Allen Jackson - Living Faith - Part 2
Simple suggestion: please read your Bibles, daily, intentionally. When I say systematically, I mean, from front to back, not just randomly here and there. I have found there to be a benefit when we do reading together. That's not the only way to read your Bible. You don't have to read it on our reading plan, but you need a reading plan. We are highly resistant to this. People that I love, people I've done a lot of life with, they go, "Pastor, I've done that 2 years. I've decided this year I'm gonna read it upside down". Or, "I'm gonna read it this way," or "I'm gonna..." I mean, as if somehow we've mastered the material. We live far from it. Josiah reads the story to them and they pledge themselves to the covenant.
You see, what we desperately want to believe is that just about any religious activity is a good thing, that it's not really that important who is worshiped or even maybe how they're worshiped. A lot of diversity in how we're gonna worship, and whether we read our Bibles or, you know, whether we just kind of have a promise. Just do good things. That's kind of the message. Be kind, be polite. And if you'll allow me the church's primary message, it seems to me for quite a season now is, let's see if we can convert everyone in the world to southern hospitality. How are y'all? Well, bless your heart. Like some sweet tea? Sure is human. Don't be offensive. Don't challenge anything. Don't dare assert an opinion. Don't be genuine. For heaven's sakes, don't be transparent or honest. Maintain the facade.
A prophet comes to the king with a message: "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Tell the man who sent you to me". "This is the message to be given back to the king: 'This is what the Lord says: I'm gonna bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book of the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken me and burned incense to other gods and provoked me to anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.' Tell the king who sent you to inquire of the Lord, 'This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I've spoken against this place and its people, that they would become accursed and laid waste, and because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you. Therefore I'll gather you to your fathers, and you'll be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I'm gonna bring on this place.'"
Did you know that's in your Bible? I didn't type this on my own. Actually, I cut and pasted that one. It doesn't fit with the contemporary image of God. Josiah, not only himself repented, he led an initiative, calling the nation to repentance, whomever would follow him. And God's response was, "Wow, I'm impressed, and I will not bring the disaster in your lifetime". What strikes me, I mean, on one hand, you think, "Wow, it's harsh. God said, 'I'm still coming. Destruction is coming, but not in your lifetime.'"
Now where we started with Jeremiah, a couple of passages back says, "Early in the reign of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, God sent a messenger, a prophet, Jeremiah, to say to all the people who came to worship, 'If you will listen to me. But if you don't listen, if you don't listen, if you don't listen, you'll be desolate.'" You see, it seems a bit harsh when you read it with Josiah. But in reality, God sent a messenger to Josiah's kids and said, "How about your generation? You're gonna follow your dad's lead? Will you choose the Lord? Will you listen"? Every generation has a choice to make. God has shown us grace and mercy because it's been a while since we've sought the Lord with our whole hearts. It's a startling passage to me.
See, I think we're often offended culturally and even in the church, we're often offended by the idea of God or anyone as a judge. A phrase you hear a lot in conversation and in broader cultures, you know, "I'm not judging anyone". It seems it's almost the most inappropriate thing you can do is to pass judgment. Don't wanna be judgy. You can be wicked, you can be immoral, you can be perverse, but you don't want to be judgy. Does that sound like the right, have I got the right group? You know, the verb "judge" means to assess or form an opinion. I hope you're forming opinions and assessing what's happening in the world. I mean, the noun is a person or someone who pronounces sentence, an educator, someone who says, "Yep, that's right and wrong".
Well, I put a New Testament verse in there. I didn't want you to think I'd just gone all Old Testament on you. It's a statement about Jesus. It says, "God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead". See, in scripture, God is identified as the judge of all the earth. Goes all the way back to the book of Genesis and it carries right through the New Testament into the concluding book, the book of Revelation, where he executes judgment on the earth. God will judge every human being.
Now, here's the challenge with that. The Adamic race, the descendants of Adam, are a race of rebels. Our old nature, the one we inherit because of our connection, all the way back to Adam, has to be addressed or we will not follow God. And when you're born again, your spirit is transformed. But that old Adamic carnal nature still is alive and well in your earth suit. And the biblical prescription for that is that we have to crucify, we have to put it to death. The Bible refers to it as earthly or soulish, that it's dominated by what I want and what I think and how I feel, and we have to address it. And again, biblically, it's an execution. No one can yield for you, no one can yield for me. We have to choose to yield our old rebellious nature to God, to allow the Holy Spirit to lead us as the character of Christ is formed in us. And that's not been the overwhelming message.
