Origin
Origin
Sealed or Marked
This is part 2 of Episode 3, The End. We are unpacking the book of Revelation. We are given two choices, life or death. Which one will you choice. Today we will talk about being Sealed by the Holy Spirit or Marked by the Beast. We will contrast the difference and illuminate the choice. We are so thankful God gives us the dignity of choice, but He wants us to choose Him.
Welcome back to the table of origin. It's been a bit. This is part 2 of The End. I'm ReGina Johnston at the table with my friends, Kyli Rose and Jina McAfee. To get us back on track, we want to recap a bit. During this whole study, parts one and two, the main thing we're looking at as we look at Revelation is that we have choices. And ultimately, we're asking, "On God's clock, what time is it?" And then given that thought process, what choices are we making? Does His timing compel us? Do we sense an urgency given His clock? And so Jina, we have two verses that we've used as foundational to this whole study of The Revelation. Can you share those
Jina Mcafee:They both deal with choice. The first one is
Deuteronomy 30:19. Basically, this is what it says, "Today, I've set before you life or death, blessing or curse." And listen to this, God says through Moses, "Oh, that you would choose life that you and your children might live." We hear that, and we know we want to choose life. We don't want to with us? choose death. We want to choose blessing. We don't want to
Jina McAfee:The second verse is 1 Kings 18:21. Elijah, the man choose curse. But we are looking at how to choose life. How do you do that? Verse 20 says,"Love the Lord, obey Him and His plan for your life, and cling to Him for He is your life. You of God, is speaking to the people of God. He says, "How grab hold, and you don't let go. This is the key to your life. The truth is, there is one God, one Creator of all of us. Some much longer will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him. But if Baal is God, then follow him." of you know Him and some of you don't. You can choose to know Him today while you're listening.
ReGina Johnston:Here's the question. Do you find yourself wavering? Or have you ever found yourself wavering? And then how did you figure that out? And what does it look like?
Kyli Rose:Absolutely. Every day is a series of choices. We make this big decision to surrender our lives to God. I said, "Yes," a long time ago as a child. I chose to make Him Lord of my life, but I have to make a series of choices every single day. I have found that oftentimes, when I am wrestling with indecision, when I'm straddling the fence, that can have a lot to do with my input. I have to be really intentional about input. There is so much noise. There is noise at my gym, there is noise in my home, there are schedules to keep, there's noise in my car, there's just noise. And we live in a culture that says busier is better. For me, whenever I have the most clarity, whenever I'm the most resolved to follow Jesus, to obey Him, like you said, to really choose life, I am choosing life in my input day-in-and-day-out. What am I listening to? The news cycle? Who are my friends? Who are the people that I have allowed to get really close to me? Are they speaking life into me? What music am I listening to? It sounds so basic, but whenever you are constantly inputting things that are not life giving, it will be very easy for you to NOT make life-filled, Spirit-led choices. And there are a lot of choices to make, so you better pay attention to what you're listening to.
ReGina Johnston:Your atmosphere is crucial. I was at a place of business this morning, and all they played the whole time I was there is worship music. As I'm sitting there, and I'm interacting with the clientele and the employees, I'm saying to them, "Your atmosphere here is so faith building." I can even sense in my own spirit being encouraged and lifted to a different place in my thinking. How do we deal with temptation when it comes to making a choice? Have you ever been tempted, Jina? I have a hard time asking Jina this because she looks like someone that has never done anything wrong in her entire life. But have you ever dealt with temptation and had to make a choice, and at times wavered in making the right choice?
Jina McAfee:Every day. Over the holidays, you've got your family with you, and you're choosing a life attitude or you're choosing a selfish attitude. You're choosing whether to speak a feeling that may not be a godly feeling, or to not speak it, all the time. Just like Kyli said, it's not really that we're intentionally choosing the wrong thing, but we're not necessarily intentionally choosing the right thing either. We know when we have a selfish thought or a selfish word. We know that we just react sometimes. It's so easy to do that. We're looking at a life choice to get you back on track. You can put yourself back on track. Holy Spirit can put you back on track. We're going to fall over and over again. We will.
