Greeneville Seventh-day Adventist Church: In New York Harbor stands a lady with her torch raised to the sky. How many of you have seen the Statue of Liberty? I think that's almost everybody. That's amazing. You know, there's probably no symbol more closely related to everybody's idea of the spirit of America than the Statue of Liberty. A have you noticed a difference? Between the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our country and the two hundredth anniversary? Do you remember nineteen seventy-six? Yeah, rub it in. Some of you don't. I think I was in seventh grade, I'm not sure. But I remember the overwhelming excitement and patriotism throughout this country. If it wasn't red, white, or blue, it wasn't a color. Everything all over the country. And for two hundred and fifty, I was like, people are like, meh, whatever. Like, wow, what a difference. Are we relinquishing our liberty? On june nineteenth, eighteen eighty-five, the Statue of Liberty arrived at what was then called Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. Wonderful symbol of America was a gift from France, designed and built on the other side of the Atlantic, and then transported here and rebuilt. Put together again. But just because we have a statue does not mean that we have liberty. It's merely a grand symbol of what we hold dear as a nation. It's a symbol that should be a constant reminder of the cost of that liberty, not just as our country was getting started, but in the subsequent years of defending that liberty. I have mentioned before the impossible stack of history books beside my bed waiting to be read. I think there's fiftyish. I looked through them this past week and I realized a theme I hadn't really realized before in those history books. I would say ninety percent of them deal with the defence of liberty. And e know, June sixth marked the eighty second anniversary of what? Do you know? D Day. And I'm so I'm looking through my books. ⁓ one I'm currently reading is about D Day. One I just finished is about D-Day. And I found two more in that stack about D-Day that I haven't read yet. These are just waiting. I thought, well, I've got a theme going on here. On D Day, one estimate is that four thousand four hundred and fourteen Allied troops were killed, over ten thousand missing or wounded, all to defend what the Statue of Liberty stands for. The first non-combatant Medal of Honor receiver, Desmond Doss, who served in the Pacific Theater of World War II, was a member of the Statue of Liberty Unit. And the the Statue of Liberty, that was their symbol, that was on their badges. And I have visited the home of Desmond Doss up on Lookout Mountain, and he had a large replica of the Statue of Liberty right beside his driveway. My adventurer club was there to help him with a yard sale. And I bought for $5 a red, white, and blue hat, baseball type cap with a Statue of Liberty on it from Desmond Doss. And it's covered in the type of pins that Pathfinders collect, all with a Statue of Liberty all over it. If there's ever a museum in his honor, that'll be donated. But Wow, he believed in liberty. Even today, our young men and women are paying the price of our liberty with their time, efforts, and lives. I have a former church member, a young lady, who's serving on an aircraft carrier overseas right now. Families back home are paying the price in so many ways. No, liberty's not a statue. It's something that we hold in our hearts and must continue to defend. Next next Sabbath marks two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of gaining that liberty from an oppressive government. Many have tried to destroy the liberty that we enjoy because it is a threat to dictatorships, to world leaders who wish to keep their power at the cost of the liberty of their own people. During the beginning of communism, Lenin said, first we shall take Eastern Europe and then the masses of Asia. After that, we shall surround and undermine the United States, which will fall into our hands without a struggle. like an overripe fruit. Khrushchev boasted, Whether you like it or not, we will bury you. And on American television in nineteen fifty-seven he stated, I can prophesy that your grandchildren will live under socialism. Quite a prophet, Khrushchev was. Today, many wish evil to happen to us because of the liberty that we enjoy, including the most evil dictator this world has ever known. He used to go by the name of Lucifer. Now we just say the dragon or Satan or the enemy. He wishes to bury us. He wants to cause our children and our grandchildren to live without liberty from God. He wants us to be bound to Him instead of free in Jesus. He does not wish for us to be here today for this communion service. Because of what it represents our liberty from his tyranny. Freedom from his control. Freedom from the bondage of sin. Just as liberty is not a statue, communion is not a piece of bread and a glass of wine. These are mere symbols of what is dear to our hearts. These are reminders of the cost of our liberty, a price that we could not pay, but was paid for us. Communion is not something that happens once a quarter. It's something that is part of us, something that is in us, something we are intimate with. Jesus, as our example, demonstrates this type of communion to his followers in John chapter 14. Turn with me there. John chapter 14. So many good things in John fourteen. But we're gonna start with verse six. Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the what? The life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. And from now on, you know him and have seen him. Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father, and it's sufficient for us. Jesus said to him, Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. So how can you say, Show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own authority. But the Father who dwells in me does the works. Believe me, and I am in the Father, and the Father in me, or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will also do. And greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father. Okay. Jesus is showing the intimate relationship of Or communion that he has with the Father. And then, as our scripture reading in chapter 17 points out, this is where Jesus is praying for the unity and intimacy in the relationships of all future believers, you and me. In this prayer, Jesus has just prayed for the unity of his disciples, and then he turns to us and zooms in on us today. He says, those that will follow. That's chapter seventeen, verse twenty. I do not pray for those alone, for these alone, but also to those who will believe in me through their word, that they all may be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us. ⁓ You know that means? We can have the same relationship with the Father that the only begotten Son has. An intimate communion with God. And it continues, that the world may believe that you sent me. Do you want to do evangelism? Evangelism is when people look at you and me and they see the Father. They see Jesus and they go, wait. I believe. That's what it says here. That the world may believe that you sent me. Because they see the unity in Christ, unity with the Father, unity with the each other within the church. Communion is a reminder of the relationship that we can have with God. Not just that we can have, that we must. Just as real as the relationship that we can have or have had with our earthly father. Now I realize some of you had earthly fathers that were maybe not there. Or maybe they're too much. Or whatever. Earthly fathers are very imperfect. But in spite of that, last Sunday we celebrated Father's Day. Father's Day, I got a card. And it says on there, there there's four letters back there. S W A K. You know what that means, don't you? If you don't, you never got a letter. Emails don't do that. That's sealed with a kiss. Okay. That's an intimate relationship between me and my wife. She gave me this Father's Day card. And we know each other so well. Sometimes we don't even like each other. But we always love each other. We get on each other's nerves. But that is a forever intimate relationship that wouldn't give up for anything. But Father's Day is more than a card and a polyester tie. It's a symbol of an ongoing relationship that is real, not just once a year. As a child, my favorite time of day was about four thirty PM. I love four thirty. And I would begin looking out the sliding glass door of our house sometime after four. And I wasn't looking down the road, I'm looking at the porch. Where my dog Sally was sleeping. Sally always slept on that cool concrete in the heat of the day. And Sally would be there laying sleeping, and I'd keep one eye on Sally. I might have been watching television or whatever I was doing as a kid, but I kept one eye on Sally. You see, she was waiting too. She was waiting for 4:30. Because no matter how many cars came up the road. Her ears would only perk up to the sound of my father's Ford F-150. I would be watching her sound asleep, but one ear would twitch. Like, Daddy's home. Couldn't see him yet, because he was a quarter of a mile away around a curve. Other cars would come, but that ear would not twitch to those other cars. But when I saw the sign of that ear twitching, I knew Daddy was home. I didn't have to look down the road to say, ⁓ she's right. No, she was always right. She could hear him coming so far away. You see, he'd been out tuning pianos all day, earning a living for the family. The family was not complete each day until Daddy came home. Even the dog had sense enough to know this. This event was enough to rouse her off the porch to greet her master, and enough to send me out the door to wait for him to pull in the driveway. I couldn't wait to hug my dad before his feet even landed. This was real. A longing in the heart to be close to my dad. Do we have that kind of longing to be close to our Heavenly Father? Are you looking for the signs that his coming is near? The signs are as sure as my dog's ears. Symbolism can only be effective if there's truth to back it up. Otherwise, liberty is only a statue, Father's Day is only a tie, and communion is only a ritual. At the Last Supper, Jesus showed such humility by washing the feet of his disciples that the whole Passover feast changed in their hearts. It the meaning did not diminish from what it had been. It was enhanced greatly. Because now there was a face-to-face possibility of a relationship that was real. And the disciples were experiencing this in a way they had never had before, with pride now broken. The yearly ritual became actual communion with God Himself. Today don't even let the footwashing service be a mere symbol. ⁓ i i it's a symbol of humility, yes. But let it reflect what is really in our hearts. May we truly be humble. And not in such a way that we can go around saying, Well, I'm proud of my humility. Wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. If we're truly humble, we don't know we're humble. We can't look in the mirror and go, Yep, I'm a humble person. Look at that. ⁓ no, I think that may be the opposite. The humility is Thinking about others more than self. Looking to Jesus instead of looking to self. You know, self doesn't do anything for us. I hope you're not too disappointed. But this Passover feast that this is enhanced from You remember Passover, when the angel passed over Egypt, and the angel was instructed: if there's blood on the doorposts, that firstborn lives. If there's not, they die. Did you notice that in this story, the angel doesn't come up to each house and knock on the door and say, I want to meet your firstborn, and give them an interview. Okay, ⁓ firstborn. ⁓ did you read your Bible today? did you do any sinning today? ⁓ what what no. The blood was enough. The angel passed by that door that had blood on it. He did not interview the person inside to see if they were worthy. It was the blood that made them worthy, not their own actions. And because I love Jesus for providing the real blood, as the Bible says, if you love me, keep my commandments. If you love me, live the way I do. Sanctification. Become more and more like me. He doesn't say, okay, you're safe in your sins. What did he tell the woman, go and sin no more? Become more like me. So the foot washing service, yes, it is a symbol, but it it's only a symbol. If there's no truth behind it, allow pride to be washed away today. So that the symbolic communion service can be backed up by truth that's in the heart, by the intimacy of our relationship to God. And if we're intimate with God, that means we got to cut each other a bunch of slack. Because we have to love each other too. And that's hard, isn't it? Be honest. We get on each other's nerves. But that doesn't stop love. Love is a commitment. Love is real. Love is intimate. Love is unity. No matter what.