Again, I understand who we are. I'm telling you, we hold the keys. And I don't think it's principally about spiritual conflict externally. I think it's about a submission of ourselves to God in ways we haven't imagined yet. Just like we want new policies to fill the halls of wherever, we need new spiritual policies. "You know, I don't know, Pastor. I think I'm doing pretty good". 2 Kings 23, verse 4: "The king ordered the high priest and the priest next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah," the Canaanite fertility gods. And the worship of those gods was really centered in a couple of things. One was a desire for prosperity.
In an agricultural society, you tend to worship the things that will make your crops grow because you get better crops, you get more money. And because it's a pagan religion, it also includes, typically, a great deal of sexual immorality. So they're seeking both carnal gratification and blessings on their lives from someone other than God. So it says the king told the priest to remove from the temple all the articles made for these Canaanite fertility gods, "and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and he took the ashes to Bethel. He did away with the pagan priests appointed by the kings of Judah". Pagan priest appointed by whom? The kings of Judah. Judah was the most godly country. Israel in the north was the ungodly. The kings of Judah appointed pagan priests. Let me ask you a question. Do you think there were any people worshiping God in the land while the kings appointed pagan priests? Sure, I promise.
"To burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and those around Jerusalem, those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, the moon, to the constellations, to all the starry host. He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley and he burned it there. He ground it to powder. He scattered the dust over the graves of the", He was mad at that. He burned it. He ground it to powder and he scattered the dust. "He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes," this is adjacent to the temple, "which were in the temple of the Lord and where women did weaving for Asherah". There was male and female prostitution taking place in the temple.
Now it isn't expressly stated, but it's implicit in the narrative. There were priests appointed to serve these idols. If there's prostitutes in the temple, there are people that are participating with the prostitution in the temple. So there's a power structure that is benefiting from the prostitution that's made available. It's so become a part of the culture that it's in the temple. And Josiah, a very young man, says, "I'm gonna burn them all and grind them to powder and sprinkle the the dust in the cemetery. And I'm tearing down the places for prostitution". He's disrupting economic opportunity, he's disrupting pleasure, he's disrupting habits, and he's doing it amongst the people who practice their faith. They didn't have a political problem. They had a spiritual problem.
For most church attenders and I'll broaden that. I don't mean just our congregation. We've been in 20 cities with lots of churches. For many church attenders, God is very seldom elevated to even hobby status because the real hobbies of our life, the passionate hobbies of our life, if we talk about in terms of effort invested or dollars expended or emotions attached, I don't think I'm misstating this to say that God hasn't even made it to hobby status in our lives. Now, repentance may begin as a private decision, but it always has a public impact. If it's never visible within your sphere of influence, it's just a theory. The people who know you will recognize the change of policy.
If this recent batch of people elected to go represent us and being chosen to do the bidding of the people who elected those and there's no discernible change in policy, we're not gonna believe them when they say, "We honored what you asked us to do". And if you and I say we've engaged in significant change and repentance in bringing greater alignment to our lives with God, the people who know us and interact with us would go, "You know, I have seen that". It's not just a private thing. Last passage. I am gonna finish your outline. There is a God. You've seen miracles 2 weeks in a row. Chapter 23, verse 25: "Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did, with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses".
That's a powerful statement. "With all of his heart, with all of his soul, all of his mind, with all of his emotions, with all of his strength," he didn't hold anything back. It took everything Josiah had to do what we just read about. It wasn't easy, it wasn't comfortable. I promise you he faced significant opposition. There were people that hated him for it. There was enough opposition, his son wanted nothing to do with it. Jeremiah showed up and basically said, "Just do what Pop did," and he's like, "No, I watched that. That was hard. I'm not doing that. I can make more friends this way".
"With all of his heart, with all of his soul, with all of his strength. Nevertheless," verse 26, this is over, "The Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because all that Manasseh had done to provoke him to anger. So the Lord said, 'I will remove Judah from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, "There shall my Name be,"'" Josiah reigned 31 years, 13 of those years in rather aggressive reform and public repentance. It brought a better life for his generation, but it didn't bring relief for the generation, which followed him because they didn't choose to do the same.