Kyli Rose:The beginning of the new year is such a relevant time. You're going to hear the words resolution and discipline and willpower. And if you want it, just go do it. But you cannot swim upstream. You cannot be countercultural. You cannot choose dozens of times a day to live and look like Jesus if you don't have a relationship with Him. You can have all the willpower in the world. You can write your resolutions, you can even post them on Facebook for the whole wide world to see because you need 4000 accountability partners. I mean, you can do all of this. But at the end of the day, it really
comes down to:do I really trust him? Do I know him? Do I trust that He is for me? Is he worth the sacrifice? The more you know Him, you know you will always be swimming upstream. But you know, you're not swimming upstream alone. And you know, at the end of this thing, the reward is worth it. I'd say yes, again.
ReGina Johnston:There is a cost. I think sometimes we lead people astray by causing them to think there's not a cost, but there is a cost either way.
Jina McAfee:There is a cost either way. When we live for ourselves alone, there's nothing right inside of me. I have tried to justify what I have thought or felt, but I can't. It just doesn't work. I don't have peace.
Kyli Rose:The seasons I have been the most miserable are the seasons when I was one foot in and one foot out, wavering. It's hard when you make the decision to follow Christ, but when you do, you will have peace. Whenever I have just settled within myself that it might cost me a friendship or multiple friendships, but I have made up my mind that I'm going to set my feet in a certain direction and take small steps in that same direction for the rest of my life and try and build a life that gets me to where I want to go, it's good.
Jina McAfee:It's not just for you. If you're a mom, a grandmother or a friend to somebody or part of a community of people at work, what you do affects them. Directly and indirectly,
ReGina Johnston:It's not just a deciding not to, but a deciding to. It's your relationship with Jesus, it's your download of the word, and it's the atmosphere you have set. Those are decisions you make to do something. And it's important to know that to choose to live a God-life on another day is actually choosing. You've actually made a choice. For those of us who sometimes struggle with decisions and put them off, you've made a decision. Today the choice we're going to look at is being sealed by the Holy Spirit or being marked by the beast. Those are two very distinct choices as we look at the book of Revelation. Being sealed by the Holy Spirit is a holy Alliance. Elwyn and I have been resurrecting a show that we used to watch years ago, and we stopped watching because of some of the content, but we've resurrected it realizing at this point in time it is pretty benign, comparatively speaking. In this show, people have to make alliances with one another in order to make it to the end. And farewell. This is what we're asking. Who are you aligned with? Sealed by the Holy Spirit indicates a holy alliance between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As humans, we get to choose that. So Kyli, give us some insight into what it means to be sealed by the Holy Spirit. And what is this holy alliance
Kyli Rose:You'll read about being sealed all throughout the all about? Old Testament, but Ephesians 1:13-14 says this: "When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance." How we become sealed initially starts with the choice to submit to God's Lordship. Will you let Him be Lord of your life? However much life I want will depend on how much I'm willing to surrender to Him, how much of a knee I'm willing to take. So it initially starts with a choice. At that point, God sets up residence in us by putting the Holy Spirit inside of us. And we then become houses, homes of the Holy Spirit. In the in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit would come on people, but we live post-cross, post-resurrection. He doesn't just come on us anymore. He now takes up residence in us. We have this inward assurance. Essentially He's constantly working out our salvation. Together we're working this thing out. It's authenticating that the relationship we have with God is good. It's empowering us. And He's enabling us to show the world around us that this is a real, living, breathing,relationship that we have with the holy God. You can see that He is working it out through me, a broken sinner. Only a supernatural God can do that. I can't do that. I don't have enough willpower to do that. But the Holy Spirit in me, the seal, shows that I am His. And He is mine.
ReGina Johnston:So we're stamped for security and preservation. Jina, tell us more of what that looks like, in practical terms.
Jina McAfee:As Kyli was talking, the thing that just popped into my mind is that God offers this to all, to everybody. He's no respecter of persons. When we choose Him, we're actually choosing life. Once we have believed and we've said, "Yes," we're saved, and He seals us. It's like, He's saying, "You belong to Me. I have got a seal on you. I'm going to protect you. I'm going to provide for you. I'm going to fight for you. I'm going to lead you, and just like Kyli said, live inside of you. That's how we get to know Him. That's how we grow in Him. You don't start out knowing everything. You grow in that.
