Faithfulness and Obedience to God's Commands

Find in your Bibles where I'm going to read, it's Judges chapter 6, beginning with verse 1. This is probably one of the longer and more famous of the stories in Judges, the story of Gideon. And it's kind of an extended story, so some of the stories we've had about the Judges were five or six verses long, and this one's several chapters long, but it tells another event in which God is judging, bringing judgment on His people. Chapter 6, beginning with verse 1, again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Now the chapter 5 had just finished after God had given the victory to Deborah, and it said that this peace had been in the land for 40 years, so one generation. Usually the Bible describes generations as being in 40-year increments. That's the lifespan of people at that time, so when they're thinking about one generation, it's usually 40 years even. And when you go through, you'll see multiples of 40s, and they don't mean that that's literally what it was, but they're trying to say, and one generation passed. The generation that was visible and present when God made the delivery of Egypt before, made the delivery from the people, the Canaanites before, and now this generation's passed and a new one's on the scene. So again, the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years He gave them into the hands of the Midianites. Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in the mountain clefts, caves, and strongholds. Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites and Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country. They camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza, and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys. They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count the men and their camels. They invaded the land to ravage it. Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help. Now I want to start with this first verse to reflect on that for a moment. The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. When you think of this evil in the eyes of the Lord, when you think of the word evil, what are some of the things that come to your mind when that word evil comes out? Okay. I'm sorry you answered. For a moment I thought this was a group that had never heard of evil. They were just tongue-tied. What is this word that's so strange? Murder? Stealing? Drugs? Yeah. And Butch is right. It's disobedience. All of those are disobedient. But we think of something bad. It's not necessarily what the Bible is talking about here. Never did we see in the story of Israel that they closed the temple down on purpose. During this time there'd be the tabernacle. They had the tabernacle. They were holding regular sacrifices. They had received the instructions about the kind of sacrifices they were to make. And they were making those sacrifices. They were going to the tabernacle with their offerings. They were participating in the worship that God had given them. There is not any indication that they had stopped doing the things that God said they should do. And in this description of what took place, he wasn't saying that they were violating necessarily all of the Ten Commandments. Probably most of the Ten Commandments they were keeping very well. What they were not doing was they were failing to keep the first commandment. The first commandment was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. We say in the New Testament, the Old Testament first command was you're to love God and obey him above all else. He is the Lord. He is the person in charge with power and authority. So what happened to the people of Israel was that their faithfulness to God began to slack off. It didn't slack off because they turned against God and rejected the Ten Commandments and all the instructions. They just sort of drifted away. When they first came into the land, they were very faithful to do what God told them to do. He said to them, you ask me what you want me to do and I will do it for you. And when they first entered this land, they asked God, what should we do to take these towns? What should we do to be able to fulfill this purpose that you've given for us? And God gave them direction. But as they began to settle into the land, they did two things that were really damaging for them. One is they began to look around and think, what is the best way for us to do what God told us to do? They no longer were asking, what do you want us to do? They were trying to decide for themselves the best way to conquer the land. They were depending on their own judgment and their own wisdom. And the second thing that they did that God told them not to do is they allowed their sons and their daughters to marry into the families that lived in that land. All of a sudden, what you had, if you had a son, he married a girl who was from that territory. Her family, all worshipers of Baal, and she wanted to worship Baal with her family. Or if you had a son that married some, if he had a son that was a daughter that married someone who was a Baal worshiper, their family was divided. And over the generations as it went by, now it didn't happen the day it took place, but over the time as the generations went by, they found themselves sort of mixing together the prophet of Baal and the God of the Bible so that they were still doing the things that they were supposed to do, honoring your parents, keeping the Sabbath day, all these things that they were supposed to do, but they were also keeping them for Baal at the same time. Now, what they were doing was saying, God is not the only authority. Now, they weren't saying it out loud, but by their lifestyle, they were showing that that was true. So that their lives and devotion was sort of divided. They were doing the things that they thought were good to do that God told them they should do. And some of them that they thought were a little bit too demanding, they sort of let those slide. But then they were doing what they thought also what might be good for them in the work of Baal, serving Baal, so that their