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It's great to be back with you again. We thoroughly enjoyed the banquet last night and getting a chance to see so many good friends and we have such fond memories of our time here. It seems hard to believe that it was four years ago when we come back.

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It seems like the time is compressed and we feel very much at home in this place. So we're glad to be here again this morning and delighted to share with you what God has laid on my heart as well. Last night I spoke from 1 Samuel chapter 4 and we talked about from that passage that

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past blessings are not a guarantee of future success. We saw there a story about how Israel had assumed that just by having the Ark of the Covenant in their midst that that would ensure victory in the future but it was not so. We saw that the only way to ensure God's blessing in the future is to continue to walk with

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Him in the present. That was the challenge of last night's message. Today as we look toward the future again I'd like to deal with that question more fully of what does the future hold?

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What will the next 10 years be like for Salem but also for the church at large? This summer at the general conference of the free church President McDill shared with us some of the trends that are taking place in our society. He shared them very effectively as he communicated many things that will impact our churches

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in the decade ahead. Among those that he mentioned were these, that we live in an ever increasing pluralistic society, secularization, the new age movement and Satan worship are now a part of the American scene.

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Millions of Americans are exposed daily through radio, television, books and magazines to the new age movement and its message. This ideology has invaded virtually every area of American life. People are being indoctrinated in it without even realizing it.

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I've seen this to be true even in our own area where at times on the news we've seen how athletics has gone toward this whole idea of visualization, how in medicine it is often used in practice this idea of sort of emptying yourself, focusing on certain objects that are not biblical and giving and directing our thoughts in that way.

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There are other trends that are taking place in our society as well. We live in an information era. We are bombarded with information daily. A writer recently commented that an average person today receives more information in

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a week than a person living in the 17th century may have received in their entire lifetime. The American family is also in radical transition. The traditional nuclear family consisting of a dad working and mom staying at home to tend the children is now a smaller and smaller segment of our society.

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Today only 24% of mothers stay at home to take care of the children. By the year 2000, 80% of women will work outside the home. Today it is 64%. This will have a profound effect upon the family, the church and the Sunday school.

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One out of five families today is a single parent home. Scores of families are blended, composed of his children, her children and their children. The 1990s will be characterized by fractured homes, alcohol, drugs, violence and child abuse.

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60% of teenagers today are sexually active. Nationwide over 16% of all children born last year were born out of wedlock. One and one half million were aborted. Our society is becoming more complex, more violent, less trusting.

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How will the church in the 90s respond to these challenges? They're frightening in many ways, the things that are taking place and it is a time for God's people to live decisively and with conviction. I believe if we are to respond to these trends that are taking place in the world around

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us, we need to remember some great facts about our God and his character and that's what I'd like to share with you today. In 1 Samuel chapter 5, we see a reminder in this passage that our God is powerful. The God that we serve is powerful indeed.

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You see after the Philistines had captured this ark from Israel, they brought it to their city to Ashdod where they had a temple set up where they worship the God Dagon. And we read here in 1 Samuel chapter 5 that they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and they set it beside him.

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When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day though, a curious thing had happened. They had intended to bring this foreign God into their temple as a sign that he was subservient to Dagon. They worshiped Dagon as that supreme God.

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What they found instead when they came in that morning though was a change in positions. It was not God who was subservient to their God but Dagon had fallen down and was prostrate before him. So they said this isn't right and they took that God and that statue and they set it up

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again and they placed him there. But when they came in the next morning, the same thing had happened. God had fallen down again only this time his head and his hands were broken off. They were shocked by it.

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In fact, they make the note here that to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who entered Dagon's temple at Ashdod step on the threshold because that's where his head and his arms had fallen. The Lord's hand was heavy upon that city and its people.

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They refused to acknowledge that God was indeed the one supreme God. Because of their refusal, other things happened. They were struck with tumors and plagues that came upon them. Their crops were devoured by rats that went in among the fields and ate what they had

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planted. It came to a point where they wondered what can we do? They realized this God's hand was heavy upon them and so they decided to send it to another city.

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It went from Ashdod to Gath but the plagues continued. The residents of Gath didn't want it anymore so they sent it down to Ekron. When the people of Ekron heard that it was coming, they panicked. They said, "No, not here.

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We don't want this. We don't want this." Because they had heard what God had done in his judgment. And so they decided, these leaders of the Philistines met together and their plan was

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to send the ark away from their midst. And does God demonstrate his power today in that same way? Is he able to demonstrate that he alone is the one true God? Yes, he can.

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And he has done it in some very dramatic ways. About a year ago, I picked up a copy of the book, I Just Saw Jesus. If you want to read some exciting and gripping stories of what God is doing in the world, I highly recommend it.

