*Title:* The Straight Testimony — Pastor Kyle Baldwin, July 25, 2026

When we tell someone we’re going to “be straight” with them, we mean we’re about to say something they need to hear. In this sermon, Pastor Kyle Baldwin asks what Scripture means by the straight testimony — and why it matters so much for the church today. He begins with Jesus’ own picture of the way of salvation: “Enter ye in at the strait gate… because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). Why do so few find it? John’s Gospel answers: people love darkness rather than light, because the light reproves. Pastor Baldwin makes it personal with a boyhood memory — his father, an enthusiastic morning person, waking his not-a-morning-person son by swinging the bedside lamp into his face and flipping it on: “Kyle, wake up.” None of us enjoys light in the eyes before we’re ready for it, and none of us enjoys being reproved. It stings our pride. But it is necessary.

The straight testimony, he shows, is the loving discipline of a Father. “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons” (Hebrews 12) — correction is evidence of sonship, not rejection, given so that we can be changed, molded, and shaped. Ellen White wrote that there must be a revival of the straight testimony, and that the shaking among God’s people would be caused by it: the straight testimony is the counsel of the True Witness to the church of Laodicea (Revelation 3:14–17) — a church neither cold nor hot, congratulating itself on being rich and in need of nothing, while Jesus names its true condition: wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. Pastor Baldwin brings the diagnosis close to home with what he has watched since COVID: he expected the upheaval to wake the church, but instead people drifted home and settled into a sleep, and the message we most resist became the message we most need. The way back, Ellen White says, is honesty — prayer and confession of sin that clear the King’s highway for the Spirit’s Pentecostal power, instead of the rationalizing that keeps us in a spiritual stupor.

The sermon refuses to leave us in the diagnosis. Paul himself cried, “O wretched man that I am” (Romans 7:24), yet pointed beyond the wrestling: “this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4). We can be God’s remnant people and Laodicea at the same time — two things can be true at once — but we do not have to stay lukewarm, caught between two worlds and enjoying neither. The Father gives the Holy Spirit to everyone who asks (Luke 11:13), and the Spirit’s reproof is the doorway to restoration: God does not wrap His robe of righteousness over our sins — He removes the sins, and then He clothes us. The closing appeal is the sermon’s title turned into a question: will you accept the straight testimony? Endure it, let the Refiner do His work, and be a son or daughter of God.

*Key texts:* Matthew 7:13–14; John 3:19–21; Hebrews 12:5–11; Revelation 3:14–22; Romans 7:24; 1 John 5:4; Luke 11:13; John 16:8 · *Also referenced:* Ellen G. White, on the shaking caused by the straight testimony and the call for its revival and renewal

*Watch:* https://youtu.be/MXnVqDME0y8 · *Listen:* https://cloud-1de12d.becdn.net/media/original/fd52d3206eff2f5810eca44edec20d78.mp3