Yesterday's Calling

It's good to see so many of you here this morning. For those of you on the web, we have had about four inches or so of snow overnight, and morning services in Cincinnati can always be an iffy thing after a snowfall like that. But judging by some of the reports I've heard, and those of you may be listening in in other parts of the country, particularly in the East Coast, four inches is nothing compared to what you've had. So, hello to you and wherever you may be.

Hope you're having a good Sabbath, and ours will be, I'm sure, fine here as well. I really appreciated the music the ladies performed here for the ABC Sabbath, which we are having here today, but it was very, very nice. I'd heard them practicing through the week, and I was looking forward to hearing their production here this morning. This is the ABC Sabbath, where the ABC students have the opportunity to take part in everything and kind of learn some of the details of what makes a church service be put together.

And so far they're doing a pretty good job, and we'll... even the jokes are better. So... It's actually a pretty good class we've got going this year. It's always interesting to see the ABC class that comes in and how they will all work together, and we're into the second semester now. And I get a chance to teach a couple of classes, three classes, I guess it is, two and a half classes maybe, through the year. And I thought I was doing pretty good with most of the class and kind of bonding, making friends and making an influence.

And then I had a dream. True story. Just last night I had a dream, and I was getting down within the last 15 minutes of one of my class periods, and one of the students decided he didn't want to stay around anymore. It was Joe Morella. It's true. I'm not making this up. And Joe said, I don't want to stay anymore. And he just gets up and he walks out of my class. And so I said, well, I'm just going to continue to finish this lecture and what material I present is.

So I start to keep on going. And in about five minutes, the rest of the class, they all get up and they walk out, too. And I'm thinking, what did I do wrong? And then I woke up and I realized, oh, I was just dreaming. They wouldn't do that. So I guess, ABC Sabbath comes, you dream about the ABC things that happen. So that better not be an omen.

Okay. So, okay. Two weeks ago was the Super Bowl. And of course, that is a major cultural event in the United States, as big as just about any other holiday that we have in terms of the anticipation and the buildup and hype and everything that goes along for it. And this year, I was really looking forward to the world's greatest quarterback winning with Denver Broncos.

And after the very first play of the game, I realized it wasn't going to happen this year. So I settled back into my chair and had to listen to the Seattle Seahawks fans in the room and move on and deal with reality. But as with most Super Bowls, the part of the hype that gets built up is the commercials that surround the Super Bowl. And you may not be interested in the game, but everything I noticed when we had these big gatherings here at the home office and we're watching that, everything kind of, you know, people are doing their own things sometimes during the game.

But when the commercial comes on, everybody's watching to see what the latest and greatest idea might be. And this year, the one commercial that really stuck out in my mind was the Radio Shack commercial. And it really made me stop and think. I went back on the web and watched it a few more times.

The Radio Shack commercial was entitled this year. The 80s are calling. They want their store back. And the way they set it up is they had this Radio Shack store front and interior from the 1980s. And two employees are in there and the phone rings. And one of them picks them up, picks it up, and listens, okay, yeah, right, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, okay. And he puts it down and he says to the other guy, the 80s called.

They want their store back. And then all of a sudden, in through the store door rushes all of these cultural figures and sports figures from the 1980s. You had Hulk Hogan. You had Mary Lou Rhettin, the Olympic star from gymnastics at that time. You had Eric Estrada from Chips, and he was dressed in his California Highway Patrol uniform. And, you know, there were others I just didn't quite recognize through, though. They had Alf, the puppet character from one of those, I never watched that show, but they had Alf.

And they all started gathering up the goods from the store shelves, rushed back out, and they piled them on top of an old AMC Gremlin from the 80s, which was a vehicle from the 80s, and it rushes off. And then they reset the store to current merchandise, and the whole point was that Radio Shack has changed to come back in, give us another look, and, you know, we've got current merchandise and a lot of good stuff, which they do.

But the 80s called. They want their store back. Got me to thinking. It was a trip back, in this case, 20 or so years, 30 years, to that period of time. And it was built upon the idea of nostalgia, which is a big item, big deal. It's an interesting point that we are in in American culture today. We are at a point where, if you thought we've seen nostalgia before, folks hang around. You're going to see a lot more in the next few years.

