A Beginning Vision: The Lord’s Counsel"

“The Beginning Vision, The Lord’s counsel”

Pastor Allan Kircher Shell Point Baptist Church

Revelation 3:14-22

IN our beginning vision we look first at the Israelites.

They have taken an 11 day journey from Egypt to the Promised Land and it turned it into a 40 year experience in the desert.

Normally it takes only 11 days to travel from Mt. Sinai to Kadesh-barnea.

Kadesh-barnea was the threshold of promise. It was the desert entry point to the Promised Land.

It was the place from where they sent the 12 spies to spy out the land.

They had been held back and detained by God Himself.

But one day, God said to them, you have stayed too long in this place.

It is time SPBC to move out and move forward.

Then we look at the beginning of Solomon, when he finished the temple and was ready to move on, the Lord God said,

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sin and will heal their land.

When we do this the Lord God says, Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.”

Oh, how I reverently seek the spirit of repentance for us each day.

But the church today, despite its largeness and its ability to exert pressure and its implied acceptance by world leaders, finds itself without real authority.

It is all very well for those of us who are fundamental in doctrine to blame the modernists for this situation,

And that there is blame to be attached to liberal theology should not be denied.

It is very well for us to castigate the liberal and to censure those who will not bow to the Word of God.

But sober reflection today in our day, reminds me there is no Abraham or Moses to stand in the portals of government.

There is no Elijah who elicits the threats of an angry, ungodly ruler in our mist today.

There is no John the Baptist ready to lose his head than his crown.

There is no Paul to live and pray consternation and fear into the heart of our leaders.

Are there any today to wear out for the Almighty God and stand for righteousness rather conformity?

I come this morning SPBC, for whose Christian character I am in some sense and to some degree responsible, with this appeal:

I beg of you---if you will not misunderstand the expression---make your communion such that it shall repel as well as attract.

That people in our community will find nothing here to draw them into an easy religion of words and formalism.

Beneath all vermin of worldliness and selfishness that may lurk,

They shall recognize the men and women of Shell Point who are bent upon holiness, longing for more and more conformity to the Divine Master.

Oh, children of God, may we never clog Christ’s chariot wheels in His kingdom.

May we never have so little spiritual life in us, as a congregation, that, if I may say so,

He dare not entrust us with the responsibility of guarding and keeping the young converts whom He loves and tends.

Depend upon it brothers and sisters, that, far more than my preaching, your lives will determine the expansion of Shell Point.

And if my preaching is pulling one way and your lives the other, and I have half an hour a week for talk and you have seven days for contradictory life, which of the two do you think is likely to win in the tug?

I beg of you, take these words that I am trying to speak.

Do not pass them to the man in the next pew and think how well they fit him, but accept them as needed by you.

Well, you say, the world is sin-hardened; it is far from God; it is beyond reach.

Let me ask the simple question: is it?

Can it be harder to reach, considering the few of today available to reach it, compared to the world in which the apostles lived?

Is anything too hard for the Lord? No…

The trouble is with us today…..

And I think, yes, I know, that God would have us turn from looking for others to blame and look into our own hearts to discover the real reason the situation in which we find ourselves.

You see, the Gospel still has its ancient power!

As a matter of fact, God is waiting for Shell Point to do something.

He’s waiting for us…God is waiting for us to make a move toward Him and toward His will.

I speak this morning with a dispensational, pre-tribulational, and pre-millennial view.