Kyli Rose:The weight of a seal may be lost today. In Bible times, they used papyrus. They would put it in a tube and wrap that tube with some cord. Then they would take a lump of clay, put it on there and press a ring, a signet into the clay. It
ReGina Johnston:It doesn't mean the enemy is not going to try. identified who that piece of mail, that document or letter, was coming from. So everybody can look at you being sealed by the Holy Spirit and know you belong to God. We don't just live in a physical world, but we live in a spiritual world. Not only can people see with their physical eyes but every single thing that the enemy has against you, people can look and say,
Kyli Rose:But, girl, you are sealed. You belong to Him."No, she's marked. She belongs to Him." There's protection in that. You're not just out there floating around hoping for the best.
ReGina Johnston:That's our defense. We say, "No, devil, I belong to God!"
Kyli Rose:They would brand cattle so thieves would think twice before they'd start stealing. They knew there was going to be punishment. repercussions.
ReGina Johnston:You belong to a holy God. That means you're protected. This reminds me of a story in the Old Testament, when God was freeing His people from Egypt, and they were instructed to put the blood of the lamb over their doorposts. When the Death Angel passed over, their firstborn would not be killed. They had protection in their household because of the blood of Jesus over their doorposts. It causes me to realize that we really need that blood of Jesus applied to our lives. In a sense, it's the identifier, just like you said. We belong to Him, and we're protected. There's assurance with that. It's an everyday walk with Christ. I want to know, just popcorn answers, how do we experience this seal of the Holy Spirit in our everyday life? Kyli, do you have any examples you can share with me?
Kyli Rose:That's when there was a shift for me. I realized there's this shield of protection round about me. I realized that the Lord was a strong tower. I could run to Him, and He would be there for me. There was a moment when this
ReGina Johnston:Any other examples? happened, that His presence was so real, that I knew I had been sealed by the Holy Spirit.
Jina McAfee:I can deal with fear. Even when I've made a good choice, a God-choice, sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice. There will be a time of wavering in assurance. I'll be kind of back and forthing. Then I read Scripture, and it says,"He will not let your foot slip" even though it sometimes looks like that. When we first moved here, we made a God-choice, and it went so well, at first. Then one thing after another came
against us:we got a traffic ticket, something broke, tangible things. It was to the point that I started laughing. I realized that old enemy was trying to make me fearful. It was so much that it made me laugh.
ReGina Johnston:I love that. You know that the Bible says that the Lord sits on the throne and laughs at the derision of the enemy. The enemy is just running around without full knowledge trying to cause effect and the Lord's response at is to laugh at him. So you're taking His position when you are able to do that.
Jina McAfee:I knew there was a battle. I saw the enemy trying to wreak havoc, but I knew what God had already done so I knew that I had security. It just made me laugh. We shared it with our kids, and they laughed. It was evidence of God moving in our lives.
Kyli Rose:I see that a lot when I look back. In the moment, I thought a guy was supposed to be the one, but God said, "No, he's not." I thought I was supposed to get into that program, but the Lord said, "No." And honestly with so many of these decisions, I wasn't even in an especially close relationship with the Lord. There are some seasons where I was just playing church, and I can look back and even in those seasons, I see His hand covering me, even in seasons of disobedience. He was shielding me and protecting me even from myself. Relationships, decisions, future decisions. I can look back and see His mercy and His grace and how He was just gently leading me, and sometimes not so gently. Sometimes it almost seemed as if He was pushing me in a different direction. Sometimes His grace looked like a lot of No's and closed doors. But I look back now and see that there was so much grace in that no, in that break up, in that person walking away.
Jina McAfee:You know that He protected you for your future and for your inheritance and for your legacy. Later, you get it.
Kyli Rose:I can look at it now and be like, "Thank You, Lord." There was so much mercy in that. Thank You that they left. That was good for them. That was good for me. I didn't get that job. It didn't work out that year. You knew what I needed. Because I didn't know. And I still don't.