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It has to do with the movie Jesus that was made a few years ago and is now being used as an evangelistic tool around the world. Philistines have come to know Christ through this presentation. And in here, Paul Eshelman, the author, shares some of those dramatic stories.

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In Thailand, for example, the movie Jesus was shown to a crowd of people and afterwards the team that had brought it to that city needed a place to stay. The residents of that city said that they could stay in the local Buddhist temple. And so they thought, well, it's at least a dry place to sleep.

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We'll stay there for the night. What they didn't know was that all the residents around there knew that that place was inhabited by demons. While they slept there during the night, they were awoke by a terrifying apparition that

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they saw. They saw the vision of a hideous beast in the corner that came toward them. And they were afraid. They were struck with fear.

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And they said, let's do what Jesus does in this movie and let's pray. And they prayed. In the name of Jesus, they cast it out and it was gone. And they slept quietly and peacefully the rest of the night.

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In the morning when the villagers came, they expected these people to be gone or dead. That's what had happened to the others who had stayed there. But they found them instead sleeping calmly. And they were struck by the power of their God.

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In another place, some thugs tried to steal the equipment that they had brought, their bikes and their projectors and the film and all of that, thinking that they could take it and sell it on the black market. When they came that night to try and break into this little hut where it was, they found

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instead two large, tall men, clothed in white, brandishing large swords, standing at the entrance. They were terrified by the presence of what we would describe as angels who were standing there.

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They fled into the woods. They kind of regrouped to spin and they said, oh, this can't be. We must have seen a ghost or something. And they came back and they decided to sneak around the back way.

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They came instead. They got to the back of this hut. And again, they saw these two men standing guard at the entrance. They said if this is the power of their God, we dare not steal from them.

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They came that night. They saw the movie. They gave their lives to Christ and they told this story. Time and time again, these events are happening.

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In India also, there was a story of a witch doctor, a Bhagat, who came to see the film. And he was so impressed by the power of Jesus and the miracles that he performed that he took one of the flyers, the advertisers that they had with this picture of Jesus. He brought it home.

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He set it up alongside the other gods that he worshipped. And as he looked at all these gods and some were beautiful and others were grotesque, he wondered to himself, can they really all be God? Or is there only one true God?

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And he decided to compose a little test. He took some dried cow dung, a common fuel in their society in India, and he placed a piece of it before each of these gods, these pictures that he worshipped. And he prayed that the one true God would answer by fire.

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And he stepped back and almost immediately, that piece of dung in front of the picture of Jesus lit and the whole thing burned until it was consumed. He took those other gods and idols that he had worshipped and he destroyed them and he gave his heart to Jesus.

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And now he spends time telling others in that area why Jesus is the only true God. Those stories are incredible. In fact, that's what Paul Eshleman titles that chapter, "That's Incredible," of the amazing things that God has done.

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And we are seeing more and more in our society those kind of open confrontations between God and Satan. Dr. Tim Warner, who teaches at our seminary, talks about spiritual warfare and spiritual battles.

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He gave a seminar in the Twin Cities where I attended and I was struck by this fact. He shared that we need not fear the battle because greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world. But the great need of the church today is to pray.

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The great need of the church in our society is to pray, to be equipped for what is happening in the world around us. I've heard it said that in Eastern Europe, the difference between the church in Eastern Europe and in America is in their commitment to prayer.

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Too often, to our shame, we have more of an entertainment mindset. We come to a performance in the church wanting to hear maybe a great concert or maybe some dramatic presentation or a very good speaker. And so God's house is full on those occasions.

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But when the call goes out to pray, only a handful come. In Eastern Europe, when the call goes out to pray, God's house is full. The people come because prayer is so important and vital to their ministry. We need to learn that.

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We need to grow in our commitment to pray. There is a second story that is shared here by Samuel in chapter 6 and it is a reminder that our God is holy. Our God is holy.

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When these Philistines met and they decided that this guy was too much for them to handle, they decided to send this ark away, but they wanted to do it properly. In verse 3, the priest told them that if you return the ark of the God of Israel, don't send it away empty by all means.

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Send a guilt offering with it and then you will be healed and you will know why his hand has not been lifted from you. So these Philistine leaders asked, "What guilt offering should we send to him?" And they said, "Send five gold tumors and five gold rats according to the number of

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the Philistine rulers because the same plague has struck both you and your rulers." They went and they built a new cart, a new cart because this God was to be treated in a holy way. It wouldn't be right to take a cart that had been used for common means and to place this

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ark upon it. So they did that. They constructed the new ark. They placed these symbols of their guilt offering there.

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But then they composed one final test to see if this really had happened because of God or if it was just by chance. They decided to take two new milk cows that had yet not been weaned from their calves and send them, use them to draw this cart.

