The Story - Chapter 19

I was driving down 10th Street and saw a fellow standing on the side of the road and he had a big sign saying, a good car, cheap, lifetime warranty. And you didn't know who he was, how tempted would you be to buy his $20,000 car with a guarantee from him of a lifetime warranty. Would you be a little nervous? Who is this guy? How long is he going to be here? Does he even have any money? Could he even fix a car if it was broken? The guarantee is no good unless you know that the person who gives you the guarantee has the ability, the power, and authority to deliver it. Same is true with God. You are not confident in the power of God. It's very difficult for you to say to God, I'm prepared to give you my life. I'm prepared to live in obedience to what you want. The Bible tells us a lot about how God operates in the world and the power that he has. Sometimes the power of God is most clearly demonstrated in times of great disaster. Now that doesn't mean that that's the only time the power of God is actually available to us. For during the times in which God blesses us, his power is there and that's the result, the blessings are the result of that. But in the times of disaster when we can't help ourselves and terrible things loom before us, we find ourselves drawn to the reality that we cannot help ourselves. And so we are compelled to depend on God for what we need to have happen. The Bible in this last passage that you've been reading in our small group Sunday school classes emphasizes the great power of God in two unusual kinds of circumstances. Both of them disasters. But one of them in times whenever the disasters come as a result of our rebellion against God. When we rebel against God, God responds to that in terms of judgment and it can be serious and severe. In the story of Israel's life, God gave them a special place in his kingdom. He brought them up out of the land of Egypt to make a nation out of them. He took them to a place and he said this is the way I want you to live and he gave what we call the Ten Commandments and then the explanation as to how those are to be put into practice. He said to them, if you will live according to this plan that I have for you, I can promise you that I will provide for you. You'll be protected. Everything that you need will be given to you. Your life will find its fulfillment. All I ask is you take my word for this. You give me full authority over your lifestyle and you live the way I tell you to live. They started out great. He found a place for them where he'd given some people but they rebelled against him and so he drove them out of the land like you'd just take a board and erase everything off the board so it was completely clean. Put them in that place and said now here are the instructions by which you should live. The book of Deuteronomy is Moses telling the people now you're getting ready to go in the land. I want to remind you again. That's why the Old Testament is repetitive. That's in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers. Moses gives them over again in Deuteronomy. So you can say this is really important to you. Whenever someone tells you something twice, they usually mean you should listen to it. When God tells you something twice, it means you better listen to it. So they started living in this place God gave them, trusting him. They ran all the people out of there, trusting him. They started to live the way they thought they should and according to what God said to them. But they slowly but surely began to see their neighbors and say I'd rather live the way they live. And so they began to sort of leave God, all the things that he said. He gave them a temple. You know what happened in the process of all this? They lost the Bible. The only copy of the law of God got lost. That's how little they cared about it. Jeremiah was the prophet in those days. And the King Josiah found this law and he began to read it. And Jeremiah helped him and they restored the temple and all the things that they were supposed to be doing. And everybody did exactly as the law said they should do. And then something very normal but terrible happened. They began to separate what God said they should do at the temple from the way they lived every day. They weren't off following other gods so much as they were not following God at all. Jeremiah then comes back in chapter 7 of his book and he comes to the people, goes to the temple, this is their church now, as the people are going into the church building and he's standing at the door and this is what he had to say. Chapter 7 of the book of Jeremiah, I'm going to begin reading it, the first verse. Here he brought the message that God had given him. He'd been very concerned to rebuild the temple and a key figure in getting it done. So they had to be shocked to hear what Jeremiah said. This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Stand at the gate of the Lord's house and there proclaim this message. Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says. Reform your ways and your actions and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say this is the temple of the Lord, this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the aliens and the fatherless or the widows and do not shed innocent blood in this place and if you do not follow the other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place and in the land I gave to your forefathers forever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, perjury, burn incense to Baal, follow other gods you have not known and then come and stand before me in this house which bears my name and say we are safe, safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house which bears my name become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching, declares the Lord. What happened to them was they made choices that brought disaster to them. God was saying I know that you come to church and I know you say you believe the Bible and I know you are religious but let me show you that in your lifestyle it has not affected you. What he talks about here are a violation of the Ten Commandments which is the beginning of the law in the Old Testament. If you notice what he says, you steal, thou shalt not steal, you murder, thou shalt not kill, you commit adultery, thou shalt not commit adultery and perjury, thou shalt not bear false witness and you burn incense to Baal, you are to have no other gods before me, you are to have no idols. All of these things were clear breaking one by one of the Ten Commandments but they were faithful to go to church. They were faithful in that lifestyle outside of the church to come and live an entirely different way. Meaning that coming to church would allow them to erase all of the things that they had been doing all week. Jeremiah was saying to them this is not what God wants. You have come to depend on the temple or the church to save you instead of your submission to the authority of God. You are not depending on God to save you because of your trust in him, you are depending on your coming to the temple to rescue you. Now Jeremiah was describing to the people the charges that God had against them. Later on in the same book, Jeremiah chapter 16, we find his result or consequence for what took place. Jeremiah comes now to describe what God has done since no change had taken place. Then the word of the Lord came to me, you must not marry, have sons or daughters in this place for this is what the Lord says about the sons and daughters born in this land and about the women who are their mothers and men who are their fathers. They will die of deadly diseases. They will not be mourned or buried but will be like refuse lying on the ground. They will perish by sword and famine and their dead bodies will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. I want to skip to verse 10. When you tell these people all this, they will ask you why has the Lord decreed such disaster against us? What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the Lord our God? Then say to them, it is because your fathers forsook me, declares the Lord, and followed other gods and served and worshipped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law but you have behaved more wickedly than your fathers. See how each of you is following the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying me? So I will throw you out of this land into a land neither you nor your fathers have known and there you will serve other gods day and night for I will show you no favor. What a curse. The time has come, Jeremiah said, when God is through talking to you and because of the choices in your own life to ignore him and live like you want to are over. And what I'm going to do, God said, is I'm going to take you out of this land that I gave you, I'm going to destroy the temple that I gave you to worship me in, and I'm going to put you in a place where you're a foreigner, where the only gods available for you to serve and worship are pagan and foreign gods. I will destroy everything that I've given you and everything that I've built. The death penalty was one of the greatest disasters that came to the people of Judah and Jerusalem. They had never known what it was like in their lifetime to not be able to look up on the hill and see the temple, the symbol of God's presence with them. Ezekiel had a dream describing what God was doing, and there in his dream he saw coming up out of Jerusalem and out of the temple a strange figure with four wheels on it going all kinds of directions, God abandoning his own people and his temple. The people of Israel didn't have the law. They didn't have the temple to offer sacrifices for forgiveness of sin. They didn't have the priest to teach them the laws of God. Everything that they depended on for their religious life was now taken away from them, and God did this. They thought no one in the world can destroy the temple or the city of Jerusalem, but I'll tell you God has the power to destroy anything and wipe the temple off the face of the earth and destroy the city of Jerusalem. That's what he did. So the people of Israel carried off into captivity because of the great power of God to bring judgment and justice. Let me warn you about something. You can go a long way ignoring God. You can go a long way making your own plans about your own life as to how you're going to spend your time and how you're going to spend your money, what you're going to invest your life in. You can do all that, and you can have great success for a while, but if you do not listen to God and follow him, disaster always comes. Because God made us from the very beginning to live according to the rules and instructions he's given in the scriptures, and everyone who deviates from those will have constant disastrous lifestyles. That's just the truth. God has the power to take away from us anything we have, even our own lives. This is not merely a game between one person and another. It is Almighty God, the ruler of the world, who says, I will demand of you that you acknowledge my authority over your life and live as I've directed you. And every other lifestyle is a lifestyle that