ReGina Johnston:Those are things you can grab hold of to remind yourself when you're in the moment. When God didn't answer in this way here, I look back now and see His blessing. So when I'm in the midst of what I'm in, I can trust that at some point, I'll look back and see His blessing. He knows best. And He's not just an individual God, He's also a corporate god. In Revelation, we're looking at the church and what happens with the church. So Jina take us to what we believe happens to the church before the tribulation. How does God's plan and the seal of the Holy Spirit play into what we call the rapture?
Jina McAfee:I was thinking this morning that a lot of people have heard of the rapture, even if they don't understand what it is. God comes before judgment gets harsh, and takes His church out. He brings the church to Himself. We are given rewards and are part of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. We've got that time with Him, instead of experiencing the judgment of unbelievers. After He's removed the church, He also moves and works on the earth. People who haven't made a choice for Him can still make a choice. We also see that He's moving and working in Israel, the Jews. The Jews were the first people He called. We hear a lot about Israel in the news today. There's going to be a time after the rapture that Antichrist will come and offer a peace treaty to Israel. The Jews will take it, but three and a half years into the seven-year treaty, Antichrist will break that treaty. And when he does, the Jews will have their eyes opened by God. They'll know who He is, choose Him and be sealed by God. One-third will be saved. You can find that in Zechariah 12. It's really exciting. You can see that He seals 144,000 in
Revelation 7:3-4. He puts a seal on them and protects them.
ReGina Johnston:There's more that we believe the seal of the Holy Spirit does for us. Kyli, we see that being sealed by Holy Spirit is our enabling. How does that work?
Kyli Rose:The Holy Spirit is your power source. He is my power source. We talked about sealing in Bible days and beyond that, but I want to talk specifically about the King's seal. Whenever the King would seal something, it had the King's identifier on it. Not only did it identify the King as having power, but it also meant that all of the power and authority of Rome was behind that seal. So if that seal was broken, there was severe punishment. The King was just one man with his military, but the God of the Universe has made a deposit in you, the Holy Spirit, THE power source. The same One that raised Christ from the dead lives in you. We see
this in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22. It says, "It is God who enables us, along with you, to stand firm for Christ. [This is Paul speaking to the church in Corinth.] He has commissioned us, and He has identified us as His own by placing the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the first installment that guarantees everything He has promised us." Everything is eternity with Him. He's made this deposit in us now, but the fulfillment of that is going to be us getting to live in eternity with God forever. We haven't even gotten to step into the fullness of it yet. "God Himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee, He has given us His Holy Spirit" (2
Cor. 5:5). So when you are sealed by the Holy Spirit, your eternal destination is a new heaven and a new earth. It gets better than this. You can experience life now. We get to bring heaven to earth. We're carriers of it. But Earth is still a broken place; it's a beautiful, broken place. We get to experience something here, and we have the hope of knowing that there is more. He who began this good work, will be faithful to complete it. The journey is short, but the destination is forever. And honestly, this is part of the choosing. We talked about choosing in the beginning and that day-to-day choosing. We are having to choose to live eternal lives, right now. We're surrounded by a lot of temporary issues. Temporal issues.
ReGina Johnston:It doesn't feel temporary.
Kyli Rose:It feels big, and it can be very distracting. How do I live with an eternal mindset, knowing that I am just passing through, I'm not going to be here forever? I've got the Holy Spirit who helps me have the mind of Christ. How do I think more like Him? How do I see the world like He does? How do I see people like He does, the brokenness, the political system, all of this? God sees it very differently than we do. We want to tap into that.
ReGina Johnston:Every day. I love what Revelation 22:3-4
says:"No longer will there be a curse upon anything." This is about the new heavens and the new earth. That's our eternal destination, if we've been sealed by the Holy Spirit. "No longer will there be a curse on anything." You talked about how we live in a broken world. But at some point, there will no longer be a curse on anything."For the throne of God, and of the Lamb will be there, and His servants will worship Him. And they will see His face, and His name will be written on their foreheads." I look forward to that time where there's no longer the hardship that we deal with now. And that's a promise. Yes. And God watches over His promises to perform them. He's not making a promise and not keeping.