Why? Because us aging baby boomers are still grappling with and trying to understand our past. And I'm speaking in a collective sense. I kind of understand it, but culturally, you're going to see something interesting. And it all began last November with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Big hype. And it continued just last weekend was the 50th anniversary of the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. And, of course, I was only about 12, 13 years old. And I was front and center watching all of those two events.

And the 60s began to unfold. So hang around, folks. You're going to see this over the next few years. Wait until we get to 1968, or 50 years from 1968 to 2018, with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Summer of Love 1968, and then Woodstock. It's going to be just – we're going to be awash in this nostalgia epic over the next several years, culturally and economically and whatever else. But it's interesting to stop and think about, because what I want to talk about today, coming off of some of my thoughts about that commercial and this cultural event, is the future. I don't want to talk about the past so much as I want to talk about the future.

But to talk about the future, we have to understand how we should look at and understand the past – your past, our past. If we can understand how to look at the past, and especially how God wants us to look at the past, then we can understand who we are, where we are, and how to look at our future. College is a mixed emotion. We look back, desiring the good old days at times.

We even did a Beyond Today program on the good old days. A couple of years ago, Gary Petty did that one and talked about that in that particular sense. But, you know, any of us that do look back at any point in our life, in the past, we really understand we can't look. We can't go back. We can always look back. And there's so much around us that's always wanting us to do so. One of the problems is, whenever we look back, we usually look back at the past with rose-colored glasses, and we remember a certain emotion.

We remember a good time or a good event. And it's usually with selective memory. At times, I found myself looking back in my life at various things and longing for this or for that. And then I think it through, and I come to a point, and I realize, well, wait a minute. There was also this. There was this.

And I was this way. And it wasn't quite exactly that way when I really would stop and analyze it, and I realized, hmm, I don't think so. But it is a proclivity. We look back with rose-colored glasses. We look back with selective memory. In fact, there was a song that came to mind when I was thinking about this that was a big hit song in the early 1970s. The Carpenters did this song.

Karen and Richard Carpenter, which again dates me and some of us in this room here, but those of you that are younger and don't remember the Carpenters, bear with me here a little bit. But they had a song. They had a song entitled Yesterday Once More, and it was one of their big hits. The lyrics go kind of like this. There's a couple of stanzas. When I was young, I'd listen to the radio, waiting for my favorite songs. Waiting they played, I'd sing along, it made me smile.

Those were such happy times and not so long ago, how I wondered where they'd gone. But they're back again, just like a long-lost friend. All the songs I loved so well. Looking back on how it was in years gone by and the good times that I had makes me today seem rather sad so much has changed.

All my best memories come back clearly to me. Some can even make me cry, just like before.

It's yesterday, once more. Big hit, big song. Actually, I heard a minister base a whole sermon on that one time and actually play that in services. And when he did that, it kind of electrified the crowd. Because in those days in the church, he didn't play music like that in services. And it just stuck out in my mind. He was kind of pushing the envelope in his own day. And I thought about playing it here, but I didn't want to get into any copyright problems for us as we put this out over the web. But just so we know, that was a song by the Carpenters, Richard and Karen Carpenter, copyright, 1972 or whatever. Not any of my own special poetry, songwriting, lyrical ability here. But I could probably pick any songs from any particular era of any of us listening here today that would echo the same type of sentiment because it's part of human proclivity and nature that seems to be hardwired into us. And we get caught up in that. There is a reason and there is a purpose to look back. I don't want to pretend that there isn't and that we cannot learn things by looking back at the past and remembering. Nostalgia can be fun and it can make a good theme for any type of a party, 60s, 70s, 80s or whatever. One of these days, believe it or not, the 2000s, 2010 will become a nostalgia period. So those ABC students who are here today thinking that this is just an old fogey up here walking down memory lane, hang around. In about 15-20 years somebody's going to say, hey, let's have a 2013 nostalgia party and dress like they did in 2013.