will be destroyed, and God has the power to do it. No nation in the world has ever lived and existed very long. It does not honor God. No church ever exists very long that does not honor the authority of God. That's why you hear us so much talk about, we only try to say, God, what do you want us to do, and to do what he tells us, regardless of how it seems to us. Because obedience to God is the secret to success in life, the fulfillment of life. And God has the power to take that away, and he did. But I want to tell you something else about God. Not only does he have the power of judgment, but God has the power to reverse the course of the all-history historical events. What took place in Israel's life was they came to this foreign land, and God used the disaster he gave them to change their whole nation. You read in the New Testament about the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who became experts in the law. You read about their focus and attention on the law. All of this took place in this foreign land. They were separated from the temple, and they said, what are we going to do now? And someone said, well, maybe we should start synagogues. And so that's where all synagogues were started in this time of captivity. Every town that had 12 male Jews was to establish a synagogue. So all across the world, after all this was over, synagogues were established all over the world. The temple never held that primary place again for them, but the focus instead was on living day by day wherever you are in the presence of God, not simply waiting until you get to the temple. They became focused on what God wanted them to do, which was what the law was. They violated the law. They left it behind in their moral behavior. And out of this came Pharisees who were so determined to live every day of their life in obedience to God that they spent every moment of the day trying to learn what God wanted and to do it. They exaggerated, of course, what God wanted, but it shows us that God used this time to refocus the Jewish people to say, you must listen to my word. And when they were ready, when they were now ready to go back, not to worship the temple, but instead to learn how to live this life that God had taught them in exile, God did something even more miraculous with His power. The Babylonians came to Jerusalem and took the temple and took the city, carried away all the treasures that they had in Jerusalem. Every important person, all the wealth of the people of Jerusalem, all the wealth of the temple. And then, by the power of God, He convinced a pagan man, Cyrus, who was king of Persia. This is what Cyrus, king of Persia, says, The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He has appointed me to build a temple for Him in Jerusalem and Judea. Any one of His people among you, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem and Judea and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide Him with silver, gold, and with goods and livestock, with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem. He ordered that the people in His kingdom, who had Jewish neighbors, were to take their own money and give it to their Jewish neighbors to go back to Jerusalem to build this temple for the God of the universe, even though He didn't believe in this God of the universe. How hard would it be to convince someone to do such a thing? Even family heads of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites and everyone whose heart God had moved prepared to go up and build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. All their neighbors assisted them with articles of silver, gold, with goods, livestock, with valuable gifts in addition to freewill offerings. Moreover, King Cyrus brought out all the articles belonging to the temple of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the temple of his God. Cyrus, king of Persia, had them brought by the treasurer who counted them out to Shishbazar, the prince of Judah. Everything they had taken from the temple, now think of this, when a foreign country invades, they think they've defeated the God of that country. And so they take all of the God's possessions and give them to their God. Now Cyrus has been prompted by God to do something unusual, steal from his own God and give it back to the God of the Jews. God has the power to change the minds and hearts of people when they don't even know it. And whenever you find yourself in a situation where life tumbles in on you and you can't find any way out of it, never forget this story. God has the power to change your mind, your heart, your life, and that of all the people around you. All he needs is for you to come to the place where you say, I'm ready now to serve you, Lord, in the way you want. When the people in captivity finally stopped, they started looking at the law, worshiping God in the synagogues and saying, now we are ready, then God changed everything. He has the power to do things that are beyond the human imagination. Can you imagine the worst enemies of our country? The worst enemies of our country suddenly one day to say, we're going to change our mind and now we're going to invite missionaries to come to our country and help us know about Jesus. When you talk about a world-shattering story on television, that would be it. But that's what happened. Sometimes the disasters in our life don't come because of our terrible choices that we make. And they made terrible choices. We're living in direct conflict with the laws of God, but they come sometimes because we fail to stay focused on what God really wants for us. You may find your life torn apart by all the things you've done wrong and your life separated from God. You may commit yourself to Christ and say, I'm going to live my life in obedience to God. And you start out doing that, but then the time comes whenever things sort of take their place and all of a sudden you find yourself again. Not separated from God because you're evil or wicked, but separated from God because you have just lost enthusiasm for what God wanted. That's what happened in the story this week. The story that we find in the book of Haggai, Haggai the prophet, this is in the story, page 266. The prophet was sent by God to the people. This is what the Lord Almighty says. These people, the time has not yet come for the Lord's house to be built. That's what the people said. Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai. Is it time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses while his house remains in ruin? Now this is what the Lord Almighty says. Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much but harvested little. You eat but never have enough. You drink but never have your fill. You put on your clothes but you're not warm. Your wages, you earn wages only to put them in a purse who has holes in them. And the people of God come to say, OK, God, I'm going to serve you. And they begin to put their own interests ahead of God's. Funny things begin to happen to them. They're not like the foreign enemy comes in and destroys their house and burns it. In fact, you can't even see it really taking place in your life. It's sort of invisible. But here are some of the signs of it, you see. Do you find yourself working all the time, doing everything that you can but you can't get ahead? You find yourself, that's what he's talking about, planting and harvesting little. I work and work and work but I never get ahead. That's one of the signs. You eat but you never have enough. Find no contentment and satisfaction in your life. You drink but never have your fill. It never seems to be satisfying to you. You put on clothes but you're not warm. You earn your wages. You put them in the bank but you never seem to be able to have enough. You see, what happened to the people of Israel was they came back and said, we're going to rebuild the temple. They started out with all the enthusiasm in the world that anyone would have with this new venture but there was opposition. People criticized them. People tried to stop them. They found out that this was a bigger job than they thought it was going to be and they got discouraged. And when they got discouraged, they said, well, you know, instead of doing all this work for God, why don't we just first take care of ourselves and then when we get taken care of enough, then we can go and do some things for God. When I have time, I'll do the things God wants me to do. But right now, my life is filled up and my schedule is full. And so I'm not going to say to God I'm not going to do it. I'll just do it whenever I have more time. I would be willing to give an offering and I was sitting in church and they took that offering. I thought, well, I ought to give some money and then I thought, well, no, I got bills to pay. You know, here's the deal, God. Whenever I get everything in place and take care of it, then I'll do what you tell me to do. I know there are people that need to take care of extended care, but, you know, I mean, I would do that, but I'm not dressed right. I don't enjoy the kids. It's not fun for me. One after another, they stop us from doing the very things God wants us to do. God does not always bring disaster to us in the way we see here in Jerusalem, destroying, burning everything. Sometimes he just makes our life empty. We know that there's something more. That's a sign to stop and say, when was the time in my life when I felt the presence of God most powerfully? What was I doing? Did I have a regular time of prayer? Was I faithful in church? Was I have the jobs that God asked me to do in the kingdom of God? Was I bearing witness to others about God? What were those things of obedience that marked your life? If we want all the wonderful benefits of a devoted life of God without the devotion, here's the sign, Haggai said. Are you taking care of yourself first? You know what that means? When you get up in the daytime, do you make the plan as to what you have to do for your job, what you have to do for the family, what you have to do for the home? And then you say, let's see now, where could I work out some time to talk to God? Or do you begin the day saying, here is the place for me to listen to God? And that gets first. Everything else around it. That's key. What happened to the people of Israel was they lost the power of God in their life by ignoring the priority of what God wanted. God had the power to bring them back miraculously. He had the power to solve all the problems that they faced. But their own apathy allowed the power of God to slip away from them. Now, you will see the power of God demonstrated in your life most powerfully in the times of disaster. It can be in the times of absolute destruction, and you don't know where to go, and you don't know how to turn to God. It can be in the times of emptiness. And it's not quite a disaster, but you know something is not right. In every one of those instances, the cure is simple. You come to God and say, your kingdom, first of all, for me. And then you make God, and what he asks of you, the priority for your life. And then the power of God will be yours every day you live. Would you bow your heads for just