God's Promise of Restoration and Renewal

Chapter 30, I want to pick up at verse 3, but I want to read, start reading at verse 1. We covered 1 through 3 last week, but just to get the context of what he's talking about. In this prophecy, he's talking about what's going to happen to the people of Israel when they move into the land of promise. He's making sure that they understand. God is making sure he understands that they are going to fall away from what they promised they would do and what they were supposed to do. When all these blessings and curses, he's talking about chapter 28 and 9. He's just talked about the blessings and curses. When all these blessings and curses I've said before you come upon you and you take them to heart, wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart, with all your soul, and according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortune. Now, he's talking about the promise that God has made that he would bring judgment if they strayed away from him. And the promise that is fulfilled that both Moses predicted this would take place. And the Bible, whenever Solomon opened the temple, he predicted that the people of Israel would stray away. At Kings chapter 8, when he had this long prayer at the beginning of the dedication of the temple, he was talking about what God was going to do and the judgment that was going to come. When famine or plague comes on the land or blight or mildew, locusts, grasshoppers, enemies, besiegers, all the curses that would come. And then in verse 46 he says, And when they sin against you and there's no one who does not sin, and you become angry and give them over to the enemy who takes them captive to his own land far away or near, and if they have a change of heart in the land where they're held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors, and say, we have sinned, we have done wrong, we've acted wickedly, and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you've chosen and the temple I have built in your name. Then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea and uphold their cause. Forgive your people who have sinned against you, forgive all the offenses they've committed against you, and cause their conquerors to show them mercy, for they are your people and your inheritance who you brought out of Egypt. The dedication and service of Solomon was an awareness that the people of Israel might sin. And he already asked this intervention prayer, which now Moses has talked about and was later to come to pass when the Israelites were brought into captivity. God's awareness of his people that they're not going to live exactly as they ought to, and over and over again he lets us know that the judgment comes, but in the time when people turn away from their sin and toward him, he will restore them. Three things, the first is prosperity that he talked about in verse 3. Then the Lord, your God, will restore your fortune. He's talking about their financial condition. When you stray, God takes his hand away from you, and one of the things that happens is your finances get in a mess. It's just kind of one of the end results of disobedience to God. Now, it doesn't mean that you have disasters always like crops fail in the Bible, but it can mean that you just are tempted to buy too much of one thing and spend your money in ways that are not necessarily wise or frugal because you're not using God's judgment. But financial concern is an issue, and part of what God does whenever you turn yourself back to him is he helps you understand how to make good choices. That's one of the things he does. It's not necessarily he gives you more money, but you find out that you're finding ways to have self-control and discipline that allows you to manage what you have in a better way. So the restoration of God's financial provision for a person is part of what takes place in a commitment to Christ to begin to follow him. So that's one of the things that he promises is going to happen. And have compassion on you. Compassion means that you look at someone and you feel their concern and their feelings. You join with them and the feelings they have. You have sympathy for them if they're hurting. You have joy with them if they're excited or they have good things come to them. I pray that when you look at these people, they turn to you, begin to do what you want them to do. Then you look at their lives and you feel with them the things that they're going through, and you guide them through them. So the other thing God does is he begins to guide us through all the circumstances we face. Share the exciting things with us. Carry the difficult and painful things with us. He becomes a part of our life to share everything that happens in our lives with him. And you gather again from all the nations where he has scattered you. So that God brings the people of Israel back to the place where they were originally before they were carried off into captivity. Now in verse 4, there's a change in the language a little bit. The translations that we have don't reflect that change because the word you, even if you, verse 4, even if you have been banished to the most distant land under heaven, and from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. He will bring you to the land that belongs to your fathers, and you will take possession of it. All of those you's are plural. In our language, English language, we don't have a distinction between a singular you. So if I were to say, would you come up here? I would be, I could point and you'd know I was pointing to a person if I would say, you come up here. And I mean all of you. I can't distinguish that by our language. Of course this is translated and written by Yankees. In the South they knew how to do that. You say, y'all come up here. Or you come up here. So you know the difference between you and y'all. But in