Kyli Rose:I love the audience that Paul is speaking too. They understood persecution. If you're reading about church history in the last century, you will get it. You have believers who are suffering under a sadistic Nero and an angry tyrant Domitian. People are being dragged out of their homes and burned at the stake. It's graphic, and it's hard. These people would walk into coliseums and hold their heads up high. They didn't want the world to think they were sad. They saw that as the most holy calling. They got it. They tapped into something that we miss, that He is worth it. If they can do it, we can too.
Jina McAfee:That's part of that grace in the moment. He gives us what we need in the moment, not before. When I think about what these early believers experienced, I think, I could not have done that. But if I were in that position, God would give me the grace I need. He would pour it out for me. I don't need it right now, so He has not put that in me yet.
ReGina Johnston:We have a few minutes. We've talked about the choice of being sealed by the Holy Spirit. Now we want to contrast that with the choice of the mark of the beast. So let's just talk about that for a few minutes and unpack what it means to choose the mark of the beast. Jina, can you help us with that?
Jina McAfee:We were saying, when you choose to worship God, you're making a holy alliance. You're worshiping God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. You make an unholy alliance when you choose to worship Satan and Antichrist and the false prophet. You're choosing an unholy alliance when you choose to take the mark. That means you're choosing to worship Satan and not God. In Scripture, Jesus talks about Satan being the father of lies in John 8:44. He says, "Your dad is a liar." You can't even see the truth. We know there are people that live in that situation. They can't even see the truth. This verse says that Satan has always hated the truth, and there is no truth in him.
ReGina Johnston:It's interesting how we know that there's a counterfeit trinity. It's an unholy trinity. Jina just mentioned the dragon which is Satan, the beast from the sea which is Anti-Christ, and the beast from the earth which is the false prophet. And then there are humans who make the choice. Let's look at some of the Scriptures that help us understand the unholy trinity. Kyli, can you unpack some of those for us?
Kyli Rose:We see the first member of this unholy trinity. We're going to start with the dragon. Revelation 12:3 says, "I saw a large red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, with seven crowns on his heads." Verse 4 says, "His tail had to be huge. It sweeps 1/3 of the stars in the sky and throws them to the earth." We see in Revelation 12:9 that Scripture very clearly spells out who this dragon is. "This great dragon--the ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world--was thrown down to the earth with all his angels. We see clearly who he is. We see that John's in the Spirit, and He sees Satan for who He really is. For those who live in the world, we need to know that Satan will not come as someone or something that will repel us. We have had this characterization of him. We think that we can have this complacent relationship with the word. And we think that we can just kind of have this complacent relationship with our prayer life. We will miss it if we are not a discerning Body of Christ. This is not fear mongering. This really is an hour to get serious with your prayer life, to get in the word because you and I will not be able to discern the schemes and the plans of the enemy and who he is and who he's working through if we don't. He doesn't show up on the scene with a tail and a pitch fork. It looks good. It will look good. And it will sound good. It will sound a lot like love. It will sound a lot like peace.
ReGina Johnston:There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end, it leads to death. That's what the Bible tells us.
Kyli Rose:Piece by piece, he will begin to get us to question our identity in Christ because if you don't know who you are, you will be prey to believe anything. It's baffling. It is, but it so lines up with right where we are in the hour that we're in. Our five-minute devotions that we have will not cut it in this hour. We have to have our eyes open and our ears open.
ReGina Johnston:It's not just the head knowledge of the word that's gonna get us through in a place of victory, in a place of thriving. It's not just the head knowledge of the word, it's a heart encounter with Jesus on a daily basis. You have to fight for that. That's not easy. You can't get that in a little five-minute, let me read my little quick devotional here and check that off my list and move on. There's got to be communion between you and the Lord on a daily basis. And, honestly, at times, it does feel like there is a ceiling or a wall, or a thickness or something that we have to break through in order to have that. But I just want to encourage us to be tenacious about that. Because we will find that life is much more enjoyable even, not that that's your goal, but it will be much more enjoyable. And you can then see the enemy at work and laugh like Jina talked about because you can see that he's not going to be victorious and win. So, all right, Jina, let's look at the beast. Tell us about the beast.