And then it will hit you, hey, I'm getting older, I'm moving on. So bear with all of us in this time. But why look back? What is there to learn? Some of you might be thinking, well, you look back to learn. And there's this great quote from a writer philosopher named George Santayana that most people know who goes like this. He says, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And there's some truth in that statement. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There are many things about the past of any of us that we don't want to repeat. Unfortunately, at times, life is like that. We fall into the same hole time and time again until we learn how to crawl out of it. But those who don't learn do not remember, and as he's saying, really learn the lessons from the past. But let me ask you this. What's the most important thing to learn whenever we might take ourselves into a nostalgic view of the past? What do you think would be the most important thing to learn? I thought this through a lot. And here's what I think is the most important thing to learn.

Let's look at what God tells us in regard to this. Turn back, if you will, to Deuteronomy 6.

Because God was not beyond looking in the past Himself. As He dealt especially with Israel, He took them down a little bit of nostalgia. When you look at what God did with Israel as He took them down a memory lane, God tended to focus just on one item, one event. And we could turn to a number of places in the Old Testament where we would find this brought out. But let's just note a couple here. Let's begin in Deuteronomy 6 and look at verse 20. Deuteronomy is actually an entire book devoted to looking back over a 40-year period. It really is. It begins and ends that way because Israel is about to go into the Promised Land. Moses sets them down and God takes them back through rehearsal of the law and many other things. And so it is a retrospective of 40 years, taking them all the way back to the time when they were in Egypt. But several times in Deuteronomy, and this is one example here, we come to a point that's important. In verse 20 of Deuteronomy 6, when your son asks you in time to come saying, what's the meaning of the testimonies, the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord our God has commanded you? What's the meaning of this religion? What's the meaning of this life? Why do we do this? Why do we put leaven out?

And in their time, why do we kill a lamb and put its blood on the on the doorposts? What earthly good is that? We've done that year after year. Why do it? Why do we keep the Sabbath? Why do we go up to keep the feasts every year? What's the purpose of all of this that is this unique way of life that we have before us? And what God tells us to do? He says, when that happens, then, verse 21, here's how you answer, then you shall say to your son, well, we were slaves, a Pharaoh in Egypt.

Oh, a slave, not master of our own destiny, not living where we wanted, how we wanted, not having our own plot of land, not having freedom to worship God, or even if we chose not to worship God, because that's part of the built-in freedom that God does give to all of us to choose. But we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And the Lord showed signs and wonders before our eyes, great and severe against Egypt, Pharaoh, and all of his household. This is one Scripture where God basically repeated over and over again. It really pointed Israel back to the one significant event of their development, their history, that they should never forget and learn. Now, every nation, every group of people, they have usually an event in their past that defines them and who they are as a culture and as a people. For us, it tends to be July 4th, 1776, from the American culture.

Other countries have other dates and times, and that is what they build their story, their national epic, their myths of who they are and what they are all about around an event. Sometimes it's a battle. Ours is the Declaration of Independence from the country of Great Britain.

But there's one event. For God and for His people, for Israel, their one event was when God brought them out of Egypt. When they were slaves and He brought them out with great signs and wonder and brought them into the land. This is repeated many, many times. All you have to do is kind of do a search with that phrase in your Bible program, and you'll draw up pages and pages of this. In fact, if you turn over to 1 Samuel 10, you will see just one example later on about the time they wanted to have a king over them instead of God to rule them. 1 Samuel 10, verse 17, Samuel called the people together to the Lord at Misba, and he said to the children of Israel, thus says the Lord God of Israel, I brought up Israel out of Egypt and delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all kingdoms and from those who oppressed you. But you've today rejected your God. And it goes on to talk about that because at that time they had rejected God. They wanted a king over them like the other nations had. But Samuel brings it up years later after the time of Moses. But again, you will see this repeatedly in the Old Testament. This is the one event that God takes them back and reminds them about. There was really then only one reason for Israel to look back to their past when you really break it all down and analyze it. And it was this. It was to remember what God did for them. All of their nostalgia and whatever epics they went through every 20 years, every 40 years, was it to look back at the time of Samson? Was it to look back at the time of Deborah? Was it to look back at the time of Joshua? No. Not what they did, not even what Samuel did. It was to look back at what God did at the moment of the Exodus when He brought them out and formed them into a nation. Brought them out of Egypt. It was to bring them back for them to remember what God did, not what they did, not what any of their leaders did necessarily. It was what God did for them. And there is a lesson there for us. When we look back, we should look back and we should remember what God has done for us. That's the moment in time. Those are the high spots of our life and of our times, 10, 20, 40 years, whatever it may be. When we look back, whenever Israel forgot what God did for them, they put their mind and their heart on themselves, which is, again, what we do as human beings. We tend to think about what we have built or whatever. On one of the other occasions, God said, look, when you've got lush gardens and fruitful fields and bountiful harvests, when you've built your barns and you've got houses and you've got a decent town and society going, don't think you did this on your own. Remember, I brought you into this and I gave it to you, which He did.