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Well, the natural desire of those cows would be to return to their calves for the milk that they needed. And instead what they did when they hitched these calves to the cart, the power of God was demonstrated in an awesome way in that this cart was taken straight up to the land

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of Israel. The cows went lowing all the way, crying out, you know, in a sense they knew what they were leaving. But the power of God was drawing them on and on until they came to the city of Beth Shemesh.

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There the residents of Israel took that cart, they chopped it, they used the wood for fire and there they sacrificed those cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. But then the people of Beth Shemesh did something they should not have done. They looked into the ark.

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They treated God's ark with contempt. They treated something that was holy that was to be handled only by the priests in a way that viewed it as common. And because of it God struck down 70 of the men in that region.

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And in verse 20 the men of Beth Shemesh asked, "Who can stand in the presence of the Lord, this holy God? To whom will the ark go up from here?" What Samuel reminds us of in this passage is that our God is holy.

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And we see two reactions to his holiness. We see on the one hand the people of the Philistines whose reaction to God's holiness was to send it away, get rid of it. Their reaction was much like Peter when in response to our Lord he said, "Lord, depart

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from me for I am a sinful man." He was overcome by the awesome holiness of our God. But the other reaction which we sometimes fall into is the danger of treating holy things as common and of not giving God the proper respect and reverence that he deserves.

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We treat him as common or we treat him with less respect when we do not live the holy lives that we should. J.I. Packer has written a book called Hot Tub Religion in which he talks about modern American Christianity

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and he likens it in many ways to a hot tub. Sitting in a hot tub he said, "I have to admit it's kind of comfortable, it's relaxing, it feels good." For many people in our country their Christianity is just like that.

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It's comfortable, it's relaxing, it makes them feel good. But there's more to that than being a Christian. In the past a hallmark of evangelical Christianity was this call to holiness. In J.I. Packer wrote, "I see sanctification as a neglected priority in today's church

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everywhere, a fading glory in the evangelical world." In the past Roman Catholics and Protestants alike emphasized the reality of God's call to holiness. They spoke with deep insight about God's provision for holiness.

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English speaking preachers in the Reformation tradition constantly expounded what holiness requires of us and what our holiness involves for us and what the Holy Spirit does within us. He's not calling for a return to legalism or a set of do's and don'ts that we should

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follow but a spirit in each of us that desires to please God in everything that we do. They pointed out these great preachers of the past what holiness means and what disciplines we need to be involved in to grow in holiness. They talked about the assurance, joy, and usefulness to God that it gives.

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Today there are many ministers who believe that their effectiveness in ministry depends upon their mastery of professional skills. But Robert Murray McShane, a Presbyterian revivalist in Scotland in the 1830s said, "My people's greatest need is my personal holiness."

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What a change from today. Today the concern for holiness that was once so striking a mark of the evangelical world is largely a thing of the past. We rarely handle the issue in a direct way and when we do our touch is indirect and insecure.

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Recently Oprah Winfrey had a show on her television program where she was talking to people who were having affairs, who were living in adultery. She talked about in particular there was one woman on the show who had had a long standing affair with a married man.

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And she was saying how happy she was in this relationship. When the time came for the people in the audience to raise some questions, one person in the audience raised the question of morality. That's not right.

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That's not right to do. And she raised it from a Christian perspective and this woman objected and she said, "No, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

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I'm a Christian. I'm a Christian but my personal life and my religion don't have anything to do with one another. God wants me to be happy and if I'm happy with this man then God doesn't mind."

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You and I know differently but it saddens my heart when there are people out there who think and live that way as though what they do on Sunday morning is no different, I mean makes no difference on the rest of the week and how they live. Now Christianity has to be vital.

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It has to be a relationship with the living God that affects us day by day as we walk with Him. And in a world that's becoming increasingly immoral and we see that in TV and movies and the sexual conduct and lifestyles of many, we must be holy.

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We must live holy lives, obedient, responding to what God has said in His Word. The third picture I'd like to share with you from 1 Samuel chapter 7 is that our God is faithful. Our God is faithful.

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Some 20 years pass in Israel's history and we come to a point where Samuel calls the people to gather again to come before the Lord. In 1 Samuel 7 verse 2, it tells us that it had been a long time, 20 years in all that the ark had remained in Kiriath-Jerim and all the people of Israel mourned and sought

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after the Lord. Samuel said to the whole house of Israel, "If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the asterisks and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve Him only and He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines."

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These Israelites had so compromised their lives that they had adopted some of these pagan customs. And they themselves had gotten involved and some were worshiping foreign gods and these fertility goddesses.