Jina McAfee:Revelation 13 describes the beast. And I want us to remember that in Revelation, John is in the spirit on the Lord's day and God is letting him see things as they are. And so he sees these not as desirable individuals, but as dragons and beasts. Here it says, "He had 7 heads and 10 horns with 10 crowns on its horns. And written on each head were names that blasphemed God." So he is blaspheming God. Sometimes he can do it and you wouldn't even know it, but he is. "This beast looked like a leopard, but it had the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion"(Re 13:1). It is a beast. "And the dragon gave the beast [and who's the dragon? Satan. Satan is the beast] his own power and throne and great authority. [And that's really what God does with Jesus. Isn't that interesting?] One of the heads of the beast, this beast out of the sea seemed to be wounded beyond recovery, but the fatal wound was healed! And the whole world marveled at this miracle and gave allegiance
to the beast" (Re 13:2-3). So what other event was somebody fatally wounded and then healed and rose from the dead? Jesus. So this beast from the sea, is Anti-christ, Anti-christ, the one that opposes Christ.
ReGina Johnston:So interesting. Revelation 13:11 moves to another beast, the beast out of the earth. So Kyli, help us with that. What is the beast out of the earth?
Kyli Rose:This is the final member we talked about in this unholy trinity. We see Satan, the Antichrist, and the final member here is the False Prophet. So the Antichrist will be more of the political leader. And then we see this false prophet, he will be almost like the head of the religious system. You see this marrying of church and state, essentially, and it's dangerous. Revelation 13:11-12, "Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth. He had two horns like those of a lamb, but he spoke with the voice of a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast [the Antichrist] and required all of the earth and its people to worship the first beast whose fatal wound had been healed." If you pay attention to the language, it says he was like, a lamb. And we know that Jesus is the Lamb of God, but he spoke with the voice of a dragon. So he's not speaking the truth, but he is speaking something that sounds a whole lot like it. It's similar, very deceptive. If you're going to be able to discern a falsehood, you have to know the truth. If you want to know what is not true, you have to know truth like the back of your hand. We see that the Holy Spirit leads people to worship Jesus; the False Prophet leads people to worship the Antichrist. He does mighty miracles and deceives all the people who belong to the world, and the beast from the earth is the false prophet. In Revelation 13:14, "He ordered the people to make a great statue of the first beast [we sure do love our idols, don't we] who was fatally wounded and then came back to life." So that rounds out that false, unholy trinity.
ReGina Johnston:Practically, this mark of the beast, becomes necessary to buy and sell. It's required. Revelation 13:15-17
says this:"He [the False Prophet] was then permitted to give life to this statue so that it could speak. Then the statue of the beast [the statue of Antichrist] commanded that anyone refusing to worship it must die. He required everyone--small and great, rich and poor, free and slave--to be given a mark on the right hand or on the forehead. And no one could buy or sell anything without that mark, which was either the name of the beast or the number representing his name." There is a lot of imagery there for us. What are some things that come to your mind when we talk about this mark of the beast?
Jina McAfee:One of the first things that comes to my mind is that there are chips that are being placed in people's wrists and hands right now, that will allow you to buy. That's starting to happen. And we've seen it happen bit by bit. And so it's like, "Oh, my goodness, this can happen.
ReGina Johnston:I think to some degree, it resurrects a fear in people. I'm about to tread on shaky ground. When this vaccine began to be required, it caused people to fear that if they received it, they would be receiving the mark of the beast. I know that during that time, my husband and I had some communication with one another, conversations about this. He believes entirely that we as believers, if we're walking in that close relationship with God that we've talked about on a daily basis, we do not have to fear being tricked into something, that we will know, we will see. We don't have to question, but it is important to know that there are some things in place, things don't just happen all of a sudden, they don't just happen in a vacuum. There are steps made such that when it comes to the time where the mark of the beast will be something we have to take, which is actually after the rapture of the church, by the way, that people who have come to Christ during that time will know that's what this is. They will because the Bible tells us there are people that don't take it.