the Bible, the Yankees didn't quite get that, so we had to figure it out. The Hebrew differentiates between the two. Now here's the difference. What he's talking about here in this section is he's talking about the whole of the nation of Israel, which is plural. Now this would reflect to us not the individual's lifestyle, but the promise to the church or the people of God as a community. So he's saying here to the community. And if you in the community have been banished so that you've been dispersed from the most distant land under heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather all of you and bring all of you back. He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers and will bring all of you to take possession of it. So he's talking about the restoration of the community of faith. When God finally sees that the people of Israel are ready to say, we're going to live in obedience to you and do what you've asked us to do, his healing presence is found in the whole community of his followers. Now for us, it means when you have a nation or a community that turns away from God, a community of faith, churches, and they find themselves in disarray and uncertainty through history, times of revival have come where the people of God would restore themselves, ask for God's forgiveness and see great increases in the number of people who become followers of God. You see it in the Bible, especially in the book of Kings, where the people fall away from God, bad things begin to happen to them, the enemy comes in and takes them over, they're in terrible financial shape, they're in terrible shape as a nation, and then they repent, ask for God's help, he gives them a leader, the people rally around and the nation of Israel flourishes again. It's a part of what God does with his people. If there are times in history whenever the church loses its fervor for God and becomes unfaithful to him, things get worse and worse and worse and worse, until finally there's an awareness of the need and revival breaks out. In this country we've had a couple of times in which the great revivals have broken out in our past history, where times when it seemed that people were so ready to hear the gospel that when preaching was done in cities like New York, people would close their businesses and come to prayer meetings at noon all across the city of New York, and thousands of people would come to faith and trust in Christ. So whenever God's people get far away from him and finally come to the place to say we're ready now to make a change, and they're ready to do the things he says that are essential, we will live in obedience to you, we will not let anything take the place you should have for us, and we'll be faithful, then God has compassion, he forgives them, he comes with them, and he brings them back into this proper perspective as his children. So God's pattern of renewal is a powerful one. There are many people in our country today who are praying for revival. Mostly the people that I hear talk about that, that are praying for revival in our country, are praying for other people to change their minds and hearts and become better. But revival breaks out in the church when the church is brokenhearted about its own sinfulness. You know, if I were praying that you guys would get better, I'm not really confronting myself with my own sinful circumstances. What happens in this idea in the beginning of it is it's a single person. We're talking about if the people there will confess their sins individually and acknowledge that they strayed away from God, then the community result follows that. What happens for us is we look at the world around us and we say, boy, the rest of the people in this country need to get straightened out. And all of our concern is about that. When the church becomes brokenhearted about its own failure to be what it ought to be, ready to confess its own failure to be faithful to God, then that's the root of what happens to the community. It draws the community together in obedience to God. And the impact of that community of faith on the people around them is powerful and strong. That's the way it happens. The pattern is old, as old as the Old Testament, and as real as the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So here's what happens to the community. No matter where they've gone, the community is depleted. God will build up the community. He will gather the people together. He'll bring them back to each other and to their fathers so that their history will be restored. And God will take possession of it or control that community of faith. He'll be Lord again over that community of believers. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. And what God promises, this is true all the way through the Scriptures, is when you stray away from God and you come back to Him, the return is even better than what you had before. Paul talks about this in Romans where he said that in everything that happens, God is at work to bring good out of it. So that if you stray away from God and you turn back to Him, His resulting rescue of you will make your life better than it was before you strayed from Him. People accused Paul of saying, you know, it would be a good thing for you to stray. Then you could make an advantage because before you were bad, now you're better. He said, that's not the point of what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to say that the mercy and grace of God is such that even if you do turn away from God and stumble away from Him, if you turn back to Him, you can be guaranteed that your advance will be greater than whatever you had before. So when you look at circumstances in your life in which something bad happens to you and you turn it over to God, you have the promise of abundance. Whatever it is that God needs to do will be greater than what you lost because of your