allegiance was divided. And because of this, they failed to keep the single most important command, which was the very first command, you shall have no other gods except me. Now, when the Bible says that, it means that you should recognize what it's talking about in the Old Testament. You should recognize that there is one God who made everything, owns everything, and owns everything and has told you how you should live. And everything that he tells you you should do is the truth. And you should never compromise it. So they found themselves believing in the things that God said they should do in the Bible, but failing to see that God, that the God who brought them out of Egypt was the only God with power and authority and everything he said they must do. That's what God saw as evil. Now, if you have a household and you have children, and you sit down and tell them the things that you want them to do, and they look at the list and say, I want to do this one and this one and this one, and I don't want to do these three. Now, you realize when you come back to see what happened that they didn't accept your authority as the parent. So you're angry. You go to work tomorrow and your boss says, I have three things I want you to do. And you look at those and you say, I'd like to do number three, but I don't want to do one and two. You're going to have problems. Because the boss expects you to do what he tells you to do. God expects of his people absolute authority in every single thing he tells us to do. And they begin to compromise by saying, we think this is important, but these things God said, we can kind of push those aside. They're not very important to us. And besides, this looks like it'd be important for us, too. They became in charge of their religious life instead of God, the creator of heaven and earth. Now, whenever God tells us what he wants us to do, he expects us if you say to God, I give my life to you and I want to serve you. Tell me what to do. Then everything in the Bible becomes a commandment to you. All of these are important to God because when he says this is what you need to do, he has a reason for it, a purpose for it and a consequence if you don't. So whenever God saw that the Israelites were doing opposite of what he wanted or rejected his authority in his own judgment, they stepped aside from that. He gave them into the hand of the Midianites. This is a language that's used throughout the book of Judges to describe God's refusal to keep his part of the covenant he made with them. I will guide you, provide for you, protect you and make you a great nation. So whenever they begin to look at God's instructions and say, I'm not going to do all those things, he backed off of those four promise covenant promises that he had made. He backed away from them. And whenever he did, then there was no protection for them. So when the Midianites came, even if they went to battle, they couldn't win because all the battles they won before were the result of God giving them the power and ability to defeat their enemies. Now they would go out to battle just like they did before when they won these battles and nothing would happen. They would lose. So the result was they were afraid and no longer even had courage in themselves. The picture that he paints in verse two, the power of the Midian was so oppressive, Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in the mountain cliffs. They went up to the mountains, found places where the mountain valleys were deep and they could protect themselves in caves and in strongholds, places where they could hold up and fight the enemy off with just a few people. They were like animals digging holes in the ground to protect themselves from the enemy. They no longer had any sense that they could attack the enemy and defeat them. Now, remember, this didn't happen over a month or a year, but it was over a 40 year period that this took place. When it would start, you see, they would go out to battle and then they would do pretty good because all of their strength wasn't gone and God was pulling away from them. But little by little, they began to be defeated more and more and more until they were hopeless. We cannot protect ourselves. We cannot defend ourselves. The frustration that comes when everything you do just doesn't seem to work. The frustration that comes when no matter what you try, it just turns out bad. The mode of happening, the mode that comes from that to that result is in this story, the consequence of the people saying, we're not going to follow your instructions, God. And whenever you look at churches and churches that are powerful and strong and vibrant churches and you see that over the period of the years, there's a decline in enthusiasm and passion and attendance. And you also see it in the lives of Christians. You see a lot of people who join the church in the beginning. They're enthusiastic and excited to do whatever God wants. Then you see them 10, 15 years later and things have changed. They're no longer vibrant in their faith in God. They're no longer successful in their lifestyle. They're no longer able to achieve the things that they did before. It's the very same thing that happens in this story. You begin passionately to want to do what God wants you to do. You start doing these things that God wants. And then little by little, you don't lose your faith in God. You don't ever stand up and say, I don't believe in God anymore. But you start saying, well, you know, it's so hard to get up on Sunday morning and I'm tired and sleepy. I've got a choice. God says I should not forsake gathering together as his children, as he's told his children to do. And I understand that command. But it looks to me like if I get up today, as tired as I am, I'm going to be in terrible shape Monday morning. Now, this is what God says I should do. But it looks to me like this is my best choice. So whenever you begin to say God's commands cannot be depended on. Now, if you tell the people around you, well, I don't go to church as often as I used to because, you know, on the weekends, I'm just