Jina McAfee:One thing that really stands out to me is that 1900 years ago, God knew where we would be technologically. People 1900 years ago couldn't understand it, but man, we can
Kyli Rose:It all comes down to choice. We saw this during see it. COVID. People were having to make really hard choices. It came down to people's jobs at times, the primary providers in these homes having to choose whether or not they were going to do this and violate their own personal belief system or lose their jobs. They had children and a wife, people depending on them. So this is not easy now. And it will be so much harder then. We're going to have to know that we know. We're going to have to make a choice now. If you wait to choose, then you will not be able to stand. You won't. It's already really hard now. So there's some things that we have to settle in our hearts now, because it's not getting any easier. The choices will only be harder, the stakes will only be higher, the cost will only be greater. And if you're not willing to pay it now, you will not be able to pay it then. And so we've got to make a choice now. Now is the time. Don't wait. Don't vacillate.
ReGina Johnston:We see that being marked by the beast brings wrath and deception. Being sealed by Holy Spirit brings peace and promise and clarity and truth and protection. Being marked by the beast brings wrath and deception. And when we're marked by the beast, our eternal destination is hell. The Bible tells us only those whose name are written in the Lamb's book of life will inherit the kingdom. So we choose. We choose. We choose who we will worship. Will we make a holy alliance or an unholy alliance? What destination will you choose? We choose Christ and live with Him forever in the new heavens and new earth. Or we reject Christ, which is a choice, and accept the mark of the beast and be eternally damned in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. That's where we are. That's the question. Will we choose to be sealed by Holy Spirit? And you can make that choice today? Or will we choose to be marked by the beast and eternally damned? And so Kyli, here's what I would like for you to do as we close. We've looked at God's clock, and we've asked ourselves, what time is it? There's a Scripture in Matthew 6:24, that I would like for you to share with us. And then, if you would, I'd like for you to lead us in prayer as we close this out, for people who are in the throes of decision making today, that you would lead us in prayer for those who need to make a choice, who have wavered, who find themselves wavering this very moment, and they need to make a choice.
Kyli Rose: In Matthew 6:24, it says, "No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money." You cannot serve God and be enslaved to yourself, your self image. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to comfort, convenience, getting ahead, all the temporary things that we talked about.
ReGina Johnston:And Matthew 10:28 says, "Don't be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both body and soul." But He doesn't want to. He's not willing that any should perish. He wants us to have life and more abundantly. So will you pray with us?
Kyli Rose:God, I just lift those up who are in the middle of a choice, in the middle of a decision. Maybe you said "yes" a long time ago, but through circumstances and disappointments, maybe trauma, you've walked away. You're not quite sure He is as good as we just said that He is. So Holy Spirit, I pray that You would just meet them right where they are in that place of decision. I love how You don't push us any which way. You just simply invite us, God, and the invitation is on the table again today. And the next day and the next day. You love us so much that You gave us the dignity to choose. You could have forced us but you didn't. That's how much you love us. You honor us by giving us a choice to choose You back. God, I pray that in the middle of what might feel confusing, frustrating, God for those who just feel like they're paralyzed, and they don't know if they should go to the left or the right, or in or out or away, or what to do, God I just speak peace over every troubled mind. I speak peace in the chaos. God, Your Word brings order. Your Holy Spirit brings confirmation, brings joy, brings peace and anything that is not of the enemy. So, God, I pray that today would be the day that we say, "yes," yes to following you fully. Yes to peace. Yes to life abundant! Yes to the cost, knowing that it'll be worth it. God I pray that we would say yes in faith and just take this thing one day at a time walking it out, knowing that we are not walking it out alone. Because You are Emmanuel. You are God with us, and You will not leave us if we reach for Your hand. God, I thank You for this time. I thank You for this word. And I pray that it would just prompt a decision from every single person listening and whatever decision they need to make. Whether it's an eternal decision, where they're going to spend their eternity, or maybe it's something else, maybe just pressing in this year. They have just been having this half in and half out relationship with Your word, with the community, with the body of Christ, with church, and they know they need to press in, Father. I pray that this would be a year of pressing in, of seeking and finding. You are faithful. And Your Word says that when we seek You, we will find You, that You give peace to those whose minds are stayed on You. God, You are inviting us, and I just pray that there would be collective yes's. In Jesus' mighty name. Amen.
ReGina Johnston:Amen. Amen.