a moment, please? Lord, I ask that you speak to us about yourself. The power you have to change the things in our life. I want to ask for those of us who are facing disaster, that you'd remind us you have the power to change everything, change our mind, our heart. You don't make things like they used to be, but you change what's here, and you change the future. I want to ask if there's anyone here facing disaster today that they would come to believe that you are the Lord who takes care of people and has the power to change lives. And that today they might say to you, Lord, I give up. I place my life in your hands. So I'm asking you right now, to those people, that you would put those words in their mind and they will know that this is meant for me. Father, I ask for those of us here who may love you, care for you, but have sort of let other things become more important to us than what you want for us. That you'd remind us we can't earn enough money, that it can't leak away. We can't find enough time to get rested unless we rest in you. And nothing in our life can be as it ought to be until you are in the place you ought to be, our Lord, our ruler. I ask for us, Father, if you become not a priority to any of us here, that in our minds you would say to us, I am not first for you. And when you tell us that, tell us then, this is what I want changed in your life. So I want you to remain seated in the quietness of this moment as God talks to you. I'm going to be at the front, Marla's going to be here, Pianist is going to play, Debbie's going to be at the front with us, too. If God has told you what he wants you to do, I want you to believe that he has the power to make it happen, and you make a promise to him, Lord, from this moment on, things will be different with me, I'll trust you. You may feel the need to get up from where you are and come and share with one of us the promise that you're making to God, and have us pray with you. Sean, would you come stand with me for just a moment? I want you to hold this, like this. I'll hold it if you're afraid to hold the mic. I've never seen anybody in the world bitten by one of these, but people seem to be real nervous about them. So I'll hold it there so you talk. I want to ask you what happened to you Friday. Friday, I did some stuff that I shouldn't have done. I turned my back against some of my friends. I turned it against the girl that I have been dating. Richard and Steve come up to the house on Friday night, and we're supposed to do a Bible study, and I couldn't do it. I had to talk to them, and Steve had asked me if I'd actually ever let the Lord into my life like I should have been, and I told him no. I didn't know what that meant. I had been baptized, but I do not know what it meant to give my full self to the Lord. And so Steve and Richard prayed for me, and I came forward this morning because God has condemned me. So I promise that I put my heart, goes to God, and I do everything for God. It doesn't matter how many times you are religious or you come and say you're going to be different. Without the power of God in your life, nothing changes. So if you've tried and tried to be religious, you know what Sean's gone through. There has to be some point in your life in which you say, I'm through trying this myself. I have to depend on you. And what I've told Sean is that that doesn't change everything. It's because that happens. You have to then begin to learn what God wants you to do, how he wants you to think, how he wants you to treat people, the priorities of your life, and the addictions that you have in your life have to be put in God's hands so he can change you. No one can change another person but God. But God can take anybody anywhere in the world and change their values, change their nature, change their character, change their passions. I want to pray for Sean. Lord, I think Sean has tried for many years to be very religious and to fit in, but he's tried to do it on his own. What he says today is he's decided that you must have control of his life. I want to ask for him that every day when he wakes up, he would begin by saying, what do you want from me today? Whenever any of these old ideas come back to him, Father, tell him how poisoned those ideas are and give him the passion to read the Bible, to be faithful in church, learning how to be able to think and live. And I pray that you would change his life in such a way so that everyone who's ever known him would know your power because of his transformed, changed life, changed nature, changed behavior, and changed attitudes. I ask this in the name of the one who has all power, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Would you stand please for a moment of benediction? This evening, in our evening service, I'm preaching from the book of Romans, chapter 12, where he describes what a church ought to be like, what characterizes the congregation of a church where God is in control. It's a very powerful instruction for us. Six o'clock. Lord, you heard Sean's words. We look at his face and we can't know his mind or heart, but you know all of that. We know that if he's really surrendered himself to you and willing to live this life, that he will be different from now on. We know that it means growing, so he's going to make mistakes. But we ask that by your power that you would change his character and nature, his life and his future. In the name of Jesus Christ, we ask this. Amen. As you guys go with me out there, people would like to say, express their prayers for Sean. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.