tired after I've worked all week long. They'll all say, boy, I can understand that. You need some rest sometime. But what God expects us to do is to say, if I've told you to not forsake assembling with other believers, I will make sure that if you do what I tell you, that your future will be secure. I will give you the energy you need. I will give you the strength that you need. I will give you those things that you think you won't have. That's what his provision is. And whenever you begin to compromise these things and you get, OK, I'll read the Bible and you start out, you know, and you read the Bible often and, you know, I'll get through it one time and start again. And you hit the names of people in those early parts of the Old Testament. And you kind of quit and you don't read anymore. And after a while, you go for, you may read it on Sunday when you go to church. But day by day, you're not looking to that book for the guidance for your life. And if you ask anybody who's not reading the Bible, who's committed their life to Christ, they will say, I know I should, but they always have a good reason. I'm busy. I have so many things in my life. But if you know God's given you that commandment, you say, this has to be a priority for me. And once you decide that you have some choices about this, that you could either do what God tells you you should do, or you could do what you think is the right thing to do for you, now, it's probably a good thing for other people. And I did it when I first started in this journey. And a lot of people have come to the place, you know, that you see them in church. They used to come Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, teach classes. And now they come on Sunday morning. That's all they're going to do. They already know everything. I think so. They already have all the knowledge of God that they need. No, they have all they want. It's not like saying, OK, God, I can grow some more if I knew what you wanted me to do. They're saying, I don't need to learn any more about you. I don't need to learn anything about how I should live my life. I've got all that together. And so I'm living it now on what I think I need, not what you tell me I should do. All of a sudden, when you see a person like that in church, we don't point at them and say they're doing evil in the eyes of God because we're afraid to do that. But the scripture does say that when people back away from the things that God has clearly told them they should do, as far as God sees their life, they're doing evil. They're doing evil. So you can have a person who's joined the church and been faithful and worked in the church a long time, lived where God wanted them to live, and then they don't read their Bible anymore. They don't pray anymore, except whenever they have a disaster in their life, and then they pray real hard when everybody else pray with them. And then when that's over, they're quit and they don't learn anymore and they don't work anymore and they're not making any disciples at all. They're not making disciples because, not because they don't think it needs to be done, but because they say this is... Wasn't that nice for her to set you right on the front row? This is every man's terrible mate. Not afraid of anything, is she? Just walk right up in front. So what you have is someone who's not doing anything like stealing, lying, all those terrible things, but in God's eyes, they've said, I'm not going to do everything you tell me. If you go to work tomorrow and you go to your boss and you say that, he's not going to say you're the best worker I've ever had. He's going to say, I don't have any room for you. If I can't count on you to do what I tell you to do, then you don't work for me anymore. It's not like you've stole money from him. It's not like you're wrecking the business. It's not like you're destroying anything. But what you've done, if you said to the person in charge, I do not accept your authority over my life. Churches really don't die. They commit suicide. They commit suicide by doing this very thing. Well, I've served my time. I've done my part. It's time for me to sit back and relax and take it easy. And even though the Bible's clear, it's not clear to me. It's clear that from the beginning of our commitment to Christ to the very last day of our life, we should be running as hard as we can to be obedient to God. We should be searching our heart and our life for things that are in conflict with God. And it's true that our physical and mental limitations sometimes limit us. But nothing limits us from doing all that we can. Nothing limits us from that. What you can may be less, but nothing limits us from doing all that we can. I went to talk in a church one time in Lawrence, Kansas. And the guy said, I want to take you to one of our most effective members. So he took me to a nursing home. And there's a guy there that had, I don't know, multiple sclerosis or something. He couldn't even hardly sit up in his chair and couldn't, you know, his hand wiggled around and he didn't have control of it. And he said, every time we have something at the church, if we have a special meeting or if we're going to have some event, he calls every member in our church and tells them about it. All he could do is talk on the phone. But he found a place and way by which with his physical limitations, he could do something for God that was meaningful with all of his limitations. See, what happens to a person like that is they say, God is in charge of my life. So I'm going to say, what can I do for you, God? God's not going to say, well, I need you to get outside and run a race next week with the rest of the people in church. 