When they pushed out the Canaanite tribes, there were fields and buildings and houses for them when and where they did that. And God says, don't think that you've done this. I've done it for you.

But we know their story that when they thought about what they did in whatever period of time, that's when they forgot God. When you and I look at our lives and where we are at this given time, at any given point, and we begin to feel sorry for ourselves, and we begin to wonder why we haven't done this or why this hasn't happened or something, some trial has hit us and we begin to focus on ourselves, which we do. Sometimes we want to look back and question our decisions, question this or that, or to remember what we think was a better time. In Israel, they always wanted to go back to the leaks and onions of Egypt. I always wondered why there were leaks and onions. I'm sure there is a reason for that. Why not ice cream and chocolate cake of Egypt? Something like that. But it was leaks and onions. But when we assess our personal past, how do we do it?

Now, let me issue a disclaimer. It's okay to look back. I'm not downing that at all.

Family reunions are great. The ones I've been to in recent years with my family have really been good. To reconnect with cousins that you hadn't seen in some cases 40 years and everybody's older and wrinkled and more experienced, but they're still the same cousin that you remember. You talk about this and what you did there. Those family reunions are good. Class reunions can be good as well for those that may want to engage in that. But we always have to look back through the lens that God provides because it's not just our own personal story if indeed we have been called by God. The Apostle Paul addressed this in Ephesians 2. Ephesians 2.

And let's begin in verse 1. Ephesians 2, beginning in verse 1. Paul writes, "'You he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience.'" Quite a way to start off a look in the past, isn't it? You were dead in sin. What was it about Egypt? It was a type of sin. Why did God always take them back to that moment in time when He brought them out of Egypt? And how do we understand Egypt from a typological point of today spiritually? Sin. Slavery. Slavery to sin. And as we keep the days of unleavened bread every year, we rehearse those themes in a very important way. That's why God took them back there. And that's why Paul starts off here. He says, you were dead, just as those Israelites were, in a sense, dead. They didn't know it. And God brought them through the Red Sea, which was a type of baptism, as Paul talks about in Corinthians. We're going on here. He said, "...among whom also," in verse 3, "...we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others." He's pretty well describing an unconverted life apart from God, doing what we want to do, fulfilling our desires, unbridled, in a sense that we didn't have God, the true God.

We had, in some cases, maybe a form of God and a desire for understanding God, but not the complete revelation of the true God and His full plan that does come by His revelation and by His calling.

And, of course, Paul is writing here to a group of Gentiles, and he's reminding them that they were immersed in a Gentile culture that was cut off from God for a person today that, you know, suddenly comes to understand God and His truths, even after a lifetime of, perhaps, debauchery or sin, or even spiritual delusion. Because for many, it is a process of dissatisfaction that begins to develop with what they do know about God, religion, and life that leads them to seek something deeper and to seek a deeper relationship with God that brings them, in time, very often, into a contact with the truth and ultimately into a deeper relationship with God. Today, we call that conversion. We sat around and we talked about, when did God call you?