faithfulness to Him. That's true not only financially. It's true in relationships if you have friends that turn against you because of your own faithfulness to God. You can be sure that you'll have better and more friends later on. I've told many people who get caught in circumstances where their marriage crumbles and they've tried to be faithful to God. What God will do for you if you'll be faithful to Him is He'll give you someone in your life in the future. And when that comes, you'll say, this is even better than what I lost. This is a principle that God uses to say that His restoration will never cause you to look back and regret the loss. His restoration is always better than what Satan takes away from us. That's why we can never be pessimistic about the future regardless of how bad our circumstances are now because the promise of God is of greater things than we have lost in whatever it is that has been taken away from us. Now this phrase kind of counters what He said in chapter 10, verse 16 when Moses was talking there about to the people of Israel. He said, Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. Circumcision was a mark of being a Jewish person. That was a sign that you were a follower of God. And in chapter 10, He talks to them saying, It's not your physical body that ought to carry the mark that you're a follower of God. It is your mind and your heart. That should be the mark that you're a follower of God. Now He says here in the time of restoration when you've drifted away from God, what you have to depend on is for God to circumcise your heart. He means by that that it is God inside of you that marks you as His child. So that the mark of being a follower of Christ is not physical though the mark of being a follower of God as a Jew was physical, the mark in the new covenant is inside of us. What is it that happens inside of us? So that baptism is not the mark that differentiates us. Baptism is not what says, OK, you're a child of God. It is our heart, what's on the inside of us. When Paul was talking about this in Romans, he was describing, he was talking about the difference between the past of the people of Israel and the present of where God's people were. He was using this issue of circumcision all the way through chapter 2 of the book of Romans. And in verse 26, he says, If those who are not circumcised keep the law's requirement, they will not be regarded as though they were circumcised. The one who is not circumcised physically yet obeys the law will condemn you who even though you have a written code and circumcised are a lawbreaker. The point he makes is, physical cutting of your body does not make you a follower of God. The external things that you do, baptism, even a profession of faith, doesn't change your insides. What changes your inside is whenever your spirit or your nature or your will suddenly becomes under God's control and the actions that you have and the way you think are suddenly transformed. When God is invited into your life to take charge of your life so that He becomes the Lord of your life, then suddenly you start thinking about things differently than you did before. And if this has happened to you, you know that it's true. Some of you may remember the time that you first started following Christ and the changes that came in your mind about what you wanted and what you desired. How you used to think one way and all of a sudden you think now another way. Now whenever you're on the other side of this and you look at the Christian faith, you think, I could never live that. I've had several people in my life and talking to them who say, you know, I don't think I could be a Christian because I enjoy doing things too much. And if I become a follower of Christ, I know there's some things in my life I have to cut out. And probably some of you, when you were thinking about making that commitment to Christ, thought, you know, I'm not sure I want to do that because there are things in my life that are going to have to go. And it may have kept you for a while from doing that. But what God does whenever you yield yourself to Him is He changes your way of thinking. He transforms the way you are. I talk about it a little bit this way when I try to witness people who think that. I say, when you were five years old, what was your favorite toy? If it's a guy, he'll say, well, I had these cars I really loved. Did you ever think when you were five years old that you'd get to the place where those didn't matter to you? Well, when I was five, I didn't. I thought I'd love them the rest of my life. They'd always be important to me. When you were 16, then did you kind of put them on the shelf and didn't pay any more attention to them? Yeah. Did you miss playing with them? No. You see, when you grow up, your mind changes about the values that you hold. And when Christ comes into your life and He begins to teach you new values, suddenly the things that used to be so important to you, you didn't think you could live without them, they become insignificant and unimportant. This is what He's talking about, the circumcision of your mind and your heart. Marking you by the choices you make and the decisions you make as a follower of His. So that when the time came and you said, okay, God, I'm ready to give you my life, you accepted Him into your life. You found yourself thinking differently about the things that used to be really important to you. You found yourself interested in things you would never be interested in before. I've heard you, Gary, talk about how you never thought you'd be interested in Bible study. But when you came to Christ, all of a sudden you wanted to learn the Bible. It became important to you. You can't convince somebody on the other side that they're ever going to have that kind of change of mind. But what Moses was talking about is, you can't be a follower of God until