News magazine that's our flagship, and it's very highly regarded. And it's very important to have a paper magazine, something that people can pick up and read. People still like the crinkle. They like to feel the crinkle when they read. That's very, very important. We as a church have a tremendous library of basic study aids, booklets called both, a lot of blog material. If you want to bring up any subject, you can use our ucg.org website as a resource.

It's a fantastic resource. I told our ministry at the Atlanta conference that there are so many resources on our website that could be tremendously used for sermons, sermonettes, and so forth, just by following all the content through a search box.

For example, if you wanted to know what the church says about the subject of divorce, okay? If you type in divorce, or divorcing, or divorced in the search box, you will have eight and a half thousand references that you'll be led to, starting from most relevant to most relevant. The least relevant. There's a lot to study. People say, what does your church say about divorce? I said, well, you know, I actually told one individual that. Go to the text box, search box, type that in, follow it through. You can do it yourself.

We have decided to call our very first public appearance campaign, Why Were You Born? Now, we could come at the public in many different ways. We could come at them with The End Is Near. We could come at them with, you know, many different types of messages that may lead people to the same thing that we really want them to, which is repentance. To take a look at themselves and their lives. And we took a look at the booklet that we used to have that became our number one publication of all time.

And that was the booklet, Why Were You Born? Four words. But that beat out any prophetic booklet. That beat out any other piece of literature. Over time, it became our number one requested piece of literature.

We had it translated into Russian back even back in the eighties. And this is one of the first booklets that I took to Ukraine with me to give to pastors that were just coming out of a communistic government where they weren't allowed to print anything. And they saw what we said about, Why Were You Born? And they said, Whoever wrote this booklet is a genius. He truly understands what evangelism is.

He truly understands what God wants to see in mankind. That man was created in the image of God. There's a purpose for that. So he used to be like God. And that he used to act like God and be part of the family of God. What a beautiful truth. It was just amazing to see an outsider be able to read what we had and come up with that kind of a conclusion.

But Why Were You Born? was our number one booklet. When we started United in 1995, we basically rewrote the contents of that and called it What is Your Destiny? Which frankly, I didn't think had the power of Why Were You Born?

And we've decided that, look, if a lot of people at one time began to question, Why am I here? Why am I doing here? Why do I work as a Walmart greeter? Why am I doing this job or whatever? I don't see the future. Am I just an object of randomness? Am I somebody who's here to be totally forgotten and extinct? Is Carl Sagan, one of the greatest astronomers, came to the conclusion of? Or is there a purpose for me being born? Is there somebody out there who not only created me but cares about me?

And we want people to think in these terms. We want people to begin to ask that question again about how it affects their life. Because this is a gateway question that will lead to repentance. This is a gateway question that will lead to understanding who is God, what is God. This is a gateway question that will lead people to ask the question, well, what does it all mean? What's the future? And is there a God who can stop it or do anything about it?

I am praying fervently for this campaign to work, to have people who will come. It's still an experiment, but I really want it to work. I want it to work so bad that I can taste it. I'm so very thankful for the staff of people that we have who are working on this project.

We're putting up 11 billboards in the Cincinnati area. Some of them are supposed to be up today. And there's supposed to be a really big one there behind Best Buy at Eastgate. So I'm going to go home from church. I want to drive by there and see if they put it up. It's supposed to be a huge billboard, 60x12 or whatever. Yesterday's till red. The space available. But we had 11 billboards around town, and it says coming September 30th or just September 12th.

And it'll be 10th, pardon me. I should have written these things down here. I'm so excited about these things. I can't remember. It's going to be on a Wednesday night at the Holiday Inn Eastgate. And it's for the general public. We already have a website. Whywereyouborn.com. And let me say a word about this. Is that considering the fact that this was such a well-known name, a well-known string in our past, I am surprised that nobody grabbed it up. Or cyber sitting on it and says you can have it for $10,000. We got it for whatever GoDaddy charges, $8 or so.

We got the name whywereyouborn.com. You can actually go to that website right now and just see a video by Gary Petty. He produced a few videos that are introducing people to make them think about themselves, about their place here on the earth, about why questions about life, what is occurring out there. That's what we want people to do. I truly believe, and I'm just praying that God has inspired us working through not just me, but the minds of all who are very, very cooperative and are very excited about this, who would produce a program, a seminar that would lead people to more of the questions that brought you here and to find what you have found, the peace of mind, the protection, God's love.

And the understanding of where we are in history, and not just be in some kind of a fog about our place in history and in life. And the best thing about it is they already have the handbook. They already have the Word of God. That's what I found to be so interesting when I came into the church, is that I didn't have to get a lot of materials elsewhere. I found it all in the Bible. It was all clear. It was all spelled out. It all made sense. And from 1962, when I first got my plain truth, to right now, I have never lost that love for the truth.

So where is the church going? The church is continuing to do the work that it's always done. It's preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, preparing a people, caring for those people.

We don't just have one message. We have a variety of messages. But they all boil down to the fact that a person coming in must go through a narrow and straight gate of repentance, of accepting the true Jesus Christ, to become part of the God family. That's what we want. That's what we're living for. That's our purpose here on the earth.

So where is the world headed? Not a very good place at all. But it will be with God's intervention that this world will be saved. This world will not end in oblivion. Where is the church going? Is the church doing? It's doing what it always has. And we're doing with great vigor, with great enthusiasm, and a spirit of preaching the Gospel and preparing a people.