When were you called to the truth, to an understanding? Well, this is what Paul is saying here, and this is how we understand it. We were just as the others. In verse 4, though, but God, who is rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up together and made us set together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Again, the focus Paul is bringing it around in how we understand it as we look at it in our lives, is what God did for us. What do we learn from the past? What should we learn as we look back at for any reason, at any point in our past, in any level of nostalgia? It's to remember what God did, not primarily what we did. What did God do? And if you look carefully as you parse all these examples in the Scripture, the singular event for any of us is that point of time when we came to know God in the fullness of the revelation of the gospel. And God revealed Himself to us and His Son Jesus Christ, and therein we began to understand the real road to eternal life.

When Jesus prayed on John 17.1 on that last evening prior to his arrest and death, He said, I thank God, you Father, for those that you've called.

He said, and this is eternal life, that they might know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, the one whom you sent. That is eternal life. And for every individual, every human being, as Jesus said in that prayer, that's the point of time to get to and to understand. When we came to know the one true God and His Son whom He sent. And this is really what Paul is saying. It's that singular event in time in our past, or for some of us, maybe yet to be, as in terms of when we're baptized and we submit our lives to God and we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That's the point of time that is the most important in our past.

For me, that goes back over 40 years, longer for some of you listening in and watching here today.

But that's the high point. That's where we draw a line over the past and recognize that we have been called to a very different relationship and purpose in life, the kingdom of God, and we begin to move toward that. That's the lessons that we should learn.

Verse 6, "...and raised us up together and made us set together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace and His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." What Paul has done here in this passage is the same thing that God did in all those various passages in the Old Testament where he said, you remember that you were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and I brought you out. That's what you tell your children whenever they want to know why, and who, and what. You tell them that. That's the most important thing, and everything else is secondary to that. And Paul is saying this is the most important. When we were dead in our sins and we were made alive before God, and when that time took place in our life, then our lives changed in our relationship with God. That's the primary reason. Perhaps if you want, after we sort everything else through nostalgically of any time as we look back at our past, that's what we come back to. That's ground zero. That's where we realize that's where my life, eternal life, and that hope began. And so it frames how we look at God. It frames how we look at the Bible and the truth. What part of your past would you want to revisit?

Would it be your childhood? Would it be a snowy winter day on a farm in wherever, Minnesota, Iowa? In a warm fire? Would it be a summer meadow? Would it be a fall river and scene and picnic and time? What point in your life would you want to go back to? What draws you back? Is it your childhood? Is it high school? Not for me. I have no desire to go back to my high school years. No thank you. The guys here in the media department say they're going to rope and tie me down one of these days to watch the movie Back to the Future. I've never been able to get through the first 30 minutes of that every time I try to watch it, but the guys around here, they cut their eye teeth on it, and their illusions and conversations at time are all framed around dialogue out of Back to the Future. And when they do that, I'm just left out in cold. I don't know at all what they're talking about. But we can all have fun with a retro experience, but the reality sets in we can't go back. We can only go into the future. And to the degree that we comprehend that and how God wants us to look at that, the better off we will be. I was going through a chapter in Acts this week with the ABC class, and I'd like to take you back to that chapter 7 of Acts.

I did realize that when we delved into this class how this kind of fits in with what I was wanting to have been thinking for a couple of weeks to speak about. So ABC students, as we kind of review this, just stay with me here. It's a review for you, but for some of you at 4 o'clock in the afternoon it might have gone right over your heads. But you can listen in with the rest of us here.

Chapter 7 of Acts is the story of Stephen, where this superdeacon kind of flashes across the scene like a comet, ordained a deacon along with six others in chapter 6, and then he just suddenly he's filled with God's Spirit and he's moved to do signs and wonders here, and that it gets him brought up before the Council of the Jews in Jerusalem. Because, as it says in verse 14 of Acts chapter 6, they accuse him of this singular sin, blasphemy that they say. In chapter 6 and verse 14, they say as they accuse Stephen, we've heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, and this place is the temple, and change the customs which Moses delivered to us.