10K run. You can tell him that. You can do it. He said, can you talk? Yeah, talk. Can you dial a phone? Yeah, I can dial a phone. Well, that's what I want you to do. All of us have a responsibility to make sure that the authority of God over our lives is absolute from the beginning of our relationship with him to the very end. God sees our failure to do the clear things he says we should do as rebellion against the authority of the ruler of the universe. And Butch hit a point of what God's trying to tell us he wants. I want you to make disciples. All of us should be in the business of saying, I want to live in front of the people around me in such a way so they'll see my life and say, I wish I could live like that. So he wants us to continue to grow and learn how to do things he wants us to do. It's not it's not enough for us to get to the place where you say, OK, I'm not going to rob anymore, steal anymore, shoot anybody anymore. But he wants us to get to the place where we're able to deal with conflicts appropriately. We're able to love people that don't love us back. We're able to love people that hurt us. I read a story this week about a lady whose sister was killed by a 16-year-old kid, had a gun, broke into her house and killed her. She's an attorney. She quit her job in a very successful career with a law firm in Chicago. She decided she would become an attorney for people who couldn't afford to pay from the courts. And so she started that career. Then she read a story about someone who said, a man who wrote an article that said, you never get free from forgiveness until you forgive the people that you hate. And so she went to the man who killed her sister. And she finally worked the courage to go talk to him. And she went and said to him, I forgive you. She said it was the most revolutionary thing she'd ever experienced in her life. She didn't know what he would do or how he would affect her. And she's been back to see many different times in his whole life has been changed, turned around, because he has seen forgiveness. He never even admitted that he killed her sister through the trial, never admitted that he was even there. And after three or four visits, he said to her, he said to her, I have learned that what I've done has been a tragic thing to so many people. And at first, I thought you were coming to make me feel worse. But you have accepted me and you have forgiven me. And he told her in great detail everything that he did to kill her sister, confessed his whole schemes of what he did. She was talking about how freeing this was from her to be able to do what she knew God wanted her to do, even though it was the hardest thing she ever did. And she said at the end of the story, this has been one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had in my life. What God wants and what he did in her life was to cause this guy who had killed her sister to see the forgiveness of God. It doesn't take very much to do that. Just travel to someone's house and care for them and listen to them and be concerned for them. And it changed his life. And it changed his life. God wants us when we enter the kingdom of God, he wants us, first of all, to learn all that we can learn about God. That means reading the Bible, coming to Bible study, listening to sermons and Sunday school lessons to you, learn all the things you can about God. And it's a lifelong process. You never get to the you can learn enough so everybody else thinks you know a lot about the Bible. But God looks down at you and says, you don't know nothing yet. So you keep working. He wants us to keep seeing this as a lifelong journey to learn who God is and what he's like and what he wants us to do and how he wants us to change inside to be more like him. And when you stop at any level, you have said to God, I'm not going to be interested in being any more like you. Well, good luck with that. Don't expect God to bless you if that's the attitude you're going to have toward him. I am the Lord. I want you to listen. You should be like me. You're to be holy as I am holy. That's his whole command to us. So here's what the simple matter is to be a follower. Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life. I give you my life. I'm going to learn all I can about who you are so I will know the kind of person you want me to be. That's a lifelong job. There's no stopping with that. You should be interested in everything you have to say. I was reading an article, I think, I can't remember this guy's name. I'm not sure if it's Tim Keller or not. But he was an atheist and he met this evangelist preaching on the streets and he was converted. So he thought, I need to read the Bible. So he got him a Bible, started looking at it and looked how many things he said, I can read this in 40 days. So he set out to read it. And every 40 days he read through the whole Bible. He couldn't get enough of it. He said, as I read through it, I began to learn more and more about how all of it fits together. He was passionate to learn everything that he could about God. And that's what God wants inside of us. His Holy Spirit should drive that for us. So he's saying, I want you to learn all you can about me. I want you to compare yourself to me and find out in what ways you're not like me. And then I want you to begin to say, God, change me so that I can quit these things that keep me from being like you and add these things that make me like you. That's your job from now on. And then as you become a different kind of person, I want all the people around you who see you, I want you to tell them how come you're different than you used to be. You've changed. I want you to tell them why that happened and how it's happened to you. That's our witness. And we should always be on the lookout for people that we know need to learn what we have learned from God. Because we see them struggling with these things that we've learned. And then God says, OK, that's a person you should pray for. They're looking for what you've already found. So start praying for them. And then they'll open up the conversation sometime and you'll be able to tell them why you are the person you are. So he's wanting us as his follower to read the Bible constantly, to keep learning from the teachers and preachers he gives to us, to keep changing, committing our lives to God to change and transform attitudes and the way we act and live. And he wants us then to share our lives with other people. And anyone can do that. It takes no physical