Reformation Hope Church Brookfield WI Dr Wayne Sedlak

God tries the Righteous (Psalm 11: 5), but not for His own benefit. It is for the Righteous so that they can see their faults that otherwise they would have avoided noticing. One of the trials that God puts in front of is building His Kingdom before our own.

Sermons grounded in The Word of God and The Grace of God's Law. Dr Wayne C Sedlak has 45 years of Pastoral Ministry in the United States and Africa, including as University Professor and Educator.

Sermons grounded in The Word of God and The Grace of God's Law. Dr Wayne C Sedlak has 45 years of Pastoral Ministry in the United States and Africa, including as University Professor and Educator.

Often we are tempted to believe that those that were once Christian lost their Salvation. Whole sects of Christianity believe this is possible. In reality, there are two types of faith, both of which are good, but only one of, which is saving. Abraham, who communed with Melchizedek and became a prince in the Earth, did not have Salvation until later (as we know from Paul's commentary, in the New Testament), although he obviously had some kind of Faith. We need to go from Preparatory Faith to Effectual Faith.

The Christian Faith is not a "leap in the dark." We are supposed to "try the spirits whether they are of God." This means that we are to trust that the 10 plagues visited Egypt, but we also are to do the archaeology necessary to find those 10 plagues in the ruins. This will lead us to such things as the Ipuwer Papyrus and other tokens of God's presence in history.

Sermons grounded in The Word of God and The Grace of God's Law. Dr Wayne C Sedlak has 45 years of Pastoral Ministry in the United States and Africa, including as University Professor and Educator.

Sermons grounded in The Word of God and The Grace of God's Law. Dr Wayne C Sedlak has 45 years of Pastoral Ministry in the United States and Africa, including as University Professor and Educator.

Ecclesiastes 4 and 5 show us a nation, people, city or region left to itself in the vanity of sin and corruption will ALWAYS move on to oppression. Both chapters highlight the horrid results of oppression. However, in the midst of these two chapters, there is a pause. Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 highlights the only real solution that breaks the mold of sin- oppression- corruption: and that solution is the house of God, the Congregation of the Lord.

God's people are warned in Ecclesiastes 5 to "guard their steps when they enter the house of God." The Hebrew word for guard is shamar. Just as Adam was to guard the Garden and failed, so God's people are the ONLY solution to the corruption to oppression of the world.

As you will see in this message, "guard your steps as you enter the house of God" calls for a peculiar stewardship and responsibility for the Christian. The passages warns us that for failure to "guard our steps" the loss can be severe, because of the angels. The angelic host is God's police force. They are not mere symbols of religion. The angelic house is designed to uphold the testimony of Jesus Christ among His people.

The Congregation of the Lord (hereinafter the Church) in both the Old and New Testaments is surrounded by "a miraculous stewardship": the sacraments of both testaments, were "signs and seals" of Christ's Righteousness. The Church itself- Old and New Testaments- is called to be the "Pillar and Ground of the Truth" (cf I Tim 3:15). As such, we are to "guard our steps" concerning our use of the House of God today. Indeed, the Apostle Paul warns us, for failure to take heed to our ethic (our "steps") can invoke deadly sanctions against us. when the Church fails to bear godly testimony before men. I Corinthians 11 makes it very clear, for such unholy ethic, "many are sickly among you and some sleep." Again, the Angelic Host are indirectly invoked as this message proves.

Sin is a deadly enemy, with which we are told to not play "so that grace might abound". But it is also used as a tool in God's arsenal for our personal growth as well as what He will use as the downfall of the wicked. "All thing work together for good," implies God's handy-work in it all. We need to struggle with sin and from that struggle learn about the world and how to overcome it.

Individually and corporately Christians tend to be perfectly fine with sin. We manage to do mental gymnastics to figure out how to justify it. the end goal in all of this is to convince ourselves that God is okay with what we are doing. Unfortunately, in doing so we often completely ignore the consequences that God puts forth as the due reward of our sin, but in the end the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes his name in vain (as we do when we call ourselves Christian).