The Jews held Moses, as they should have, in high honor, high regard. And the charges that they trumped up against Stephen and twisted to bring him to this point were they, well, he's going to destroy this place, this wonderful, glorious temple that has been a part of us, and change the customs of Moses that have been delivered to us. And so they set him in front of the Council. And chapter 7, Stephen launches into a trip down memory lane, a story of nostalgia, because he goes back and he begins to talk about their roots, their past, the history of Israel. And he talks about Abraham. And he talks about Moses, and he talks about Joseph, and then he talks about Moses, and brings it all down to a point. But we don't have the time to go through every verse of here. We'll just hit a few of the high points. But Stephen's sermon that he gives before the Council, inspired by God, is a marvelous history, and really shows us some lessons about how we should look at any given historical record of the past. In this case, Stephen grasped the essence of God and Jesus Christ and what they were doing. And he used these examples from the past to illustrate exactly what they were doing. He begins in verse 1 through the first eight verses by talking about Abraham. And the essential core of Abraham's life in verse 3 was when God told him, Get out of your country and from your relatives and come to a land that I'll show you.

And he begins to talk about that. But he draws the lessons, and it begins with that primary directive from God to get out. Leave your home, the familiar surroundings of Mesopotamia, your family, your uncles, your relatives, and go to a land that I will show you and ultimately give to you, which we know from Genesis 12, Abraham did. As I like to say when we talk about that story of Abraham, what we don't fully really grasp is that what Abraham did was such a remarkable event for a man of the ancient world. People didn't do that in the ancient world. They didn't get up and get out. They were born, they lived, and they died basically in the same village that they were born into. They didn't go off on cruises. They didn't go off on vacations.

They didn't take excursions. It was a pretty basic life. And for Moses to go hundreds of – Abraham to go hundreds of miles across the deserts into the land of Canaan and never go back.

People didn't do that in his day. But beyond that, what he was doing was breaking the cycle of the pagan life that he had been steeped in, which was basically a circular life. You live, you born, you live, you die. And it's repeated over and over again with no purpose and no meaning within the rituals of the pagan world that they had. Even those rituals were rather circular in their meaning because they didn't show any real purpose other than living for a god or gods or goddesses and that entire system. And it was very circular. And what Abraham did was he broke out of that circle and he began to go in a line toward the future, toward what God was drawing him to, as embodied in all of the promises that went through him, his son, his grandson, his great-grandchildren, the whole story of Israel. Abraham started going in a linear line into the future and that was remarkable. Stephen shows that.

And then Stephen goes on to talk about Moses, or I'm sorry, Joseph in a second example, beginning in verse 9 here of chapter 7. Joseph, as we all know, a wonderful story.

You never get tired of reading the story of Joseph. It's been embodied in the play and movie, Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that we have as part of our modern pop culture.

Wonderful story of betrayal, of slavery, of rescue and redemption, possible revenge. And at that very moment of Joseph's life when he could have taken revenge upon his brothers.

And you're reading along and you think, give it to them. They really deserve that.

They shouldn't have done that, put their father through that agony. It's thrown you into a pit and sewed you off into slavery. And all of this, and you come down to Genesis chapter 50 and verse 20 in the story of Joseph where he is before his brothers and they think that he's going to stick it to them and he says, no, I'm not going to do it. He says in verse 20, as for me, as for you, you meant evil against me. But God meant it for good in order to bring it about as it is this day to save many people alive. Joseph was thrust into a whole different life and he didn't look back, he didn't go back. And he learned the lesson and he kept moving forward. And at some point, as I was telling the kids in class the other day, at some point Joseph, maybe it was when he was imprisoned unjustly by Lady Potiphar, and in prison thinking it all through, or maybe after he'd been exalted to the second in command to Pharaoh, at some point Joseph thought it all through and he connected the dots of his past.

And the rancor and the animosity toward his brothers melted away and he realized, you know, this has been of God. I don't know how many years it took him to get to that point.