requirement. You can even read by listening to tapes or CDs. Everyone can do that from the time they start till the day they die. And whenever we stop doing any one of those things, all the people around you will say you're a good person. All the people around you say you're a really religious guy. You go to church regularly. But God will look at you and say you're doing evil because you're not doing what I have told you to do. And so whenever churches are filled with people who are in this mode, God continually pulls back his power from them, his wisdom and his guidance from them. And they don't die. But by stopping doing the things God tells them to do, they commit suicide. It's what happened to the people of Israel. The people of Israel did the things that God told them they shouldn't do and were not doing the things he told them they should do. And so he gave them into the hands of the evil people. If this is the kind of people, if you want to be like the Midianites, go to it, brother. I'm not going to help you. I'm not going to answer your prayers. I'm not going to give you anything that will help you. Because I want you someday to wake up and say, how did we get in this hole in the cave when no one around to help us? I want you to come to that place where you will stop and say, God, where are you? How can I change this world that I'm in? God makes a covenant with every person that comes to him. You give me your life and I'll promise you I'll guide you in all the choices that you make. I'll provide every need you have. I will protect you. And I will make you an example to all the people around you who know you. He keeps it. But whenever you start saying, no, I'm not going to do that, he begins to withdraw those things. Until suddenly one day you feel like you're all alone in the world and you don't have any way, any idea of what to do or how to do it. And your life is just miserable. And that's where the people of Israel found themselves for seven years. Now, the Bible likes to use symbolic numbers. The word seven is one of the words that's always symbolic, like the word 40 is a sort of symbolic number. Like the word 40 is a sort of symbolic of one generation. But the word seven is a word for completion. It comes from three, which is for God, and then four, which is for the four corners of the earth. So it's like everything in the world. So it's usually doesn't mean started in January one year and seven years later at the end of December. That's the period of time. But it's talking about over this period of time in their lives, God began to withdraw his hand until one day they couldn't live in their houses. Another day they had to find, run to the mountains and hide. And they were living in caves like animals instead of in the promised land that God had given them. From successful farmers and cattlemen who had land, cattle, and crops. Now they were living in holes in the ground, eating roots and leaves and trash and dead animals. And it all came because God looked at their lives and said, what you're doing is contrary to what I told you. You've rejected my authority over your life. You're no longer living the way I told you you should live. You've rejected my lordship. So I am not going to keep my promise to my children because you've said to me, I no longer want to be your child. So have at it. Over and over again in the book of Judges, the same story is told. We can see it take place in that age. And you may have seen in the newspaper, on the computer, I think this week, the United States is less and less Christian than it's been before. And the surveys that they take are people less and less involved in Bible reading, less and less involved in church attendance, less and less involved in living the Christian life. And a warning for us is that when that happens, God says, you are doing evil in my sight. Now we might say, people often do, well, I'm a pretty good person. It's just I don't go to church all the time. I'm a pretty good person. I just don't read the Bible all the time. They mean usually I don't go any at all and I don't read it at all, but they don't want to admit that. But God knows exactly what we do. And the doom of people who are followers of God are always certain when that takes place. It happens individually and it happens to churches. All God wants is for us to recognize that he's the supreme authority and say, I believe I believe if I listen to you and follow your instructions, my life will be what it ought to be. That's faith in God. He wants us to have that faith from the first day all the way to our last day on earth. Anything less than that, God says you're doing evil in my eyes. Would you bow your heads please for a moment? When you read these passages, always for me, they're confronting. I woke up this morning at two o'clock thinking about ways that in my own life that I am not as passionate about visiting people or doing things as good. And it was really confronting to me. I made some new promises to God. What a horrible thing for God to think someone who pledged his life to him was now doing evil in his eyes. But all we have to do is to say, OK, God, how can I correct this? What do you want me to do that I'm not doing? What should I stop that I'm doing? He's so good. He's so ready to tell us. So if this is true for you, it's time for you to ask God, what next? Because what he wants us to do is have life in all of its fullness. That's why Jesus came. He said, I've come that you might have life in all of its fullness. If there's something missing, it's a failure to apply what Jesus said we should do. What I'm asking, Father, is you'd help each of us every day to take an assessment, not from ourselves, but from you. Lord, have I done this right? Is there something I've missed? I know you don't ask too much of us. You ask only things that you give us the ability and time to do. So remind us daily to stop and say, Lord, how do I look to you? I want you to see me as your faithful servant. What needs to change? And when you tell us, make it the priority of our lives. In the name of Christ, we ask this. Amen.