I assure you we have benefited from the sacrifices of many who have preceded us. There is a latent knowledge of a biblical worldview of the fundamental principles of scripture, whatever label you prefer that still exists amongst us, which is a point of tremendous victory. Many places I go in the world, even if I go to what we would call Christian nations. That's no longer true. I was in the UK a few years ago and they presented a list of things you couldn't talk about in their churches. It was illegal. We still retain a bit of that knowledge of God. And I believe that's what was reflected. I believe that's what God responded to. And I believe now we have a choice.
Go back with me to the beginning of your outline, Jeremiah 26. This is the message that Jeremiah, the prophet, has to the generation immediately following Josiah. So they know his story the way you know the story of Biden or Obama or Trump. Early in the reign of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, the king of Judah, early in the reign, not years and years later, this word came from the Lord. This is what the Lord says, "Stand in the courtyard of the Lord's house and speak to all the peoples of the towns of Judah who come to worship in the house of the Lord. Tell them everything I command you. Don't omit a word. Perhaps they will listen, and each will turn from his evil way".
See, the book of Kings is a history book. It tells you they didn't turn, and even though Josiah turned and God showed him mercy, the generation that followed him refused to listen. Jeremiah is the prophet. We get to hear the message God gave to that generation. He said, "If you will listen, perhaps you'll turn from your evil," the people that were coming to worship. I believe that's as close to a message for us as anything I could think of in scripture. Just maybe we will listen and perhaps we would begin to turn. We want the politicians to change. We've been mad at them, close the border, stop spending money we don't have, stop redefining marriage, stop doing this and stop doing that. Do what we think you should be done. But we don't wanna change. We don't want to have that conversation with our family at the holidays. We're not united. But let them change their professional lives. We're busy. I'm doing everything I wanna do. I don't have time for that.
My friend, Mike Huckabee got tagged to be the ambassador to Israel. May I tell you something? He's really busy. He moved his family from Florida back to Arkansas because he had grandkids and they wanted to be closer to the grandkids and then his daughter got elected governor. So he's living, his daughter's in the governor's mansion. He can visit his grandkids in the same house where his daughter played when she was a kid. Life is pretty good. And they want him to move to the other side of the world to a war zone to a place most of you wouldn't go visit today if I paid for your ticket, and deal with all the problems that are there.
Now, we're thinking, "That is so good for Mike. He should go, he should hurry. But if I can't sit in the chair I like at church", we have this deep-seated idea that change needs to happen, but it needs to start someplace else. And I just want to ask you to begin to quietly say to the Lord, "Help me see". And then I want to ask you to add to that. "I am willing to do what you show me". He'll change your schedule. You think you're busy because we've been busy doing what we thought we needed to do or wanted, whatever. He'll change it. I'm always annoyed when I pray that something will change and then the Lord puts something in front of me to be a part of the change. "I didn't say me. I didn't mean me. I just thought you had revealed to me something I should intercede for. I didn't mean mess with me. I don't wanna do that".
We have an amazing opportunity to make an impact that will make a change that can impact a generation. I pray we have the humility and the courage and the boldness to say Yes to the Lord. Don't you dare cheer for those other people that are disrupting their lives, taking on assignments, facing criticism, doing heavy lifting with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. Because once the change gets engaged, folks, the battle is gonna boil all around you.
Don't you dare cheer for them and then say to the Lord, "Oh, I don't need any change. I'm good. They'll do their job. I like mine". We have to be willing to be the change, amen? I brought you a prayer. Let's stand, we can read it together. It's not a long one. You can make a pretty good commitment to the Lord in a hurry. I mean that's true. Wedding ceremony only takes about 7 minutes. Take you the rest of your born days to figure out what you agreed to, but that 7 minutes you can get right into the heart of that thing. Don't send me an email. Let's read it together:
Heavenly Father, open my eyes to see and my heart to understand Your ways. I desire Your truth in my life. Forgive me for my rebellious attitude and stubborn pride. I turn to You today in humble repentance. May my thoughts and dreams be pleasing to You. Guide my steps so that Your best may fill my life and allow Jesus' name to be exalted through my days on this earth. I rejoice in the Majesty of my God, amen.