He changes your mindset and your thinking. That's what He means by the circumcision of your heart. It is what He does inside of you, in your heart, that marks you as a follower of Christ. What are the marks? You have a desire to get to know God, and that means that Bible study is important to you. You can't generate that. You can't sit down and say, I'm going to start loving the Bible if Christ is not in control of your life, no matter how much you try. I've seen a lot of people who come to make professions of faith. They're baptized, and you try to get them to sit down and study the Bible and read it, and it's just not there. They just don't want it. They try, but you can tell it's just not real to them. Something has to happen inside of you that makes you desire the things of God. I used to think, you know, every person that came and made a profession of faith that baptized, if I'd sit down with them with discipling books, like we used to do, a survival kit, if I'd just make them learn that, and we'd sit down and go through it, that they would grow in their faith. I remember one guy that was trying to get them to do that. I gave him the book, and the first week he didn't read very much of it. The second week he read less. The third week he didn't even read that week, and didn't fill out at all. But I said to God, you know, I'm going to trick him. I'm going to go and meet with him every week, and I'm going to read this, and I'm going to talk about all the things in the lesson that week. And so I did the next week. And then the next week he didn't want to come at all. There's no hunger. No circumcised heart. When you proclaim the truth of God, people have to have a hunger to hear it, or it's boring. It's not interesting. And no matter what you do, if their heart is not circumcised, it's going to be that way. So when you hear people talk about the Bible's not interesting to me, I don't like to hear the Bible taught or preached, you just know that inside of them something hasn't happened that needs to happen. And when it's there, it's just passion. I remember going to your house one night after you'd made a commitment to Christ, and you said, I just stay up all night long reading the Bible. Something happens inside of us that we don't understand or know. It changes, and that's what he's talking about. So when the people of God come to you and they make this kind of commitment, he said, what I'm asking, what's going to take place, is that you will change the minds and hearts of people so that they won't be the same. The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants so that, in order that, you may love him, God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and live. We cannot make believers. Only God can do that. We can teach, we can proclaim, we can try, but there has to be something inside. Now, here's the secret. If that something is not there for you, that is, you don't have an interest in reading the Bible, you don't have an interest in coming to church, and it just seems terribly boring to you, you look inside of yourself. What he talks about is, God will do this whenever you have given your heart, soul, mind, and strength to him. It is the yielding to God that allows him to do the work. He won't remake your heart and your mind and your life unless you ask him to do so, and unless you are willing to yield to him. And then when you do that, he does his work inside of you to change your desires and your passions. So if you don't have that desire, and you find it difficult to get that done, you stop and look inside of yourself. Do I really place God in the place of supreme authority in my life? What is it, God, that stands in my life that I care more about than you? He'll tell you. Like the rich ruler. Okay, here's what you have to do. It may be painful, but he'll tell you. Once you do that, then everything begins to change. The story in the New Testament that Jesus went through, you see, when he's talking to the rich ruler, all this is rooted in the Old Testament. Everything Jesus did was rooted in these Old Testament teachings. What he knew when he talked to the man who came to him and said, I'd like to know how to be able to have eternal life. He said, well, if you kept the law, the commandments. He said, I've done that since I was a child. What he knew was he had given his heart and his soul and his life to God. And so Jesus looked in his mind and in his heart to find out what it was he loved more than God. And it was his possessions. And he said, now, if you'll give away everything you own to the poor and come and say, God, you're enough for me. He will circumcise your heart. That's the language of the Old Testament. And he wouldn't do it. See, what God's looking for is the freedom to work inside of us in any way he wants. And when he does, he changes us from the inside out. Let's bow for a moment of prayer together. I'd like you to think about your life. And what is it that drives you? Can you say to God that you've given him complete control of all of your life? That you understand and know about? If you want to check, you can say, Lord, is there anything in my life that is more important to me than you? If God has given you hunger for knowing him and following him and living for him, you know that he has taken possession of your life. That's a mark. That is the mark of a follower, what the Bible calls the circumcision of your heart. There are some things, God, we can't do. And one is to change our insides. But you have the power to change the way we think, the choices we make, and the way we act. And when we present ourselves to you and say, you can do with me, Lord, anything you want, then you do that. We pray that you would continue to build in us the marks of your followers. That the world might know what it's like to follow you when it sees us. In the name of Christ we ask this. Amen.