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We can imagine that their lifestyle was much like that of the people around them where there was very little difference seen. Samuel calls them to repent and to turn from their sin and turn back to the Lord. And it says here that the Israelites put away their bales and their asterisks and served

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the Lord only. They came together and on that day they fasted, they confessed their sin, they acknowledged it before the Lord. It says here that they poured out their sins like water before the Lord in a time of real

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and genuine repentance. And as these people were gathered here before the Lord to worship, the Philistines thought that these people were gathering for a strategy session, a military strategy session. And so the Philistines decided to attack them.

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When the Israelites saw it, they called out to their God and they asked Samuel to pray for them. And Samuel cried out to the Lord on Israel's behalf and the Lord answered him in a marvelous way.

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God sent a storm that routed the Philistines and it threw them into such a panic that they began to flee and the Israelites came and pursued them and destroyed many of them along the way. And God brought about a great victory on that day.

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But it wouldn't have happened had the people not come back to the Lord and straighten things out in their relationship with him and determined to walk rightly before the Lord. What Samuel did on that occasion, and we read in verse 12, he took a stone, he set it up between Mizpah and Shem and he named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far the Lord has helped us."

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So the Philistines were subdued and did not invade Israelite territory again. In fact, throughout Samuel's lifetime, the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines. The town from Ekron to Gath that were the Philistines that they had captured from Israel were restored to her.

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And Israel delivered the neighboring territory from the power of the Philistines and there was peace between Israel and the Amorites. We see here Samuel wanting to erect this stone, this monument. Ebenezer means literally a stone of help as a reminder of God's faithfulness to them.

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In our home, Gail and I have an Ebenezer as well. It's not a stone that we've set up, but it's a book that we keep on our shelf. It's a book in which we have recorded many of God's faithful acts in our life in the past.

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Answers to prayer, times when he has been faithful to provide for our needs in often unexpected ways, times when we have seen God work where he has protected us from harm or danger, times when he has ministered to us or encouraged us. My only regret is that we haven't recorded more of them.

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There are so many that happen as you walk with God. But when we look back on those events and the things that God has done in the past, they are an encouragement to walk with him in the future. Why have we done it too?

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We've also done it because of our children. Because we want them to learn that trusting God for answers to prayer is not an academic exercise, but it's a very real experience and that God answers in specific ways and he is faithful and we have seen that over and over again.

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So that this track record is established that when you meet another challenge in the future you can face it with confidence because God is good. We need to be people who live and who trust in God's faithfulness to us and who are not afraid to tell others what God has done for us and what he can do for them.

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At the end of World War II, a newspaper reporter was sent to Okinawa. He traveled with the military men there as they were doing some of the cleanup operations and as he and his jeep driver came upon a small town in that village, they saw a beautiful demonstration of what a Christian community could be like.

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The newsman's name was Clarence Hall and he wrote that we had seen other Okinawan villages that were down at the heels and despairing. By contrast, this one shone like a diamond in a dung heap. Everywhere we were greeted by smiles and dignified bows.

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Proudly the old men showed us their spotless homes, their terraced fields, their store houses and granaries, their prized sugar mill. Hall said that in this village he saw no jails, no drunkenness, divorce was unknown and he was told that 30 years before an American missionary had come to that place, he had

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led two elderly townspeople to the Lord and he had left them a Japanese Bible. These new believers began to study the scriptures and as God taught them, they shared the gospel with others who in turn came to know Christ and that entire village was transformed. Hall's jeep driver was so amazed at the difference between this community and the others that

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he had seen that he made this remark. So this is what comes out of a Bible and a few old men who want to live like Jesus. What an amazing transformation it was. And if we are to see God work in the communities where we live and begin to make changes in

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the lives of people in our neighborhoods or the places around us, it's going to take all of us to have that commitment to live like Jesus. It means a commitment to walk in his power day by day, a commitment to live holy lives pleasing to him, obedient, responsive, sensitive to what God has shared in his word.

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And it means living lives faithful, not ashamed to tell what God has done in our lives and what he can do in the lives of others. And my prayer would be that this weekend, the challenges that you have heard would inspire you to do just that, to continue to press ahead into this next decade, being people

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that God can use in this community or if he calls you from here in another place as well, but that others might know Jesus lives because of you. Let's pray. Our Father, as we come before you this morning, our desire is to please you in all respects.

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We know that that is impossible apart from your power working in us. And so Father, empower us, challenge us, fill us with your spirit this day that we might go from this place as your servants, willing, humble, obedient, wanting to please you in every area of our life.

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And Father, if there is anything that is standing in the way of that now, give us the courage to remove it, that it might not be a hindrance in our life, but that we might walk obediently with you. For your sake and glory, amen.