I like to imagine that it was a few years. I was telling the kids that I've had one of those moments in my own life, my own time, where I was never sold into slavery, but we had to make a move at a point in our career in the ministry. And after I found out the real reason why I was moved, I thought, oh, I mean, I wasn't told the truth and there were other things. But then, after a few years, I came to a point to realize, you know what? Somebody else had this design and created a scenario for us to move. And they had one idea, but I think God had another idea, and it was ultimately of God. And so, you have to come to points like that. And I think that that's a major lesson to learn out of the life of Joseph as Stephen takes them back there. He moves on here in chapter 7 of Acts and he talks about Moses.

Moses, conveniently, as Stephen breaks it down into periods of 40, his first 40 years as an Egyptian, after he was put onto the Nile River by his parents and his life was spared and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter. And then he has 40 years of desert nomadic existence before God sends him back as the deliverer, and then he brings them out and there's another 40 years until the end of his life. So there's three convenient periods there, but you don't see Moses even looking back. He kept looking toward the future. And here in chapter 7 and verse 37, Stephen brings the life and the story of Moses to point in verse 37, which is very interesting to what Stephen now was faced with. He said, this is that Moses, who said to the children of Israel, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brethren, him you shall hear. Moses, and this is a quote out of Deuteronomy, before he died he was telling the people, you look to the future. God's going to raise up a prophet like me and it's to him that you will look. Well, was it that Stephen was accused of? Go back to chapter 6 and verse 14, that the Jews accused Stephen of saying that Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, change the customs which Moses delivered to us.

They couldn't abide that idea that there was something that they didn't understand from their past. They didn't have their theology right. And they couldn't grasp that. And because of that, they couldn't under...they didn't recognize Jesus and His teachings. And now they didn't...they doubly didn't understand and accept the teachings of the disciples and the apostles as the church was growing and developing at this period. And they forgot what Moses, whom they revered so highly, told them which was, look to the future. God's going to send you someone like me, but it's to Him that you will look. And yet they still wanted to look back just on Moses and what he was doing then. And because they didn't fully grasp all of Moses' teaching, they couldn't understand what had happened in their own time. And now they had Stephen in front of them with these accusations.

But Moses was the one who pointed them to the future. Stephen sealed his fate when he said, though, the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands, in verse 48.

There was a direct accusation of idolatry that the Jews couldn't abide. He said, the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands, as the prophet says. And he was in the shadow of the temple as he said this, maybe even pointed to the temple. And of course, that again back in chapter 6 and verse 14 was one of the charges before him that Jesus Christ will destroy this temple. Of course, Jesus essentially had said that in his teaching. They didn't grasp it then, nor through Stephen now did they grasp it, that it wasn't the temple. It was Jesus Christ who was God in the flesh in front of them. And now with a whole different understanding of the church, what had happened on Pentecost, the giving of the Holy Spirit, it wasn't the temple, it was the individual and the relationship with God. And the individual was a temple of the Holy Spirit, as Paul would later bring out in his teaching. Stephen was way ahead of them all, but they couldn't see that.

And he sealed his fate at this particular point. The whole point of Stephen's marvelous sermon here. It is really a joy and a pleasure for me to be able to go through acts every year, as it is, I'm sure, for every one of our ABC instructors to go through the epistles or the prophets or the books of the Bible, as we do with a different class. You think you know it as a teacher, as a minister, and every time you go through a section, a book, you learn more. And I'm thinking, oh, I didn't teach that to him last year. So, Serena, I didn't teach it to you last year, so, in your class and others. But that's the joy of, I guess, being able to teach the Bible to a group of young people every year. And these are major, major lessons. Stephen was, he understood how to look at the past and to learn from it and to move into the future. And it's interesting, when you come down to the vision that God gave him here at verse 56, as they were stoning him, God gave him this vision to encourage him, and he said, look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. What he saw was the reality, the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. The resurrected Jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father. He saw that. He cried out. He asked God to not lay this at their charge and to defeat, and then he died. But he died with that vision, that scene on his mind. And God, in his grace and mercy, gave that to him. As I've thought about that, that is what God and the Father is. That is what they is.

It is what they are. And when we try to comprehend the existence, the eternal existence of the Father and of God and Christ coming in the flesh, it is an exercise, not just in metaphysics and trying to figure it all out, but it's a mind-blowing, mind-expanding matter to really try to grasp God and Christ and what they are.

It says in Hebrews that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

It is true that God doesn't change. Christ has not changed. But it's also really giving us a little bit of a peek into what is the nature of God's existence. God is not in the past, He's not in the present, and He's not in the future in one sense, because that's all relative to us as we measure time. God is outside of time. And to think that and how Stephen had this vision for him to understand, for us to take encouragement from him as well, it really does tell us that with our limited vocabulary, God is in our future, at least. He already is. And that plan is sealed and locked in, and God is going to bring it to pass, to bring many sons to glory. But it's not in God's future because God's already there.

But it is in my future and yours because we're temporal and we're subject to time and space, and it is to that future that we are moving and should be moving. And when we do look back at the past, what we should see is what God has done for us and how He has moved and acted in our life at any given time, or that of our parents, or that of another family member, or within His church, and take encouragement, understanding for the moment and for the present, and for the fact of moving us into the future. What part of our past would we want to look back to? For me, really, when I sort it all through, there's no part. It's only into the future that we should be moving.

And to me, it adds a greater depth of meaning and understanding to what Peter wrote in 2 Peter, chapter 3, verses 17 and 18. 2 Peter, chapter 3, verses 17 and 18.

You therefore be loved, since you know this beforehand, beware lest you fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked.

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and forever. Grow in grace and knowledge. Continue to grow in understanding in God's grace at calling of His Word, of His law, of His truth that He has given to us.

I had the opportunity to serve on the Doctrine Committee of the Council of Elders, and you know, we all know at times, you know, people think that in the past, we've been accused of going to change doctrine, and that lie has been proven to be false and is a lie. And I like to tell people that the purpose of the Doctrine Committee is not to change doctrine. The purpose of the Doctrine Committee is to preserve doctrine, to preserve the truth. And that is a lifelong, age-long endeavor for us to do. As I teach doctrine and study doctrine, I'm amazed at the depth of understanding that there is yet for us to understand about the truths that God has given to us of all of them and all the 20 fundamental beliefs that we have in the United Church of God and the entire biblical revelation. There's enough for us to study and to learn in this lifetime, we don't have to change anything, we don't have to introduce new doctrine or new teaching in that sense. That's not what it's about. It's growing in grace and in knowledge that we have. And there's a lifetime of knowledge there for us yet to plumb the depths of with what we do have and what God has provided for us in His church today. We don't grow by going back. We don't grow for wishing what is in the past. We grow by looking at what God has done for us and moving forward into the future. I'd like to close by leaving you with three points to think about it in this regard here.

Number one, when we look on the past, again, remember what God did for us.

He's called us and He's brought us to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Look at Philippians 3. And beginning in verse 7, this is how the apostle Paul looked at his past.

What things were gained to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed, I also count all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things. And he had to recognize that it was some things needed to be lost and left in the past with his Pharisaic background, as he was ultimately called. He said, I count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith. And so, Paul understood this principle to look back and to know what was to be left there and to move into the future. Second point, live in the here and the now, the present, and make wise choices. Make the choices that will impact your life today and in a positive way impact your life tomorrow for the good. Don't get overly caught up in nostalgia and ever thinking that there was something in our personal past or life that might draw us back and that would remove us from the steadfastness that Peter admonished us to remain in, in verse 17 of 2 Peter 3.

And then the third point, firmly keep your eyes fastened on the future glory of the kingdom of God. Keep your eyes firmly fastened on the future glory of the kingdom of God. Here in verse 13 of Philippians 3, Paul says, "'Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead.

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, forgetting what is behind and looking toward what is ahead, pressing toward the goal, toward the kingdom of God. That is what's calling to us." If there's a phone ringing in our life, it's not the 80s. It's not the 70s. It's not the 60s. It's not the 50s. Anybody here that need to go back to the 40s, I don't see anybody necessarily that old today here in our midst. It's not any point in the past. If the phone is ringing, it's the future that's calling, and we should be pressing toward that. If yesterday's calling in your life, don't pick up the phone.